Journal of Teacher Education

We designed a video-based course to develop preservice teachers’ vision of ambitious instruction by decomposing instruction to learn to attend to student thinking and to examine how particular teaching moves influence student learning. In this study, we examine the influence that learning to systematically analyze ambitious pedagogy in the course has on preservice teachers’ classroom practice. Analysis of preservice teachers’ videos from the Performance Assessment for California Teachers Teaching Event reveals that they engaged in more student-centered practices compared with a cohort of candidates who did not participate in the course—creating opportunities to see student thinking, noticing student thinking during instruction, and pursuing student ideas to learn more about their thinking. We also found that their probing of student thinking focused primarily on correct answers and procedural fluency. These findings have implications for defining a pedagogy of teacher preparation to develop beginning teacher competency.

Attention to the core practices of teaching necessitates core pedagogies in teacher preparation. This article outlines the diffusion of one such pedagogy from medical to teacher education. The concept of clinical simulations is outlined through the lens of “signature pedagogies” and their uncertain, engaging, formative qualities. Implemented in five different teacher preparation programs, simulation data highlight design principles and resulting outcomes for general scholastic and subject-specific problems of practice.

The growing national attention to students’ learning trajectories (LTs) renews the opportunity to explore the ways that teachers may use students’ thinking in their instruction. In this article, we examine teachers’ learning of two frameworks, one for students’ thinking in a particular domain and one for broad student-centered instructional practices, in the context of an elementary grades mathematics professional development setting. As a part of a retrospective analysis of a design experiment, we analyzed 19 lessons of teachers who participated in 60 hr of professional development designed to support their learning of one LT and one framework about student-centered instructional practices. Our findings describe the ways in which teachers brought together these frameworks to enact instructional practices that elicit and use students’ mathematical thinking in classroom instruction. We conclude by arguing that LTs can serve as a referent for student-centered instructional practices, bridging guidelines for student-centered instruction with domain-specific understandings of students’ thinking for teachers.

The authors present findings from a qualitative study of an experience that supports teacher candidates to use discourse analysis and positioning theory to analyze videos of their practice during student teaching. The research relies on the theoretical concept that learning to teach is an identity process. In particular, teachers construct and enact their identities during moment-to-moment interactions with students, colleagues, and parents. Using case study methods for data generation and analysis, the authors demonstrate how one participant used the analytic tools to trace whether and how she enacted her preferred teacher identities (facilitator and advocate) during student teaching. Implications suggest that using discourse analytic frameworks to analyze videos of instruction is a generative strategy for developing candidates’ interactional awareness that impacts student learning and the nature of classroom talk. Overall, these tools support novice teachers with the difficult task of becoming the teacher they desire to be.

The notion of reflection nowadays is considered crucial in the field of teaching and teacher education. However, although the great majority of approaches to reflection are grounded on the same main theoretical sources, the meaning of this notion is unanimously recognized in the field to be ambiguous. This article aims to look for clarity about what reflection is, what it is not, and how it works, by closely revisiting the seminal works of Dewey, Schön, and Wertheimer. It is argued that reflection is a descriptive notion—not a prescriptive one—and that it refers to the thinking process engaged in giving coherence to an initially unclear situation. The article then identifies some aspects of how reflection works, and some current widespread assumptions about reflection, which are insufficiently warranted, either theoretically in the writings of Dewey or Schön or empirically in the observations of reflection processes.

This study explores teachers’ reflections on their learning to compose with new technologies in the context of teacher education and/or teacher professional development. English language arts (ELA) teachers (n = 240) in 15 courses learned to use digital video (DV), completed at least one DV group project, and responded to open-ended survey questions. The data examined connections they made between print and DV composing, the best and most frustrating aspects of DV, content they still wanted to learn, and its relevance in their classrooms. The findings demonstrate high engagement with DV, the use of transmediation in making connections between print and DV, the reporting of both enjoyment and frustration with DV, and perceived curricular value with DV in the classroom. Implications include the need for teachers to have practical experiences with DV and opportunities to reflect on content and pedagogical applications.

Gargani and Strong claim to have developed and validated an observation system that requires only 4 hr of training, but one that can identify effective teachers using just 20 min of one video-taped lesson. They further contend that their six-item inventory requires little judgment from those who use it. They describe their instrument, the Rapid Assessment of Teacher Effectiveness (RATE), as better, faster, and cheaper than other available instruments. Although we find some aspects of their work (e.g., their work describing instrument development) as well done, we find, more generally, that their claims are premature and inflated. Their work suffers from several problems including inattention to relevant historical work, no demonstrated ecological validity, no working theory, and lacks a clear conception of what RATE is. At this stage of development, we rate RATE as having limited, if any, capacity for improving teaching.