The Goals and Strategies of Core Practices: Preparing Teachers for Purposeful Decision Making Through Practice-Based Pedagogies

• In Event: Instructional Decision Making for Responsive Teaching Across Contexts

Abstract

Objectives
Practice-based teacher education (PBTE) scholars have argued in favor of approaches to teacher education that define and teach complex instructional practices, referred to as core practices (Grossman, 2018; Grossman & McDonald, 2008). However, critics have expressed concern that PBTE fails to develop teachers’ capacity to engage in purposeful decision-making and pedagogical reasoning (Kavanagh et al., 2020; Kennedy, 2016; Zeichner, 2012). Two central components of teachers’ pedagogical reasoning are their instructional goals (Shulman, 1987) and the instructional strategies that they employ to achieve those goals (Kennedy, 2016). This research studies the instructional goals and strategies of teachers enrolled in a practice-based professional development (PD), asking:
What relationships exist between teachers’ participation in a practice-based PD and the instructional goals they pursue in their own instruction?
To what extent are instructional strategies associated with the core practice of facilitating text-based discussions enacted as rote prescriptions of practice?

Theoretical Framework
This study engages conceptual and theoretical knowledge from two bodies of literature: PBTE and pedagogical reasoning. PBTE scholars propose that the instructional practices of teaching should be researched and conceptualized as core practices: complex pedagogies and instructional moves that require teachers to attend to both student thinking and contextualized factors (Grossman, Hammerness, & McDonald, 2009). Recently, practice-based scholars have begun to investigate how practice-based pedagogies of teacher education influence teachers’ development of pedagogical reasoning (Kavanagh et al., 2020). This study expands on this work by studying the instructional goals and strategies of teachers engaged in a two-year, practice-based professional development program.

Methods and Data
This study was conducted during a two-year school-university partnership between a research university and a public K-8 school in a large, urban city in the U.S. The partnership engaged six literacy teachers in a job-embedded, practice-based, teacher learning experience. This study uses qualitative methods to code video Stimulated Recall Interview (VSRI) data to explore the relationship between the instructional goals and strategies of the practice-based PD, and the instructional goals and strategies pursued and used by teachers in their own instructional practice.

Results
This analysis reveals that teachers’ take-up of the instructional goals from the practice-based PD preceded their adoption of the instructional strategies that were taught in the PD. Additionally, this analysis shows that teachers’ enactment of instructional strategies from the PD was not indicative of mimicry or prescription, as teachers enacted an average of seven different strategies in pursuit of each instructional goal. The findings suggest that the practice-based pedagogies used by teacher educators in this PD did in fact support teachers’ development of pedagogical reasoning.

Significance
This study contributes to the need for research that connects teachers' instructional strategies to teachers’ pedagogical reasoning. Findings suggest that teacher educators may not need to choose between a purpose-focused and practice-oriented teacher education. In response to fears that PBTE may preclude the development of teachers’ instructional goals, this study indicates that working on practice does not necessarily inhibit working on purpose; in fact, purpose may actually precede and support changes in teachers’ practice.

Author

• Elizabeth Gotwalt, University of Maryland
  Presenting Author