Simultaneous Practical Intentions: Implications for Practice-Based Teacher Education

• In Event: 35.081 - Roundtable Session 13
  In Roundtable Session: 35.081-10 - Understanding the Lives of New Teachers

Abstract

Current frameworks of practice-based teacher education argue that the core practices of ambitious instruction should be decomposed and that novices should learn to teach by focusing on the mastery of these practices. The current study seeks to complement this framework by presenting a portrait of six novice teachers’ classroom thinking. Novices were asked to articulate their classroom decision-making. The findings of this study reveal that the novices, within any given decision, tended to consider multiple – potentially conflicting – practical intentions simultaneously. This finding has implications for practice-based teacher education; namely, it may be valuable to scaffold novice teachers towards the ability to integrate their simultaneous intentions as they occur in practice.

Author

• Aaron Samuel Zimmerman, Michigan State University