Currently, the field of teacher education is undergoing a major shift—a turn away from a predominant focus on specifying the necessary knowledge for teaching toward specifying teaching practices that entail knowledge and doing. In this article, the authors suggest that current work on K-12 core teaching practices has the potential to shift teacher education toward the practice of teaching. However, the authors argue that to realize this vision we must reimagine not only the curriculum for learning to teach but also the pedagogy of teacher education. We present one example of what we mean by reimagined teacher education pedagogy by offering a framework through which to conceptualize the preparation of teachers organized around core practices. From our perspectives, this framework could be the backbone of a larger research and development agenda aimed at engaging teachers and teacher educators in systematic knowledge generation regarding ambitious teaching and teacher education pedagogy. We conclude with an invitation to the field to join with us in imagining approaches to generating and aggregating knowledge about teaching and the pedagogy of teacher education that will move not only our individual practice but also our collective practice forward.

If the movement toward more project-based learning is to be successful, it’s essential to understand what teachers need to do to be effective in a project-based classroom. Pam Grossman, Christopher G. Pupik Dean, Sarah Schneider Kavanagh, and Zachary Herrmann surveyed experts and teachers and viewed classroom videos to identify a set of core practices for project-based teaching. Effective project-based educators promote subject-area learning; create relevant experiences; cultivate a classroom culture of production, feedback, reflection, and revision; and build student agency in learning communities.

As practice-based teacher education (PBTE) has become more prevalent, debates about its contribution have emerged. Critics of PBTE question whether emphasizing practice will support a technocratic approach to teacher education rather than promoting instruction that is responsive to students’ ideas. This qualitative case study was motivated by an interest in understanding whether and in what ways practice-based approaches to teacher learning can support teachers in practicing responsiveness as opposed to practicing decontextualized moves. To this end, we investigated how early-career teachers in a practice-based professional development program were supported to approximate teaching practices. We focused on the extent to which approximations of practice supported teachers to hone their skill at being responsive to students’ ideas. Findings revealed characteristics of approximations of practice that support teachers in developing their capacity to enact responsive instruction. These findings have implications for program design, teacher educator pedagogy, and future research.

Disciplinary literacy scholars promote text-based instruction in the service of disciplinary inquiry, and scholars of teacher education promote practice-based preparation for teachers. This study brings these scholarly communities into conversation by investigating how practice orientations in teacher education influence novice teachers’ literacy teaching. We conducted video analyses of teacher education coursework and novice teachers’ classroom instruction in secondary English language arts. Data were collected during a summer institute for novice teachers designed through a partnership between a university and an alternative teacher education program. Analyses revealed that when learning targets for novice teacher participants were explicitly connected to teaching practice through the use of representations, decompositions, and approximations, those targets were more frequently observed in novices’ subsequent classroom instruction.