The Cycle: Preparation & Rehearsal

Overview of Preparation

NTs work together to plan their upcoming enactments with buddies. We often support this process by providing planning templates to guide their work. Each planning template is unique to the IA and helps NTs focus on the core features of the IA while they design the enactment specifically for their small group of buddies. See some sample planning templates (completed by NTs) below.

Overview of Rehearsal

Note: Much has been written about rehearsal elsewhere (see References).

Rehearsal is one of our core teacher educator pedagogies. Rehearsal is just as it sounds -- an opportunity for the teacher education students to work on the practice of teaching while considering the principled ideas that underlie their practice and their decisions, before engaging with their students. Rehearsal involves at least one teacher educator and a group of 4 to 30 teacher education students. The teacher education students take turns leading the identified practice, while their colleagues take on the role of the students, and the teacher educator intervenes and provides feedback and engages the group in reflective discussion.

Rehearsal allows teacher education students the opportunity to take up practice, consider the complexity of practice by managing pedagogy, content, students, context all in relation to each other. In our field-based methods courses we have used rehearsal to prepare teacher education students for their work with their buddies around the IA for the week.

The teacher education students have planned in groups of 4 (these are regular groups and the groups they are in for engaging their buddies).
There are many different ways to manage the rehearsal time (typically about 30-45 min each week). We change the way we manage based on time, IA, and number of teacher educators.
We might have a small group of NTs rehearse as one and “pass the chalk” as they are working their way through the IA. This way they are not in the space alone and thus feel less overwhelmed.
As teacher educators we lead the intervening. We are purposeful in what we want to intervene about. If you are not careful you could intervene almost every 15 seconds. The goal is to choose those places you have identified as what you are working on and intervene around those (i.e if we are working on eliciting we intervene around that).
If you intervene too much, or your intervening is about fixing rather than supporting, the teacher education students will leave rehearsal feeling unable to engage students in the IA. We want students to leave the rehearsal feeling like they can and will be even better after rehearsal.
After one group rehearses we often debrief by asking the rehearsing group to share what it felt like to lead the IA and then open it up for questions. We then have the next group rehearse. You have to keep these short (15 min or less) so they are focused and multiple NTs get a chance to rehearse. Often this means that a group does not rehearse the entire IA but one part of it.

Read more about some of our TE reflections as we navigated whole-group vs. small-group rehearsal structures.

Teacher Educator Reflections

We share some of of the instructional decision-making we engage in during our own teaching (Week 5 Debrief)

TE 1: Today, I picked out four different lead teachers and asked them to rehearse particular parts of their lessons so that the whole group could see them. I thought it was helpful for the group to see those four things, because they were things we had not talked about before in the class. They were doing close reading. In their plans, I saw that one group was sharing the reading with their buddies in a way that didn't single kids out. We hadn't talked yet about the problems teachers face when individual kids read, so I wanted to bring up that about how to share reading. There were a couple of nice closing moves. We hadn't yet talked about closing moves at all. Then I had them go back to their plans as a group to see if they could adjust anything. I thought it was productive for getting to topics we haven't talked about yet.

TE 2: There might be different ways we can go about rehearsal for different purposes at different times. Also, I've also been wanting to bring up closing moves for some time. I would love to put that on our radar as something we can talk about generally and possibly as something to add to our list. It's also awesome that you invited the novices to think about how they could incorporate things into their own plans.

Novice Teacher Reflections

“Rehearsal helps me solidify what I want to do during the activity so I am not lost for words during. For example, when I rehearsed in front of the class as a LT, I saw the things I should cut out from my lesson as well as change the language I use in order for students to better understand something. I don't think I would have realized these things that soon if I did not practice beforehand.”

-Han (TEP 2018-2020)

“Seeing some of my peers was also really helpful because I was able to learn a few techniques that I would've never thought of myself. Each one of my team members brings something different to the table.”

-Meesh (TEP 2018-2020)

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