Teaching Practice: A Cross-Professional Perspective

Abstract

Background/Context This study investigates how people are prepared for professional practice in the clergy, teaching, and clinical psychology. The work is located within research on professional education, and research on the teaching and learning of practice. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study The purpose of the study is to develop a framework to describe and analyze the teaching of practice in professional education programs, specifically preparation for relational practices. Setting The research took place in eight professional education programs located in seminaries, schools of professional psychology, and universities across the country. Population/Participants/Subjects Our research participants include faculty members, students, and administrators at each of these eight programs. Research Design This research is a comparative case study of professional education across three different professions—the clergy, clinical psychology, and teaching. Our data include qualitative case studies of eight preparation programs: two teacher education programs, three seminaries, and three clinical psychology programs. Data Collection and Analysis For each institution, we conducted site visits that included interviews with administrators, faculty, and staff; observations of multiple classes and field-work; and focus groups with students who were either at the midpoint or at the end of their programs. Conclusions/Recommendations We have identified three key concepts for understanding the pedagogies of practice in professional education: representations, decomposition, and approximations of practice. Representations of practice comprise the different ways that practice is represented in professional education and what these various representations make visible to novices. Decomposition of practice involves breaking down practice into its constituent parts for the purposes of teaching and learning. Approximations of practice refer to opportunities to engage in practices that are more or less proximal to the practices of a profession. In this article, we define and provide examples of the representation, decomposition, and approximation of practice from our study of professional education in the clergy, clinical psychology, and teaching. We conclude that, in the program we studied, prospective teachers have fewer opportunities to engage in approximations that focus on contingent, interactive practice than do novices in the other two professions we studied.

Formatively assessing prospective teachers’ skills in leading mathematics discussions

“…From our perspective, a classroom discussion is a period of relatively sustained dialog among the teacher and multiple members of the class in which students respond to and use one another’s ideas to develop collective understanding. To assess capabilities in leading discussions, we drew upon Grossman et al’s ( 2009 ) notion of parsing teaching practice into specific areas of work to create a “decomposition” of the practice. Because we were interested in using decomposition in teacher preparation, we attended to the importance of decomposing in ways that the practice can be taught and learned by PTs (Boerst et al, 2011 ).…”

“…Practice opportunities need to be coupled with structured directive coaching (Ericsson & Pool, 2016 ). Thus, formative assessment is a critical component in teacher preparation (Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators, 2017 ; Darling-Hammond et al, 2005 ; Grossman, 2009 ). However, many current assessments of teaching used in the USA, including observation and portfolios, measure PTs’ skills with broad domains of work such as planning, instruction, or assessment.…”

An Epistemic Network Approach to Teacher Students’ Professional Vision in Tutoring Video Analysis

“…To realize the teacher education reform goal of increasing practicebased training, programs are increasingly focused on common and flexible core practices (Ball and Forzani, 2009;Windschitl et al, 2011;Kloser, 2014). This focus aims to balance maintaining field-like authenticity and complexity on the one hand, with suitability for novice initial mastery on the other hand (Grossman et al, 2009), offering opportunities for learning about teaching and student achievement with diverse methods in varied domains.…”

“…For initial teacher students, starting out with truly authentic practice experiences can be overwhelming and difficult to navigate. Alternatively, research suggests practices be taught in a gradual process of increasing complexity and authenticity (Grossman et al, 2009). Teacher students need opportunities to see practice-in-action representations (e.g., videos), learn how to "unpack" these practices into decompositions of their constituent parts (e.g., pre-training texts), and to "try on" a range of teacher moves, methods and procedures within approximations of practice (Grossman, 2018).…”

“…The supportive structure within such approximations of practice (Grossman et al, 2009) can foster teacher students' PV development. The video-based format offers a motivating learning context (Gaudin and Chaliès, 2015) with reduced complexity to facilitate processing (e.g., observing video vs. in-the-moment teaching).…”