Creating Pedagogical Problem Spaces: Grounding Practice-Based Teacher Education in Pedagogical Problems

• In Event: 32.039 - Approximations of Practice Across Teacher Education Contexts

Abstract

Objectives/Framework
In 2009, Grossman, Hammerness, and McDonald called on the field to organize teacher preparation around core teaching practices. While many teacher educators have taken up this call (Core Practices Consortium, 2013), others have expressed wariness (Zeichner, 2012). Critics argue that specifying practices and engaging novices with representations, decompositions, and approximations of these practices (Grossman et al., 2009a) runs the risk decontextualizing practice, detaching it from its cultural and historical context (Gottesman & Bowman, 2013) and from its instructional purpose (Kennedy, 2016).  Such de-contextualization runs the risk of producing what Hatano and Inagaki (1986) have called “routine experts,” experts adept in a fixed repertoire of techniques that are reflexive rather than responsive.  In response, proponents of practice-based teacher education argue that approximations of bounded practices can be geared towards the development of judgment, not just automaticity (Lampert et al., 2013).  While the literature on both sides of this debate is rich, it remains largely theoretical.  Interested in testing the claims made by both proponents and critics of practice-based teacher education, our study investigates the following question: Within a program organized around core practices, to what extent and in what ways did approximations of practice support candidates in developing professional judgment?

Data/Methods
Our study is situated within a unique teacher education program: a summer institute within an alternative route program that was designed and staffed by university faculty and advanced graduate students from a major research university.  Data included video of methods courses across all grade-bands and content areas, interviews with teacher educators, and programmatic documents.  With codes grounded in constructs from Schwartz, Bransford, and Sears’ (2005) model of adaptive expertise (e.g. “efficiency,” “innovation,”) we coded all data using Dedoose and Studiocode.  With each iterative pass through the data, codes were refined (Miles & Huberman, 1994).  Through an analysis of moments of code co-occurrence, the construct of the “pedagogical problem space” emerged.

Findings
Findings revealed that some teacher educators were able to leverage approximations to engage novices in activity that was primarily focused on honing their instructional judgment.  Those approximations that engaged novices in considering instructional options and making instructional decisions, as opposed to enacting discrete skills without leveraging their own judgment, included what we called “pedagogical problem spaces.”  Pedagogical problems spaces were present in approximations when teacher educators opened up a pedagogical dilemma (Lampert, 1985) for investigation and engaged candidates in considering multiple pedagogical choices.  We found that pedagogical problem spaces were more likely to exist within approximations that required novices to engage with student thinking.

Significance
The introduction of the construct of the pedagogical problem space is a significant contribution to scholarly discussions about the pedagogy of practice-based teacher education. This construct offers another layer of nuance to debates about whether or not focusing on practice is useful or detrimental to putting novice teachers on the path to adaptive expertise in teaching. The construct contributes an additional, more fine-grained, lens through which to investigate practice-based pedagogies -- one that is grounded in robust theories of expertise development.

Authors

• Sarah Schneider Kavanagh, University of Washington - Seattle

• Sarah Munger, University of Washington