Developing pedagogical judgment in novice teachers: mediated field experience as a pedagogy for teacher education

Abstract

A common critique of teacher education centres on the gap between coursework and schools, with ample evidence that novice teachers seldom bring ambitious forms of instruction into classroom placements. We describe a 6-year design experiment conducted in a university teacher education program secondary mathematics methods course focused squarely on this issue. Using the framework of hybridity, or the merging of two contexts to make a third that has elements of the originals, we developed a pedagogy we call the mediated field experience (MFE). We present our design framework and describe the MFE cycle, where novices learned a concept in course activities, followed by guided classroom observations and facilitated debriefs with partner teachers. We highlight how this pedagogy facilitated connections across coursework and classrooms through narrative cases of novices’ learning. We argue that their learning provided the basis for a complex form of teacher thinking, pedagogical judgment. This article offers a proof-of-concept argument that teacher education can support novices’ learning in the service of ambitious practice.