Understanding “Core Practices” and “Practice-Based” Teacher Education

What Is Meant by “Practice-Based” Teacher Education?

Although the phrase “practice-based teacher education” abounds in policy documents, program descriptions, and other literature, there seems to be little consensus about what it means or should mean. Fifteen years ago, Ball and Cohen (1999) defined it as training focused on learning professional performance, centered around key activities of the profession, and involving investigation of critical problems in teaching. They argued that it does not necessarily imply anything about where teachers are trained, but is rather a “statement about a terrain of action and analysis that is defined first by identifying the central activities of teaching practice and, second, by selecting or creating materials that usefully depict that work” (p. 13). More recently, however, the term has been used to describe a wide range of programs that in some way depart from the traditional academic model of teacher education, particularly those that offer extended apprenticeships or opportunities to observe and practice in schools. In many cases, “practice-based” seems to indicate an increased exposure to practice or number of assignments that ask students to carry out work in classrooms, or close partnerships between the program and a local school district (e.g., Berry et al., 2008; Matsko & Hammerness, 2014; Solomon, 2009).

Recent work to center teacher education on core practices is less concerned with where teachers’ training takes place and more with what teachers are helped to learn and how they learn it. The curriculum is deliberately focused on specific practices of teaching such as leading discussions and modeling academic content. These are generally specified to students from the outset of a program or course and form the core of assignments or even program completion requirements. The practices are articulated in detail, and students are engaged in scaffolded opportunities to study and practice each one, usually first using videos or other records of practice, then in simulated situations with their peers, and finally in K-12 classrooms, where they are often closely coached (e.g., Lampert et al., 2013; McDonald et al., 2013). Time spent in schools is important because it provides opportunities for students to observe and practice, and partnerships between a teacher education program and a school or district can help make those opportunities as productive as possible. But the hallmark of a core practices model is the intense focus on particular, well-specified practices and not on the length of time students spend “in the field” or the orientation of a program to a specific community or school district.

In contrast, many teacher education programs that take a different approach—including traditional, higher-education-based ones and those labeled “alternative” or “residency”—use a curriculum structured around broader domains of teaching, such as “content methods” or “educational psychology.” Students might learn specific teaching practices because they encounter them in the field or participate in an assignment where they happen to try one out, but a good deal is left to chance—focal practices are not clearly identified or tied to final course grades or graduation requirements. Novices might spend months in student teaching or participating in a residency program and never learn how to lead a productive whole-group discussion, for example, because the practice has not been clearly identified as something to learn. Their work is “practice-based” in the sense that students spend lots of time observing and participating in practice, but it is not necessarily directed at acquiring skill at specific practices.

“Practice-based,” then, is an amorphous term when applied to teacher education, particularly in light of growth in residency programs and other apprenticeship models and in core practices-focused teacher education, all of which might reasonably be described as “practice-based.” There are not even always clear distinctions among these approaches. The University of Chicago Urban Teacher Preparation program, for example, is a context-specific program with many features of a teacher residency; its curriculum also focuses on at least one teaching activity, the interactive read-aloud, that might be termed a “core practice” (Matsko & Hammerness, 2014). The program is “based in practice” in the sense that it is closely associated with Chicago Public Schools and involves extensive field experiences there and “based on practice” in the sense that it focuses students’ learning on particular practices. From the perspective of other fields of professional education, deliberately applying the phrase “practice-based” to teacher education might well seem odd. What would professional training be based on if not practice? Though actual change in the field has been slow, growing agreement that teacher education needs to be more practice-based in many ways suggests that the phrase might lose meaning in the near future.

In the meantime, the indiscriminate application of the phrase “practice-based” to a wide variety of efforts to improve teacher education may present subtle but serious problems. It is difficult to learn from the great variation that currently characterizes innovation in the field in the absence of well-defined terms for describing the work and risky to assume that anything referred to as “practice-based” will actually influence new teachers’ practice. These worries are particularly grave in light of widespread concern over the achievement of U.S. schoolchildren and growing recognition of the role of high-quality instruction in promoting learning. The risk is that large amounts of money and time may be invested in work that does little to rebuild teacher education into an intervention that prepares novices to help all children learn and that the lack of agreement about what it means to design “practice-based” teacher education may impede the systematic development of knowledge about what works.

The remainder of this article is directed at explicating the “core practices” approach in detail, making clear the kind of teaching practice for which it aims to prepare novices and distinguishing it from historical approaches to practice-based teacher education in ways that help elucidate its potential affordances. The point is not necessarily to argue that it is better than other kinds of “practice-based” teacher education, but to clarify the dimensions on which it differs and how it builds on but departs from earlier efforts to prepare teachers for practice.

Teacher Education and Conceptions of Teaching

Decisions about what and how new teachers should learn are inherently bound up with the ways in which teacher educators conceive of teaching as a professional practice. If teaching is viewed as the direct transmission of ideas from teacher to pupil, for example, then classroom practices such as explaining and lecturing are critical, discussion and small group work much less important, and learning to teach often relatively straightforward. If teaching is instead conceived of as interactive work in which students’ ideas and questions figure centrally, then teachers must learn more complex and improvisational practices. The focus of the teacher education curriculum and the pedagogical approaches used to train novices have tended to reflect prevailing notions of classroom instruction at different moments in history, and differences in how teacher educators have conceived of teaching and learning to teach help explain why results have differed when they have tried to develop effective ways of preparing novices.

Recent efforts to design and study teacher education focused on core practices have centered around three important ideas about teaching and teacher education. One is that instruction should be aimed at ambitious learning goals that are grounded in the expectation that all students will develop high-level thinking, reasoning, and problem-solving skills. A second is that teaching that will help students learn content for these purposes is a partially improvisational practice, contingent on the ideas and contributions that are offered in the classroom, and that novices must be trained to manage the uncertainty that arises as a result. A third is that this kind of teaching requires making the subject-matter of instruction a critical component of the goals and activities that constitute the professional curriculum. Each of these ideas is useful for understanding how the current work is different from and sometimes similar to what came before.

Educators working today hold higher expectations for what K-12 schoolchildren will learn than they have at any other time, and they hold those expectations for all students, not just a select few. Most Americans now view a high school diploma as necessary for all students, and many teacher educators and researchers active today take seriously the responsibility to prepare novice teachers who know how to unpack challenging academic content for learners from a diversity of backgrounds and to help all students learn to analyze and use subject-matter for sophisticated purposes. They focus on preparing novices to engage in “responsible” or “ambitious” teaching that will equip students to analyze texts critically, compose persuasive arguments and execute them effectively both orally and in writing, and use skills of scientific analysis and mathematical reasoning to understand and respond to complex problems (e.g., Lampert, Beasley, Ghousseini, Kazemi, & Franke, 2010; Windschitl, Thompson, Braaten, & Stroupe, 2012). At other moments in the history of U.S. teacher education, the K-12 curriculum was less intellectually ambitious, and the teacher training curriculum reflected it.

Much of the recent work on core practices has focused on understanding the practices that teachers engage in to help all students reach ambitious learning goals and on designing and sequencing experiences that will help novices develop proficiency with those practices. Reasoning publicly and listening to, interpreting, challenging, and elaborating others’ ideas; identifying and investigating thorny questions, persevering in the face of challenge, and taking intellectual and social risks—all behaviors that students must develop comfort with to learn at high levels—require teachers who are skilled at managing complicated social and relational dynamics, facilitating classroom discourse, and overseeing student-led projects and small group work. These student behaviors and the teaching practices that support them are grounded in the notion that students’ own ideas about the subject-matter are a central resource in the classroom and the starting point for instruction. Teaching is conceived of as work that teachers do to help students learn for themselves, using the curriculum and their peers as resources. Part of this work is to make content explicit to students, but this view of teaching recognizes that efforts to unpack content are more likely to succeed when they take students’ interests and extant understandings into careful account. It also acknowledges that students themselves are resources for instruction: the questions they ask, the opinions they express, the knowledge and skill they bring to school, and the encounters they have with each other and with the teacher about the content are resources for teaching and learning, made useable by the ways in which the teacher deploys them. This conception of teaching has been described as the management of interactions—between and among the teacher and what he or she knows, the students and what they know and can do, and the content being taught (Cohen, Raudenbush, & Ball, 2003; Lampert, 2001).

Teaching defined in this way is a contingent practice. When students’ ideas are taken as the starting place for instruction and viewed as essential resources for classroom learning, and the teacher’s job is seen as bridge-building from what students already know and can do to new ideas and skills, then the classroom is at least a partially unpredictable place. Managing classroom uncertainty requires that teachers know the material they are teaching deeply and flexibly so that they can locate student ideas on a mental “map” of the content and make on-the-fly decisions about effective ways to move the class from one idea to the next (Leinhardt & Greeno, 1986). It also depends on the teacher’s ability to elicit and interpret ideas from students and facilitate classroom discourse efficiently and effectively.

Yet underlying these definitions is a recognition that even “ambitious” teaching is at least partly predictable, and recent work on core practices has focused on helping novices both understand the predictable parts and manage the inherent uncertainty. Research in teaching and in other domains has shown that professionals often rely on routines to navigate complexity and uncertainty (e.g., Axelrod & Cohen, 1999; Weick & McDaniel, 1989). For example, Lampert and her colleagues (2010) have pointed to several different routines for classroom dialogue that teachers can use to manage a variety of work that teachers and students might do together (e.g., analyzing a problem publicly, revising an assertion, clarifying an idea). These routines are predictable features of classroom instruction that become well-known to both teachers and students, but their explicit purpose is to surface ideas that are only partly predictable. Recent work on core practices makes facility with academic routines a central goal of initial teacher training.

These efforts have also tried to help novices manage the contingent nature of ambitious teaching in part by focusing in depth on academic content. Pointing to evidence that students of similar ages and experiences often think in similar ways about particular content, some teacher educators are trying to help novices become skilled at anticipating the reactions and questions that students will bring to a given topic as well as how particular instructional strategies are likely to work (Ball & Bass, 2003; Ball, Thames, & Phelps, 2008; Shulman, 1986). Many have assumed that new teachers need to understand the subjects they are teaching in deep and flexible ways so that they can unpack and represent it accurately for learners who come to school with very different kinds of background knowledge, learning styles, and purposes. Another focus has been on helping novices learn to react quickly to diverse interpretations of content, such as those presented in the course of a class discussion, and recognize and use error and misunderstanding productively.

This deliberate orientation toward “ambitious” teaching in which subject-matter figures prominently has significantly influenced recent efforts to develop core practices-focused teacher education and distinguishes the current work from prior attempts to orient teacher education around practice. It is playing out in both the decisions teacher educators are making about what novices should learn—and in particular in how they decompose practice into learnable parts—and in the pedagogical approaches used in professional training. Because “teaching” is now more widely understood as interactional, improvisational work in which students’ ideas and beliefs are critical resources, the practices that are viewed as important for novices to master include eliciting and interpreting student thinking, leading class discussions, and facilitating small group work, to name some examples. In core practices-focused teacher education, novices are helped to understand instruction as a complicated practice and to manage its complexity and uncertainty through video analysis and rehearsals, in addition to more traditional observation and student teaching. In earlier periods, different definitions of teaching led to different choices about the foci and activities of the curriculum. A look back at these efforts illustrates this point and helps to clarify important features of the current work.

Teacher Education in the 19th-Century Normal Schools

Teaching was viewed as a relatively simple practice at the advent of formal teacher education in the United States. Throughout much of the 19th century, most teachers and parents believed that learning was a passive activity, and teachers spent most of their time lecturing, monitoring students as they read textbooks and completed assignments, and conducting group recitations (Cuban, 1993; Finkelstein, 1989). Many Americans held the corresponding belief that teaching required little in the way of special preparation or knowledge, and were reluctant to provide significant resources toward schooling or teacher training.

Yet teacher educators in the normal schools believed fervently that to teach well required deliberate training, and they designed their programs to offer novices explicit opportunities to observe and practice key skills of what at the time was viewed as competent instruction. There was no formal body of knowledge about teaching in this period, but teacher educators drew on their own experience teaching and their observations of classrooms to identify critical skills for novices—namely lecturing, conducting recitations, and keeping order in the schoolhouse. While the conception of “practice” differed from today’s definitions, this was practice-focused teacher education in the sense that it engaged students in observation, rehearsal, and practice, and it resembled current core practices efforts in the sense that it was directed at specific elements of the work.

In his school at Lexington, Massachusetts, for example, Principal Cyrus Peirce pointed to the ability to give clear explanations of ideas and to choose effective examples and representations as critical teaching skills. In an 1841 letter to his colleague Henry Barnard, Peirce summarized his methods:

I have four different methods of recitation. 1st, by question and answer; 2d, by conversation; 3d, by calling on one, two, three, more or less, to give an analysis of the whole subject contained in the lesson; and 4th, by requiring written analyses, in which the ideas of the author are stated in the language of the pupil . . . Much attention is paid to the manner in which the pupils set forth, or state their positions. I am ever mingling, or attempting to mingle, at these exercises, theory and example; frequently putting the inquiry to them, not only, “How do you understand such and such a statement?” but, “How would you express such and such a sentiment, or explain such a principle, or illustrate such a position to a class, which you may be teaching?” “Let me,” I say to them, “hear your statements, or witness your modes of illustrating and explaining.” In this connection, I frequently call them to the black-board for visible representation. (Borrowman, 1965, pp. 60-61)

Peirce clearly distinguished between understanding school subjects and the ability to help others understand those subjects. He also used the normal school classroom as a site for practice teaching under conditions more controlled than those found in the practice school—an early effort in the direction of what might now be called “designed” settings for learning to teach (see Lampert, 2006) or “approximations” of practice (see Grossman et al., 2009).

Yet Peirce’s efforts were aimed at preparing teachers to engage in a kind of teaching that few today would consider to be particularly ambitious. His notes focus on the practices of explaining and illustrating, and he did not record attempts to help students develop skill at eliciting or interpreting pupil thinking, leading class discussions, or other practices in which pupil ideas figure centrally. Indeed, such practices would have been rare in the 19th-century common schools, where instruction almost always took place in a lecture format (Cuban, 1993). Peirce’s own pedagogical approaches in the normal school, though certainly directed at ensuring that novice teachers developed a high degree of skill, were consonant with this reality.

As the normal school movement grew throughout the 1850s, some programs codified the specific teaching skills they wanted their students to master in observation rubrics and student teaching evaluation forms, and formal debriefings after practice teaching sessions centered on those skills. Teaching, however, continued to be viewed mostly as something done to students by teachers. At the normal school at Troy, New York, for example, a scoring form for evaluating student teachers listed these categories: “Power to control,” “Power to interest,” “Skill in preparation of lesson,” “Skill in questioning,” “Skill in illustrating and explaining,” “Judgment in assigning lessons,” “Voice,” “Manner in classroom,” and “Care of blackboard” (Ogren, 2005, p. 141). Absent from this list is any attention to children’s ideas or to activities such as small group or project-based instruction that might engage students in constructing meaning through conversation or other kinds of interaction.

Still, the intensity and prescriptiveness of the training offered in the normal schools in this period was striking in comparison with what would follow a few decades later, and not dissimilar to what teacher educators working today on core practices seek. In Florence, Alabama, for example, each student teacher met after every lesson with his or her critic teacher; the school’s catalog explained that at the meeting, “his work is criticized, and the particulars in which he succeeded and those in which he failed are pointed out” (Ogren, 2005, p. 141). In Edinboro, Pennsylvania, the 1881 normal school catalog reported that discussions of student teaching “were held twice weekly or oftener, at which the excellencies and defects are pointed out that all may profit thereby” (p. 141).

In a memoir about life at the New Britain Normal School in this period, student teacher Adelaide Pender described the thoroughness with which her work was critiqued:

As I stumbled through that lesson, my classmates sat around the edges of the room taking notes fiendishly (I thought) and frantically. I felt like a small fly being drawn into a spider’s web . . . criticism concerned my method, my preparation, manner, personal appearance, anything. EVERYTHING! . . . I gave a lesson for that superior teacher, Miss Page, one day, and she pulled me to pieces everywhere. (Ogren, 2005, pp. 140-141)

Pender’s recollections underscore not only the importance of actual practice but the directive orientation prevalent among teacher educators in the normal schools by the end of the 1800s. Although what students knew mattered, what they were able to do with what they knew, and the manner in which they did it, mattered more. Teacher educators did not hesitate to offer corrections, and the culture in programs such as the New Britain Normal School seemed to have supported the use of relatively intensive criticism not only between teacher and student but among students. Teaching was viewed as skilled work, and it was assumed that novices could get better at it through ample practice and prescriptive feedback.

This skills-oriented approach intensified in the later decades of the 19th century, as teacher educators and education reformers embraced new ideas about teaching derived from European educational philosophers. The ideas behind “object teaching,” an instructional method devised by the Swiss pedagogue Johann Pestalozzi, and Herbartianism, which was imported to the United States from German pedagogical seminaries, galvanized the American normal schools, where instructors seized the opportunity to center professional training on recognized approaches to classroom instruction. Although both methods were eventually ridiculed for their formulaic and often mechanistic approaches to teaching, for a time they offered teacher educators an organized body of knowledge and skill that could be made the explicit focus of professional training and helped provide a rationale for the existence of the normal schools to a skeptical public.

In the 1860s, for example, Oswego, NY school superintendent Edward Sheldon became so enamored of object teaching that he opened a special training school that used prescriptive and practice-focused methods to prepare large numbers of teachers (Hollis, 1898). Object teachers presented objects such as books, balls, and pottery to their students, asked a series of rapid-fire questions about them, waited for answers, and then made what they intended to be an informative statement about them. The rules and formulas that characterized the approach were teachable and thus appealing to teacher educators. Students in the Oswego training school were given detailed lesson plans that specified what questions to ask of pupils, what statements to make, and what to say or ask in the case of different responses. They alternated observation in a model school with practice teaching, and were required to pass a performance examination at the end of one year in which they taught an object lesson in a practice school. There was clear agreement among the training school and model school faculty members about what novices should learn to do, and the professional curriculum was relentlessly focused on those skills.

A similar example comes from the Illinois State Normal University (ISNU), which principal Richard Edwards turned into the seat of American Herbartianism in the later decades of the 19th century. Anticipating later developments in pedagogy, the Herbartians believed that learners must actively develop understanding of subject-matter and argued that it was a waste of time for teachers to begin instruction with a direct explanation of a particular topic or problem. Instead, they recommended that teachers use what they termed the “five formal steps” of instruction: “preparation” (directing students’ attention to past experiences), “synthesis” (presenting new subject-matter, possibly through a textbook but preferably through conversation and questioning), “comparison and abstraction” (the separation of essential ideas in the subject from non-essential ones), “definition” (a clear explanation by the teacher), and finally, “practical application.” (See McMurry & McMurry, 1903 for original discussion of the five formal steps; Ogren, 2005, and Harper, 1939 for useful summaries of Herbartianism.) Under Edwards’ guidance, Herbartianism became the object of teacher training at ISNU for at least a decade.

Illustrative lessons and closely coached practice were the center of teachers’ practical training at ISNU and the chief way in which novices learned Herbartian methods. Resembling Japanese lesson study, illustrative or “critique” lessons engaged student teachers in close observation of a master lesson, generally taught by ISNU faculty in the model school (Harper, 1935). After each lesson, the master teacher held a debriefing session with the normal students in which he or she explained the instructional methods that had been used, reviewed the subject-matter, and analyzed instructional decisions. By 1877, these “illustrative” lessons were so popular that 4 hr of class time were devoted to them per week, and normal school students typically spent more than 50 weeks participating in the cycle of observation and discussion (Harper, 1935). Students were also required to complete four terms of closely supervised practice teaching, including participating in debriefing sessions “intended to correct erroneous notions in regard to grading, use of textbooks, the purpose of the recitation, assignment of lessons, use of motives, teaching of good moral habits, problems of discipline, etc.” (Harper, 1935, p. 141).

Although Herbartianism was eventually discredited, it helped teacher educators develop a thoroughly practice-focused approach by the end of the 19th century. There was a body of knowledge and skill for prospective teachers to learn, and they were helped to learn it through intensive cycles of observation and practice, often with highly prescriptive feedback. Yet Herbartianism, which purported to bring children’s thinking into instruction, overlooked the ways in which true attention to children’s ideas makes teaching inherently improvisational. As a result, students in the normal schools learned teaching as a relatively straightforward practice wherein their chief responsibility was to communicate new information directly to students. The parts into which teaching was parsed—asking questions and giving explanations, demonstrations, and lectures—reflected this view. Because this was precise but not necessarily complex work, teachers’ professional education consisted primarily of observation and immediate practice, with highly directive coaching.

Had the normal schools continued to flourish, the approaches to preparing teachers that had developed within them might have evolved to incorporate and respond to more complex conceptions of teaching and learning, such as those advanced by John Dewey and William Heard Kilpatrick early in the 20th century. Instead, the degree-granting colleges and universities that were growing rapidly across the United States by the late 1800s quickly subsumed the normal schools and absorbed their teacher training function. Faculty members in the new education departments turned their attention away from the problems of the schools to academic research and the development of graduate programs (Jencks & Riesman, 1968). Even those who maintained an interest in teacher education or in the study of schooling often reacted to the encroachment of laboratory psychology and to growing interest in scientific management or “social efficiency” by increasing the attention they paid to the social ends of schooling and to designing corresponding teacher education—often at the expense of more practice-focused approaches. These developments heralded a turn away from practice-focused teacher education and education research that would last for more than 50 years. Indeed, it is in relation to this moment that the notion of “practice-based teacher education” might be most useful, as it helps describe the difference between teacher education in the era of the normal schools and teacher education in the new colleges and universities.

The Commonwealth Teacher Training Study

Although teacher education became decidedly more academic in the first half of the 20th century, one project from the period, the Commonwealth Teacher Training Study, stands out in the history of efforts to prepare teachers for practice. Inspired by Taylorism and other principles of scientific management that were gaining currency at the time, education researchers Werrett W. Charters and Douglas Waples surveyed thousands of teachers about the tasks and activities of their work to form a comprehensive list of teaching activities that could be used as the basis for a redesigned teacher training curriculum. The results had little influence on contemporary teacher education, but the work makes clear the challenges of decomposing teaching for the purposes of novices’ learning.

The most striking feature of the Commonwealth Study was its length. The final list included more than 1,000 items, many of them specified at an extremely fine grain-size (see Charters & Waples, 1929). Items were classified into one of seven categories, each containing hundreds of detailed items, and together the list covered almost every move a teacher might make and every task he or she might face. In the category called “teaching subject matter,” for example, there were 83 items ranging from “planning methods of assigning work” to “adapting materials to time limit” to “selecting points for special emphasis.” Another section, titled “Activities involving contacts with pupils,” contained 215 items, including “performing manual services” (“assisting pupils in adjusting clothing . . .”), “excusing pupils,” and “making announcements.” Other categories contained similarly atomized decompositions of practice.

In the sense that it was an attempt to identify specific teaching practices and make them the focus of the teacher education curriculum, the Commonwealth Study resembles more recent efforts to identify core teaching practices. It remains one of the only major efforts to decompose teaching into specific parts, and is distinguished from more common projects to create teaching standards—such as those advanced by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards or the Interstate Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (InTASC)—by its attention to specific tasks and activities of the work rather than to broad categories of teaching practice.

Unlike recent projects to identify core teaching practices, however, the Commonwealth Study was not based on any particular conception of teaching, and there was no theory for what should be included in the list other than comprehensiveness. Instead, it was a detailed job analysis, and the authors seemed intent on decomposing teaching into the smallest parts possible and including virtually every move a teacher might make. Despite the project’s stated purpose of serving teacher education, there does not seem to have been any attempt to identify teaching practices that might be particularly important for a novice, nor any effort to consider how narrowly or broadly items should be articulated to make them useful to beginners.

In contrast, researchers and teacher educators who have proposed sets of core or high-leverage practices in the past few years have used carefully developed criteria to identify a much smaller number of items, recognizing that the short duration of teacher education must be used strategically. Windschitl et al. (2012), for example, have identified just four “high-leverage practices” for beginning science teachers: a planning practice called “constructing the Big Idea,” and three discourse practices—“eliciting students’ ideas to adapt instruction, helping students make sense of material activity, and pressing students for evidence-based explanations” (p. 885). They selected these practices because together they reflect the idea that students should participate productively in scientific practices and discourse—an important conviction in recent thought about science teaching. They note, too, their belief that high-leverage practices “should be few in number to reflect priorities of equitable and effective teaching and to allow significant time for novices to develop and receive feedback on approximations of each of these practices” (p. 883). At the University of Michigan, to name another example, researchers constructing a comprehensive set of “high-leverage” teaching practices meant to span the content areas have arrived at just 19 items (see TeachingWorks, 2013). Researchers associated with the Commonwealth Study did not give similar consideration to either the sort of teaching toward which teacher training might aspire or the number of practices that might be productive within a teacher training program.

Competency-Based Teacher Education

Nearly 40 years after the publication of the Commonwealth report, researchers at Stanford University launched a similarly comprehensive study of teachers’ work. Responding to national concern over the quality of U.S. schooling and its effect on the United States’ international competitiveness, they aimed to identify the characteristics and behaviors of “effective” teachers and to support the redesign of teacher education through a detailed taxonomy of teaching moves (Baral, Snow, & Allen, 1968; Bush, 1968). Similar to the list generated by the Commonwealth Fund, the Stanford taxonomy contained hundreds of teaching tasks organized into at least 19 categories. Teacher educators used it as the basis for a detailed approach to teacher training, generally referred to as competency-based teacher education (CBTE). Although CBTE never became widespread, elements of it were implemented in hundreds of American teacher education programs, and the movement signaled an important shift in the field toward more deliberate teaching of practice. It had a good deal in common with current core practices work, but also differed in critical ways.

Proponents of CBTE aspired to structure teacher education around a set of precise learning objectives (“competencies”), defined in assessable, behavioral terms (Howsam & Houston, 1972). Programs were typically organized into self-contained “instructional modules,” each focused on specific learning objectives, rather than in traditional content and “methods” courses. Students participated in a variety of pedagogical activities in each module, including independent work in a learning carrel, seminars, and practice in real or simulated classroom settings. Programs were self-paced, and students were generally required to demonstrate competence at target skills before they were permitted to move to the next module or graduate from a program. Many students in CBTE programs participated in microteaching, which engaged them in intensive practice of specific teaching skills, usually in special laboratory classrooms with small groups of pupils (MacLeod, 1987).

In a typical example of competency-based teacher education, Gonzaga University offered students enrolled in teacher education in the early 1970s an instructional module (or “mini-course”) called “Effective Questioning.” Intended to help novices develop skill at conducting a discussion, the mini-course addressed 12 specific teacher behaviors:

Students enrolled in the mini-course began the module by watching films that showed teachers modeling 1 or more of the 12 behaviors. Students were also provided with a rationale for each practice in a written handbook that accompanied the module. Following the film viewings, students prepared a short discussion lesson that included several of the target behaviors and then taught the lesson in a special “microteaching room” to groups of 4 to 8 pupils. These microteaching lessons were videotaped and then critiqued by students and their supervisors. Following the video viewing, students re-planned the lesson, taught it again in the microteaching room to a different set of pupils, and again analyzed the video according to the observation form (Peterson, 1973). Other modules followed a similar pattern.

An important similarity between competency-based approaches and the current work on core practices was the way the former focused teachers’ attention on specific teaching activities and used what might now be called “approximations” of practice. In the example above, the practice of “discussion” was decomposed into smaller parts, and students’ attention was focused on just a few of those parts at a time, just as core practices approaches center on decompositions of teaching that serve as the foci for students’ observation and practice. Other modules were based on similar efforts to identify “chunks” of instruction that would not be too overwhelming for novices and then to break those chunks down into specific behaviors and moves that could be practiced and learned to the point of proficiency. CBTE also engaged students in an instructional cycle that began with observation and included several rounds of practice, critique, and practice again. Within this cycle, teacher educators used pedagogies such as modeling and video analysis that are still more common today. Underlying the approach was a belief that teaching was a learnable practice that consisted of specific skills and techniques, best mastered by observing specific elements of the work, practicing those elements in controlled settings, receiving feedback and analyzing one’s work, and then trying again, perhaps in a more complicated teaching situation. Similar views about teaching and the process of learning to teach drove work in the normal schools and have continued to inform teacher education in recent years.

Yet the conceptions of teaching on which competency-based teacher education was based differ from those that underlie current core practices work. Student thinking was much less obviously viewed as a resource in CBTE than it is now, and the ways in which teaching was described and organized for novices’ learning reflected this. In the module dedicated to class discussions described above, for example, none of the 12 target behaviors suggests that learning to elicit ideas from pupils and then use those ideas to stimulate thought among other pupils or make decisions about what to do next was thought to be important. Instead, the 12 behaviors imply a vision of class discussion as a back-and-forth between teacher and students: The teacher asks a question, the students respond, perhaps the teacher probes for additional commentary, and then the teacher asks another question. With the exception of item number 8 (“seeking further clarification and pupil insight”), all of the behaviors indicate work for the teacher rather than for the student, and there is no mention of moves the teacher might make to encourage students to exchange ideas with one another and build collective knowledge. In contrast, more recent projects to help new teachers learn to lead discussions have centered around a more complex conception of the practice, one in which the specific subject-matter being taught is critical.

For example, in work to prepare novice elementary mathematics teachers to engage in ambitious teaching, members of the Learning to Teach in, From, and Through Practice project (LTP; Lampert et al., 2013) have focused on the use of “instructional activities” that are tied directly to the mathematical goals of instruction. They describe an instructional activity called “strategy sharing” as follows:

The teacher poses a computational problem and elicits multiple ways of solving the problem. Careful use of representations and targeted questioning of students are designed to help the class learn the general logic underlying the strategies, identify mathematical connections, and evaluate strategies in terms of efficiency and generalizability. (Lampert et al., 2010, p. 136)

Whereas discussion in the Gonzaga CBTE module was taught as a generic practice, with a set of discrete teacher moves that presumably could be applied to any academic content, discussion in the LTP work is taught as a vehicle for accomplishing particular instructional goals, in relation to specific content. In strategy sharing, novices’ learning of discussion is grounded in the goal of helping students understand and evaluate multiple strategies for problem solving. To accomplish this goal, teachers must elicit and probe student thinking; help students understand, question, and assess their classmates’ ideas; and make connections among student ideas explicit—all elements of facilitating a class discussion. This work is more complicated than simply “asking questions,” “calling on students,” and “prompting,” however, in part because what students will say is at least somewhat unpredictable. As LTP project members put it, instructional activities prescribe some aspects of what the teacher will do while leaving “room for teachers to create teaching”:

In order to support ambitious mathematics teaching, instructional activities need to be structured to generate the variety of skills and knowledge that display to teachers what students can do and what they still need to learn. They also need to leave room for teachers to create teaching in response to what is displayed. At the same time, they structure what teachers and students do with the content to bring about an intended learning goal. (p. 137)

This emphasis on generating student thinking that helps teachers decide what to do next distinguishes this approach to teaching discussion from the Gonzaga example, particularly since even a novice teacher must figure out for himself or herself, in the moment of instruction, how to proceed in response to student ideas.

There are also subtle but important differences between the pedagogical approaches used in the recent work and those used in competency-based teacher education. In CBTE, learning to teach was treated as a somewhat mechanical process in which a novice would observe expert practice and then plan and execute a lesson that was meant to be as similar as possible to the expert example. In this respect, CBTE had a great deal in common with learning to teach in the normal school era, when novices were expected to observe master teachers in the “illustrative lessons” and then emulate the work. In comparison, more recent approaches acknowledge the relative unpredictability of teaching and help novices develop proficiency at improvising instruction in response to student productions. LTP project members, for example, note that instructional activities enable novices to “get deep enough into authentic interactions with specific learners to practice inventing [emphasis added] educative responses” (Lampert et al., 2010, p. 135). They also use an instructional cycle that resembles the cycle used in CBTE modules with one critical difference: Students are expected to “experiment” with the instructional activities:

These pedagogies are enacted in recurrent cycles during which teacher educators support novice teachers to analyze and observe, to plan and rehearse, and to experiment with the instructional activities, cycling between a phase in which the activities are taught and studied in a university classroom setting and a phase where beginners use them in interaction with children in actual classroom contexts. (p. 137)

The idea that novices should experiment with instructional activities is consistent with a view of teaching as an improvisational practice, and one that would have been foreign to competency-based teacher educators. “Experimentation” implies that the experimenter is pursuing his or her own inquiry into the effects of particular instructional moves in the classroom, not simply following the prescriptions of the teacher educator. Although John Dewey (1965/1904) wrote about the value of experimentation—or what he referred to as “professional laboratory activities”—in an essay at the turn of the 19th century, the notion that inquiry and experimentation are a part of both good teaching and learning to teach has rarely surfaced since the beginning of teacher education. In both the normal schools and competency-based teacher education, teaching was viewed strictly as technique, and the process of learning it was treated as a short cycle of observation and emulation.

In the recent work, teaching is conceived of as a composite of technique, analysis, interpretation, and judgment: The teacher uses skills to elicit and interpret student thinking, decides based on that interpretation what to do next, and then uses more skills to pose additional questions, provide explanations, model content, and then elicit more responses from students. How students will interact with the content is predictable, but only partially so, and although teachers may use the same skills over and over again to elicit ideas, present information, and manage many other elements of classroom interactions, every teaching situation will require new judgment about what to do and how to do it. Inherent in this view is a recognition that any set of classroom interactions is different from any previous set, that even novice teachers cannot avoid encountering teaching situations that are not exactly like anything they have seen before. Learning to manage this uncertainty requires that novices develop not only technical skill, particularly skill at listening and interpreting, but professional judgment. Doing that depends not only on observation and emulation, but on repeated practice managing novel teaching situations and on the development of skills such as listening, interpreting, and managing instructional discourse. It is very different work from what has been common throughout much of the history of public school teaching in the United States.

Core Practices in Context

In marrying attention to technical skill with attention to professional judgment and improvisational capability, recent work to center teachers’ professional training on core practices shows both a significant debt to earlier work in American teacher education and a more nuanced, multidimensional vision of good teaching. “New” pedagogies of professional education such as coached rehearsals bear a significant resemblance to activities in the normal schools, as well as to the work of competency-based teacher educators, and reflect a respect for the skilled elements of classroom teaching practice that was present in thinking about teaching in the early 19th century, mostly drifted out of favor during the 20th century, and drew interest again in the 1960s and 1970s. But they also suggest a view of teaching as complex, improvisational work that, while it has roots in the thinking of Progressive American educators such as John Dewey, has only occasionally informed teacher education practice. When teaching is presented to novices today in professional education programs focused on core practices, it is more likely to have been decomposed into parts that conform to this view, such as discussion, small group work, and the elicitation of student thinking, rather than into finer grain-sized parts such as asking questions and passing out papers. Pedagogies such as video analysis and rehearsal acknowledge the endemic difficulties of teaching defined in this way and try to help novices learn to manage them. While these are not entirely new ideas, they have begun to mature considerably as teacher educators working today have wrestled directly with their implications for new teachers’ learning.

The focus on academic content in recent work on core practices is also fundamental. It not only allows teacher educators to help new teachers learn skills that are particularly powerful in certain subject areas, but brings purpose to the work of teaching in ways that may improve the process of learning to teach. Learning to lead a whole class discussion, for example, is not only about perfecting the technical skills of asking questions and managing student participation—as it was in competency-based teacher education—but about doing these things in relation to content-specific learning goals for students. New teachers can evaluate their attempts to launch a productive discussion or help students learn to listen and respond to one another by considering how well their attempts allowed them to traverse the academic terrain that was the point of the lesson. Efforts to design summative assessments such as end-of-unit tests and papers can be disciplined not only by an a priori understanding of what makes a good assessment, derived from a professor’s lecture or a textbook, but by an examination of how well a given assessment elicits useful information about what students have learned in relation to instructional goals.

These changes in how some teacher educators are approaching the teaching of practice are consonant with shifts in the academic goals that are held for American schoolchildren and with changes in public expectations for what schools will help students accomplish. Higher aspirations are reflected in the new Common Core State Standards, for example, which lay out learning goals for pupils that many consider to be more challenging than those in previous sets of K-12 curriculum standards. Although the future of the Common Core remains uncertain, these new standards imply a very different view of teaching and learning from that which prevailed in earlier decades and have important implications for what teachers must learn to do. Their prospects may depend partially on the success of teacher education in training novices to engage in teaching that is intellectually ambitious and demanding of sophisticated academic, relational, and organizational skills—a very different kind of practice than that which normal school students learned at the advent of professional education for teachers.

The Work Ahead for Teacher Educators

Work on core practices occupies a precarious position in teacher education research and practice. There is no evidence that interest in it is widespread or that large numbers of American teacher educators are adopting the approach. Resistance to the notion of detailed professional training is still common (see, for example, Zeichner, 2010). Many teacher educators have not taught children or worked intensively in classrooms in many years (Levine, 2006), and may lack the skill required to implement practice-based approaches effectively were they even to try it. Furthermore, although teachers have been formally educated in this country for nearly 200 years, there is not even agreement about the specific practices that new teachers should be able to carry out competently before they take responsibility for a classroom, and no assessment that measures their capability with particular practices (Grossman & McDonald, 2008).

If the current work is to gain momentum and significantly influence teacher education practice, some more permanent infrastructure for teaching and learning core practice-based methods will need to be built, and the common view that teaching cannot be specified or taught repudiated. Marshaling some consensus around both core teaching practices and effective pedagogies for preparing novices in those practices would create a foundation for the sharing of knowledge and resources, which in turn might help teacher educators develop their capability at a very new kind of teacher education practice. As the history of efforts to implement practice-focused teacher education has shown, all of this is likely to depend on sustained commitment on the part of those who fund education research, the policy makers who make decisions about how new teachers are trained and assessed, leaders in higher education, and the teacher educators who work directly with novice teachers.

In the meantime, it is important for those who work in teacher education to exercise discipline in the ways in which they describe different forms of “practice-based” teacher education. Not all core practices are alike, focusing teachers’ training on core practices is not the same as situating professional learning in a K-12 classroom, and effective “practice-based” teacher education may include “academic” components. Getting clear about the different dimensions of “practice-focused” training could help support more careful investigations of the many ways in which teacher educators are trying to improve their work.