“It’s 1000 Degrees in Here When I Teach”: Providing Preservice Teachers With an Extended Opportunity to Approximate Ambitious Instruction

Abstract

Teacher educators have a challenging task of designing opportunities for preservice teachers (PSTs) to learn ambitious science teaching (AST). However, with limited time in methods courses and the complexities of AST, opportunities for PSTs to “try out” ambitious instruction are difficult to construct and analyze. To address this problem, we describe our enactment of a type of extended pedagogical rehearsal that we call “macroteaching” in a secondary science methods course. Framed as a design experiment, we codeveloped macroteaching with the PSTs during methods class, examining how we all learned about AST given the extended learning opportunity. The results of this study, including that PSTs are not afraid of the uncertainty about what students might say and do, suggest that extended rehearsals of AST provide PSTs and the course instructors with opportunities to advance their teaching and vision of the profession in a methods class.

Persistence of the two‐worlds pitfall: Learning to teach within and across settings

“…Other instances of "huddles" taking place between teachers have also indicated that this is productive form of joint work shared between teachers. For example, Stroupe and Gotwals (2018) detail how PSTs used "time outs" as a chance to work through a dilemma of teaching and learning as a sidebar to the busy work of carrying out highly interactive science teaching with multiple groups of students. Kazemi, et al (2016) describe how this pause in the action to talk through pedagogical pathways and interpretations of student thinking can take the form of a teacher educator intervening in a PST's teaching or it can take the form of a joint deliberation where all participants contribute to the discussion during a "time out" from teaching.…”

Design-based research as a research methodology in teacher and social education – a scoping review

“…Subsequently, analyses were conducted within the research team, assessing the need for refinements based on the researchers' sense of progress, which was partially informed by the data collected from the PSTs, such as interviews and video recordings of the enactments. In contrast, the iteration cycle in the study by Stroupe and Gotwals (2018) was less systematic. Rather than simply prescribing learning opportunities for the PSTs to enact, the researchers introduced the concept of macroteaching as an overall framework, in which learning opportunities emerged 'as the instructors and PSTs made sense of pedagogical moments' (Stroupe & Gotwals, 2018, p. 300).…”

“…based on the data collected from previous cohorts. Other studies describe the iterative cycles in which refinements were implemented regarding a single cohort (e.g., Stroupe & Gotwals, 2018).…”

Contrast, Commonality, and a Call for Clarity: A Review of the Use of Core Practices in Teacher Education

“…We then attended to the "timescale" or duration of the classroom instruction segment in each core-practice approach described by teacher educators. That is, we attempted to classify from larger scale domains of teaching practice such as a unit (see Stroupe & Gotwals, 2017) to narrower 15-min episodes of teaching (e.g., see Ghousseini, Beasley, & Lord, 2015). Through multiple rounds of discussion and analytic memos, however, we found that timescale did not by itself capture the meaningful differences of a teacher educator's incorporation of core practices.…”