Parsing the Practice of Teaching

Abstract

Teacher education programs typically teach novices about one part of teaching at a time. We might offer courses on different topics—cultural foundations, learning theory, or classroom management—or we may parse teaching practice itself into a set of discrete techniques, such as core teaching practices, that can be taught individually. Missing from our courses is attention to the ultimate purpose of these discrete parts—how specific concepts can help teachers achieve their goals, or how specific procedures can help them achieve their goals. Because we are now shifting from a focus on bodies of knowledge to a focus on depictions of practice, this article examines our efforts to parse teaching practice into lists of discrete procedures. It argues that we need to pay less attention to the visible behaviors of teaching and more attention to the purposes that are served by those behaviors. As a way to begin a conversation about parsing teachers’ purposes, I offer a proposal for conceptualizing teaching as a practice that entails five persistent problems, each of which presents a difficult challenge to teachers, and all of which compete for teachers’ attention. Viewed in this way, the role of teacher education is not to offer solutions to these problems, but instead to help novices learn to analyze these problems and to evaluate alternative courses of action for how well they address these problems.

Teacher Educators’ Practice and Vision of Good Teaching in Teacher Education Reform Context in Ghana

“…Kennedy (2016), points out that the 'core teaching activities' approach, which partitions teaching into steps of activities including planning, setting objectives, demonstrating, assigning work, is an old model of learning to teach developed as far back as the late 1920s, and was based on the idea that teaching practices should be partitioned based on what 'good teachers' do. To produce 'good teachers', teacher education had "to find a way to identify common teaching activities independent of students, settings, and subjects … nothing is said about why teachers did any of these activities, how it contributed to a larger goal or the overall process called 'teaching'" (Kennedy, 2016 p. 7;emphasis added).…”

“…However, from the evidence presented in this study, the 'in-in-out' teacher education model incorporating practicum needs to be accompanied with a paradigm shift in teacher educators' practices of teaching methods courses and their visions of good teaching. Kennedy (2016) argues that, "reasoning about 23 practice, rather than … prescribing a set of practices for (pre-service teachers) to adopt", (Kennedy, 2016, p. 15), should be the guiding principle in teacher education. A teacher education approach based on reasoning about practice fits well with the principles underpinning learner-centered pedagogy.…”

Preservice Teachers’ Learning to Plan Intellectually Challenging Tasks

“…By contrast, the other PSTs primarily followed either a canonical science storyline or the order of the curriculum topics. Finally, both groups of PSTs noted some challenges in "enlisting student participation" (Kennedy, 2005(Kennedy, , 2016 in the tasks as intended. They interpreted and addressed these problems of practice in a different way.…”

Reforming Initial Teacher Education: A Call for Innovation

“…This question is necessary in light of historical and ongoing comments by Berry (2011), Darling-Hammond (2013), Furlong and Maynard (1995), Fullan (2007), Hagger and McIntyre (2000), Hartsuyker (2007), Hattie (2011), Ingvarson et al (2014), Kennedy (2016), Lyndaker (1990), Ramsey (2000), Tom (1997), and Walls, Nardi, Minden, and Hoffman (2002), all of whom have called for ITE reform and argued that ITE needs to develop more innovative and outcomes-based approaches to the preparation of teaching graduates. In this article we respond to this question by reviewing the broad history of ITE, and by investigating its characteristics and the specific issues which have been identified as necessary to the creation of a more modern and responsive ITE approach.…”