Where Do We Start? Initiating a Practice-Based Teacher Education Program

Abstract

In recent years, there has been renewed interest in practicebased teacher education around the enactment of high leverage practices, but there is scant scholarship detailing the perceptions of faculty members who must be implementers of such programmatic shifts. Our study utilized survey and interview data to better understand faculty members beliefs and prior work related to this line of inquiry. Initial results suggest that despite practical concerns, our participants are optimistic about high leverage practices, and in contrast to deficiency narratives about teacher education, participants articulated sophisticated teacher preparation methods along these lines. Participants also desired programmatic coherence.

Exploring the Nature, Facilitators, and Challenges of Program Coherence in a Case of Teacher Education Program Redesign Using Core Practices

“…Representations of practice, such as videos or transcripts of accomplished practice that make discrete practice visible and available for interrogation (Hurlbut & Krutka, 2020; McDonald et al, 2013);…”

“…• • Representations of practice, such as videos or transcripts of accomplished practice that make discrete practice visible and available for interrogation (Hurlbut & Krutka, 2020;McDonald et al, 2013); • • Decomposition of practice, that is, identification of underlying principles and components of practice (Janssen et al, 2015;McDonald et al, 2014); • • Approximations of practice, that is, bounded and scaffolded opportunities to try enacting or rehearsing practices in the university courses and/or field experiences (Kavanagh, Metz, et al, 2019;Lampert et al, 2013).…”

“…Faculty have indicated a preference for bottom-up redesign that engages faculty (Hurlbut & Krutka, 2020; see also Gappa & Austin, 2010). Faculty who do not engage with, shape, and understand a specific redesign may resist changes or respond to them only superficially.…”

First-Year Teachers’ Perceptions of Pre-Service Wellness and Physical Activity Integration Coursework and the First-Year Transition

“…These factors are taught and discussed within each course and students are provided opportunities to practice the skills learned through peer teaching, by developing an active classroom management plan to implement for daily tasks and routines once in student teaching, and an opportunity to develop and teach a fully integrated unit plan during their last semester with support from their mentor teacher, university supervisor, and the endorsement course teacher. This shift in developing assignments from a purely cognitive understanding to enacting the learned practices provides a theoretical lens of practice-based teacher education through which pre-service teachers are asked to embody the pedagogy as opposed to being passive consumers of information (Hurlburt & Krutka, 2020).…”