Core Teaching Practices Research Articles

Two Preservice Teachers’ Adaptive Competence in Lesson Planning Across Two High School Placements

Purpose: To investigate the adaptive competence of two physical education preservice teachers (PSTs) across two high school placements. Methods: Two PSTs each taught four 6-lesson frisbee units across two different high schools. Feedback on lesson plans prior to teaching, guided reflection-on-action, and repeated teaching was used to support adaptations to six core teaching practices. PSTs made three iterations of each lesson plan. Results: PSTs made 589 adaptations across the core teaching practices of management (28%), task presentation (16%), content development (16%), active supervision (16%), goals and assessment (7%), and rules and routines (3%). Between 16% and 30% of adaptations were made in the last iteration. The number of adaptations decreased from the first to the second school placement and from Lessons 1 to 6. Conclusion: Feedback on lesson plans, guided reflection-on-action, and repeated teaching aided PSTs’ development of adaptive competence during school placements.

Signaling cues and focused prompts for professional vision support: The interplay of instructional design and situational interest in preservice teachers’ video analysis

AbstractIn teacher education, video representations of practice offer a motivating means for applying conceptual teaching knowledge toward real-world settings. With video analysis, preservice teachers can begin cultivating professional vision skills through noticing and reasoning about presented core teaching practices. However, with novices’ limited prior knowledge and experience, processing transient information from video can be challenging. Multimedia learning research suggests instructional design techniques for support, such as signaling keyword cues during video viewing, or presenting focused self-explanation prompts which target theoretical knowledge application during video analysis. This study investigates the professional vision skills of noticing and reasoning (operationalized as descriptions and interpretations of relevant noticed events) from 130 preservice teachers participating in a video-analysis training on the core practice of small-group instruction. By means of experimental comparisons, we examine the effects of signaling cues and focused self-explanation prompts on professional vision performance. Further, we explore the impact of these techniques, considering preservice teachers’ situational interest. Overall, results demonstrated that preservice teachers’ professional vision skills improved from pretest to posttest, but the instructional design techniques did not generally offer additional support. However, moderation analysis indicated that training with cues fostered professional vision skills for preservice teachers with low situational interest. This suggests that for uninterested novices, signaling cues may compensate for the generative processing boost typically associated with situational interest. Research and practice implications involve the consideration of situational interest as a powerful component of instructional design, and that keyword cueing can offer an alternative when interest is difficult to elicit.

“How can we change if we are the same people?”: Chilean academic leaders’ experiences implementing a practice-based teacher education approach

A growing body of literature in teacher education stresses the importance of enhancing the training of pre-service teachers through a practice-based teacher education approach centered on core teaching practices. However, further research is needed to explore how schools of education implement this approach at an institutional level. Through semi-structured interviews, this paper reports on how seven academic leaders from two Chilean schools of education experienced implementing this practice-based teacher education approach. The findings reveal factors that support and challenge the organizational learning necessary to enact the approach at an institutional level. This study also highlights implications for practice.

Enhancing prospective secondary teachers’ potential competence for enacting core teaching practices—through experiences in university mathematics and statistics courses

Enhancing prospective secondary teachers’ potential competence for enacting core teaching practices—through experiences in university mathematics and statistics courses

Enhancing student teachers’ epistemology of reflective practice while still at the university: Evidence from a sheltered reflective practicum

ABSTRACT This article reports research evidence of the enhancement of student teachers’ epistemology of reflective practice through their participation in a formative strategy developed in the context of the Bologna Process in Portugal. Building on Schön’s conceptualisation of the education of the reflective practitioner, articulated with concepts such as pedagogical content knowledge, approximations to core teaching practices, epistemology of reflective practice, and assessment for and as learning, the strategy was designed to be a sheltered reflective practicum to learn about language and literacy education while still at the university, before moving into real class practicums. Data collected through individual reflective writing, developed at the beginning and revisited at the end of the practicum, were subjected to qualitative analysis. The results evidence students’ awareness of their limited initial and rich final understandings as well as of critical features of the learning process, expressing positive feelings and acknowledging the relevance of their learning for future practice. The discussion argues for the relevance of offering a sheltered reflective practicum approach while still at university in the design of teacher education.

Reprint: The Turn Once Again Toward Practice-Based Teacher Education

Current work to identify the core teaching practices that should be included in teacher education curriculum is a part of a long-standing tradition of reform in American teacher education. This article situates the proposals of Hiebert and Morris and the contemporary work to which it is linked within this historical tradition and identifies several issues that need to be addressed by this current work. These include the task of developing a system that unlike performance-based systems in the past is evidence-based, manageable, and sustainable, and that does not ignore important aspects of good teaching.

A Case Study of Private School Teachers’ Personal Practical Knowledge

This paper is a case study of the personal practical knowledge of two private middle school teachers, discussing the core teaching concepts and practices of private middle school teachers and their causes. The research shows that these two teachers have their own core concepts to guide teaching practice, and found that their personal experiences The social environment in which they live affects the formation of their core ideas to varying degrees. The article focuses on the great impact of the teaching and management mode of private schools on Teachers’ education ideas, and hopes to have more research in this regard. For a long time, private schools have been subordinates to the public education system, so the academic community has not paid enough attention to private teachers for a long time, but the impact of private school teachers on students is not weaker than that of public teachers, It should receive more attention from the academic community

Do Simulated Teaching Experiences Impact Elementary Preservice Teachers’ Ability to Facilitate Argumentation-Focused Discussions in Mathematics and Science?

Recently scholars have advocated for using teachers’ practice as a site for teacher learning. The recent proliferation of online, digital spaces, including simulated classrooms, has paved the way for novel approaches within practice-based teacher education. Yet, limited research has investigated the extent to which and how the use of online, simulated teaching experiences promote teacher learning of core teaching practices. The purpose of this study was to examine whether and how integrating simulated teaching experiences into teacher education coursework impacts preservice teacher (PST) learning. Findings showed that the use of simulated teaching experiences within elementary teacher education methods courses resulted in evidence of statistically significant growth in PSTs’ ability to engage in one core teaching practice: facilitating argumentation-focused discussions.

Inside the black box: How elementary teacher educators support preservice teachers in preparing for and learning from online simulated teaching experiences

Limited research has explored the pedagogies teacher educators use to support preservice teachers as they learn to enact core teaching practices. In this study, we used qualitative content analysis from class observations of elementary mathematics and science methods courses and survey responses to examine the pedagogies of practice eight elementary teacher educators used to support preservice teachers in preparing for and learning from an online simulated teaching experience. We also examined the teacher educators' and their preservice teachers’ perceptions of the value of using simulated teaching experiences. Findings suggest the importance of engaging preservice teachers in decomposing and recomposing practice through structured analysis and reflection within larger cycles of enactment.

Core Practices for Preservice Teachers in Health Education Teacher Education

This article discusses core teaching practices for health education by defining, unpacking, and describing the use of core practices in teacher education. Core practices offer health teacher-educators and health educators a set of teaching practices that can be introduced during professional preparation and then refined and mastered as health educators begin and continue their careers. Implementing core practices in health education allows teacher education programs to specifically define what they teach and to determine standards of competence for their graduates.

Pre-Service Teachers as Researchers: A Mentorship Model

In this paper, we share a mentorship model we developed and implemented while collaborating with pre-service teachers (PSTs) on their Model Eliciting Activity projects and the outcomes of the mentorship model in terms of PSTs’ growth as teachers as well as researchers. For their projects, PSTs designed and developed their own mathematical modeling tasks and later analyzed student work collected during task implementations to better understand their students’ reasoning. The PSTs’ reflections were collected to assess the effectiveness of the program and to report their professional growth. The PSTs who participated in this mentorship model identified core teaching practices (e.g., questioning, facilitating discussions) and they improved their knowledge of student thinking and reasoning. They were also able to analyze rich data and identify trends in student learning. The findings from this study affirm that engaging in undergraduate research provides PSTs with opportunities to improve their teaching practice as well as their understanding of research processes.

Technology-Enhanced Assessment Feedback on Preservice Teachers’ Core Teaching Practices

The teaching practicum has been characterised by “wicked feedback” problems. Feedback is essential for enhancing student teachers’ core teaching practices. Student teachers are most vulnerable when they have to present lesson segments and may not know whether they are doing it correctly. Providing actionable, timely and constructive feedback is challenging at the best of times and this became even more so during the COVID-19 pandemic. This proactive action research study aims to provide an overview of the utilization of technology-enhanced feedback (digital screen recording) on preservice teachers’ practicum assessment tasks and to report on their perceptions of, reflections on, and uptake of the feedback. A group of fifteen preservice teachers and two teacher educators from a university in the North West Province participated in the study. The findings indicate that technology-enhanced feedback motivates student teachers to engage with the feedback because it facilitates the personalization of feedback, fosters relationships between preservice teachers and teacher educators, and increases the uptake of feedback that results in improved teaching practicum performance tasks. The study informs a developing understanding of the pedagogic potential of feedback via technology and its uptake within an environment that is becoming increasingly digital. The article concludes with recommendations for exploiting the potential benefits of technology-enhanced feedback to ensure uptake and facilitate the improved teaching practice of preservice teachers within teaching practicum settings. Keywords: Technology-enhanced, Feedback, Preservice teachers, Core teaching practices, Assessment

An Epistemic Network Approach to Teacher Students’ Professional Vision in Tutoring Video Analysis

Video-based training offers teacher students approximations of practice for developing professional vision (PV; i.e., noticing and reasoning) of core teaching practices. While much video analysis research focuses on whole-classroom scenarios, for early PV training, it is unclear whether the focused instructional context of tutoring could be an appropriate and potentially supportive design element. The present study describes 42 biology teacher students’ performance on a tutoring video analysis task. With qualitative content analysis, we investigated how teacher students describe and interpret noticed tutoring events, with particular reference to research-informed PV indicators. With epistemic network analyses, we explored co-occurrences of PV indicators across teacher students’ six video analysis responses, contrasting low and high quality description and interpretation network models, respectively. We found that teacher students’ skills paralleled previous PV literature findings on novices (e.g., vague, general pedagogy descriptions). Yet, unexpectedly, some teacher students demonstrated aspects of higher sophistication (e.g., describing individual students, making multiple knowledge-based interpretations). Findings suggest tutoring is a powerful context for showing tutor-student interactions, making it suitable for initial teacher students’ PV training. Moreover, results offer hints about the range of teacher students’ PV mental models and highlight the need for more support in content-specific noticing and reasoning. Nevertheless, tutoring representations within PV video analysis training may offer teacher students support in student-centered attention and knowledge-oriented focus.

Understanding and Learning to Do Teacher Education in an Introductory Methods Course

ABSTRACT The development of a teacher educator requires a sustained, systematic, and critical inquiry into one’s own practice. The purpose of this study was to explore how two doctoral students, in their first semester of doctoral study, understood how to do physical education teacher education in an introductory teaching method class, through the lens of socialization theory. This was a collaborative self-study using an interpretative phenomenological analysis. Three themes were identified. First, social justice and its sub-themes: (a) challenges in changing habited behaviors, (b) social justice issues embedded in the class material, and (c) understanding diversity, change, and the importance of adaptability. Second, practice-based teacher education and its two sub-themes: (a) alignment between theory and practice, and (b) core teaching practices. Third, adapting to the COVID-19 environment and sub-themes of: (a) environmental constraints, (b) improving while being online, and (c) creating a supportive and caring atmosphere in the breakout sessions. Our recommendations include using self-study as a tool to help doctoral students understand and do teacher education.

A COVID-19 Re-envisioned Teaching Practicum Curriculum

The changes taking place in the schooling landscape because of the coronavirus are real and meaningful and have implications for the training of preservice teachers, especially the teaching practicum component of their initial teacher education programs. The havoc caused by COVID-19 forced many faculties of education into a state of ‘panic-gogy’ to ensure that student teachers could complete their teaching practicums. In this paper we argue that consideration should be given to core teaching practices and practice-based teacher education pedagogies (i.e., representations and approximations) that can be used in alternative “placement contexts” that will supplement and harness the authenticity of school-based experiences. We provide two conceptual tools, collaboratively developed by teaching practicum educators and mentor teachers, that can be used as heuristic by other university-school partnerships when considering teaching practicum redesign efforts.

The potential of translanguaging as a core teaching practice in an EFL context

This article reports on a study that sought to identify a set of core practices for teaching English more effectively in a Chilean EFL context. The findings of the study were generated using a Delphi-based panel of Chilean English language educators who were identified as experts, including classroom teachers, university-based teacher educators and educational researchers. The results generated a framework of potential core teaching practices that could afford more effective teaching practices, most notably translanguaging and the more effective integration of L1. Results may inform other contexts as to how to develop more collaborative instances to define core-teaching practices as a participatory process.

Five Trends in Physical Education Teacher Education

In this article we present five trends that are impacting physical education teacher education (PETE). The trends are (a) practice-based teacher education that refines the knowledge base for teacher education, (b) core teaching practices that define the critical teaching practices for successful lifelong teaching, (c) pedagogies of practice that operationalize practice-based teacher education with core practices, (d) the reconnection of health education with physical education, and (e) the Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child model. We describe each trend, discuss related policy implications and provide examples of how to use these trends in PETE.

Core Practices for Preservice Teachers in Physical Education Teacher Education

This article contributes to the ongoing discussion on practice-based teacher education in physical education teacher education (PETE) programs. In this article we situate core practices within the practice-based teacher education movement, define and describe core practices for physical education, and discuss how to use them in the PETE curriculum and in coursework. Defining the knowledge base of PETE, in this case in terms of core teaching practices, has several advantages. First, it creates a consensus on what is the knowledge base, which in turn can be refined or challenged. Second, it allows for a shared professional language to be used. Finally, it allows curriculum maps to be used to structure the intentional and detailed development of core practices across a PETE program.

Music Teacher Rankings of Selected Core Teaching Practices

There is a decades-long history of music education researchers examining characteristics and skills associated with effective teaching and assessing how preservice music teachers develop those competencies. Building on studies of pedagogical content knowledge and the professional opinions of experienced music educators, researchers are now attempting to identity a body of core music teaching practices. We asked experienced in-service music teachers ( N = 898) to think about the skills beginning music teachers must possess to investigate how respondents rated and ranked selected core music teaching practices in terms of their relative importance. Developing appropriate relationships with students, modeling music concepts, and sequencing instruction were the top core teaching practices identified by the group. Results provide insights into knowing, naming, and framing a set of core teaching practices and offer a common technical vocabulary that music teacher educators might use as they design curricula and activities to develop these foundational skills.

Core Teaching Practices: Addressing Both Social Justice and Academic Subject Matter

Core Teaching Practices: Addressing Both Social Justice and Academic Subject Matter