Practice-Based Methods
What do we mean by practice-based?
As the demand to engage students and content in complex ways increases, teacher education needs to better prepare new teachers to competently and confidently begin their teaching careers in ways that support ongoing learning from their practice and from their students. This is especially important for teachers committed to addressing issues of equity and social justice as they teach in linguistically and culturally diverse urban communities and disrupt existing traditions that systemically limit access and opportunity to marginalized youth. Our model of preservice teacher education is both field-based and practice-based.
We highlight our use of Instructional Activities within Cycles of Engagement and Investigation in our courses. Much has been written about these ideas elsewhere (see References); we highlight aspects that we have taken up into our courses below.
Instructional Activities
Our Instructional Activities (IA's) are designed to support novice teacher learning as they highlight the relational aspects of teaching and the interaction among students, teaching, content, and children's thinking. Read more about Instructional Activities.
The Cycle
Our methods courses are structured around cyclical engagement with IA's that support collaborative learning as novice teachers plan, rehearse, enact, analyze, and reflect upon their teaching practice. Read more about The Cycle.
Teacher Educator Reflections
In one of our debriefing conversations (week 3), we share about how the time in the classroom didn't go as smoothly as we had hoped (during the Observation phase of the cycle), but that ultimately this is an accurate reflection of the complexity of teaching.
TE1: The third graders had a really hard time doing the strategy that I thought was going to be super easy for them.
TE2: I had that same experience.
TE1: [The principal] was walking around…I don't know.
TE2: This is teaching! Right? And if it was all gonna go smoothly, we wouldn't need to do this.
TE1: Right.
TE2: So I mean, I think that where I'm trying to get in my head, although I'm not quite there yet, is teachable moments. Right? This is learning that we're trying to help our people learn to teach. And if it all went smoothly, they would leave this class thinking, oh no problem.
TE1: [Teaching is] easy. Yeah.