Improving Teacher Practice-Based Knowledge: What Teachers Need to Know and How They Come to Know It

• In Event: Intents, Enactors, and Outcomes of Educational Supervision

Abstract

The chapter authors establish that although evaluation might serve as a gatekeeper, improving teacher quality requires coupling evaluation with support that facilitates teacher practice based knowledge development. This chapter brings together four key ideas, drawn from the literature, that help educators understand what practice-based knowledge teachers and teacher candidates need to know as well as how this knowledge is developed. We begin by illustrating the importance of using the same approaches to teacher candidate learning as currently called for in the research-based, job-embedded, practicing teacher professional learning literature. We then describe three forms of practice-based knowledge that teachers and teacher candidates need to develop and refine throughout their careers. Specifically, we describe the significance of cultivating an inquiry stance, outline the practice-based knowledge of equity and social justice, demonstrate the complexity of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), and how PCK is generated through practice-based learning. Lastly, we highlight the importance and complexity of developing and adopting an inquiry stance that is powerful enough to guide teachers through career long learning, discuss the needed supervisory skills, and raise questions for future research.

Authors

• Diane Yendol-Hoppey, University of North Florida

• Jennifer Jacobs, University of South Florida

• Rebecca West Burns, University of South Florida