Teaching Core Practices in Teacher Education

In Teaching Core Practices in Teacher Education, Pam Grossman and her colleagues advocate an approach to practice-based teacher education that identifies “core practices” of teaching and supports novice teachers in learning how to enact them competently. Examples of core practices include facilitating whole-class discussion, eliciting student thinking, and maintaining classroom norms. The contributors argue that teacher education needs to do more to help teachers master these professional skills, rather than simply emphasizing content knowledge.
 
Teaching Core Practices in Teacher Education outlines a series of pedagogies that teacher educators can use to help preservice students develop these teaching skills. Pedagogies include representations of practice (ways to show what this skill looks like and break it down into its component parts) and approximations of practice (the ways preservice teachers can try these skills out as they learn). Vignettes throughout the book illustrate how core practices can be incorporated into the teacher education curriculum.
 
The book draws on the work of a consortium of teacher educators from thirteen universities devoted to describing and enacting pedagogies to help novice teachers develop these core practices in support of ambitious and equitable instruction. Their aim is to support teacher educator learning across institutions, content domains, and grade levels. The book also addresses efforts to support teacher learning outside formal teacher education programs.

Contributors
 
Chandra L. Alston
Andrea Bien
Janet Carlson
Ashley Cartun
Katie A. Danielson 
Elizabeth A. Davis
Christopher G. Pupik Dean
Brad Fogo 
Megan Franke
Hala Ghousseini
Lightning Peter Jay
Sarah Schneider Kavanagh
Elham Kazemi
Megan Kelley-Petersen
Matthew Kloser 
Sarah McGrew
Chauncey Monte-Sano 
Abby Reisman
Melissa A. Scheve
Kristine M. Schutz
Meghan Shaughnessy
Andrea Wells