Reformers are increasingly calling for and adopting practice-based approaches to teacher preparation, with particular emphasis on identifying and centering core practices. In this article, we argue ...that organizing teacher education around core practices brings its own risks, including the risk of peripheralizing equity and justice. Situating our argument within the broad economic trends affecting labor and higher education in the 21st century, we begin by examining the linkages between the core practices movement and organizations that advocate market-based solutions to education. We then explore how constructs of practice and improvisation and commitments to equity and justice are taken up, and with what implications and consequences, in core practices scholarship and its applications. In conclusion, we consider how work being done around core practices might contribute to a collective struggle for greater equity and justice in schools and in society.
Although teacher education is the formal means by which novices are prepared for teaching, they come having already had significant experience in schools. Preservice teachers have formed habits of ...“teaching” which influence their learning to teach. This article reports a study of the specific knowledge of and skills with teaching practice that novices bring to teacher education with respect to one teaching practice, eliciting student thinking in elementary mathematics, and describes the use of a standardized teaching simulation to learn about novices’ skills. The findings reveal details about preservice teachers’ skills and habits of practice at the point that they enter formal teacher preparation. Preservice teachers’ ways of carrying out this particular practice are categorized into three distinct categories: (a) skills that need to be learned, (b) skills that can be built on, and (c) approaches that need to be unlearned.
The Core Practices Movement (CPM) and Social Justice Teacher Education (SJTE) represent two communities of practice within which novices develop as professional educators. However, there is little ...dialogue about how they might collaborate to develop novice social justice educators, and the critiques and recommendations that do cross movements originate from divergent theoretical starting points. Possibilities for convergence within the learning theories that underpin CPM and SJTE are explored, examining how social learning theories might be infused with, and enveloped within, critical learning theories. This article thus re-presents teacher education as a “community of praxis.” Within each of its three hybrid dimensions—a shared repertoire of practice/praxis, mutual engagement of vertical and horizontal expertise, and joint enterprise of professional and political aims—possibilities for developing novice social justice educators are described, and tensions at the intersection of justice and practice in teacher education are explored.
Arguments for social justice teacher education and arguments for practice-based teacher education are often seen as incongruous. Drawing on sociocultural theory and theories of justice, our study ...interrogates this underresearched assumption. We conducted video analyses of teacher education coursework and novice teachers' K-6 classroom instruction, together with novices' written reflections on videos. Data were collected during a university-based, accelerated teacher credentialing program. Analyses of videos of teacher education coursework revealed that while teacher educators frequently represented, decomposed, and approximated teaching practice, they rarely did so when discussing social justice issues. In a mirrorimage finding, analyses of videos of (and reflections on) novices' subsequent K-6 teaching revealed that novices rarely identified instructional decisions during which they attended to social justice issues.
ABSTRACT
Equipping elementary (i.e., grades K–5) teachers with adequate content and pedagogical knowledge to promote effective reading instruction based on the science of reading is a crucial piece ...of the reading education puzzle. We reviewed 20 empirical studies to examine the impact of teacher preparation and training programs on elementary teachers’ knowledge of the science of reading, focusing on the foundational pillars of reading instruction, namely, phonological and phonemic awareness, phonics, and morphological awareness, as well as student outcomes in reading. We also identified program characteristics that promoted positive growth in teacher knowledge. Generally, findings support the effectiveness of training and preparation programs in increasing elementary teachers’ knowledge of foundational constructs. Training in which teachers have the opportunity to apply their learned knowledge and skills under expert guidance produced the largest growth in teacher knowledge. Implications of findings are discussed.
This paper presents a systematic review of the literature on online initial teacher education. This review is timely given the growing numbers of online students studying teacher education in ...Australia and beyond. The paper begins with a presentation of the search protocol including search terms, databases, and inclusion/exclusion criteria that resulted in 492 refereed articles being included in the review. Analysis of title and abstract of these articles allowed insight into a variety of factors and trends, including journal of publication, year of publication, research approach, and key focal areas. Two well-established research focal areas emerged: technological pedagogical innovations and student experiences of studying teacher education online. Two emerging research focal areas were teacher educator experiences of teaching online and online teacher education in traditionally experiential specialisations, such as drama and outdoor education. When all the articles are considered holistically, a fragmented and siloed research approach is revealed, evidenced by a large number of journals publishing articles on multiple focal areas, leading to considerable repetition among the evidences presented across the articles. As such, this paper highlights the need for a more coherent and organised approach to research in online teacher education and its dissemination to all stakeholders.
As teacher education programs shift to more practice‐based methods in the preparation of literacy teachers, the ways in which teacher educators support the learning of their preservice teachers ...(PSTs) becomes paramount. In an effort to support PSTs in developing competency in instructional literacy routines, coaching has been found to support PSTs’ understandings of how to teach for student learning. In this article, three approaches to coaching are explored: rehearsals, a modified behind‐the‐glass approach, and structured video reflection. Drawing from rich examples of practice, attention is paid to the ways each method of coaching supports novice teachers in developing competency and the contexts in which each is used.
Although widely touted as important, there is little evidence regarding the influence of teaching experience on elementary teachers' science subject matter knowledge (SMK). To better understand this ...phenomenon, we administered an assessment of science topics taught in the fifth and sixth grades to 169 preservice teachers, 231 fifth‐grade teachers, and 208 sixth‐grade teachers. We then compared the mean scores of teachers at different stages in the career cycle using one‐way and two‐way ANOVA and explored the relationship between SMK scores and years of teaching experience using regression analysis. Findings indicate that (i) being assigned to a specific grade level had an impact on teachers' SMK for topics included in the grade level, (ii) teachers' SMK scores were lower later in their careers for both science topics they had never taught and for science topics they were responsible for teaching, and (iii) results differed for fifth and sixth grades. This study adds to the existing literature through the examination of a large sample of elementary teachers, with teachers of varying years of experience, while focusing on the science topics these teachers are responsible for teaching. The results of this study provide strong evidence that (i) years of experience teaching specific science topics is associated with the development of teachers' knowledge of these topics, and (ii) teaching experience, what teachers do in the context of their everyday practice, can be an effective means of self‐directed learning for teachers. There is also evidence that this influence is not uniform across years of teaching experience or science topics taught. These findings raise important implications about future research into the mechanism of SMK development through teaching experience and teacher grade‐level assignments.
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