Preparing Teachers to Enact
Ambitious Teaching Practices
during Secondary Preservice
Teacher Education: Challenges and
Successes
Rebekah Elliott
Ron Gray
Oregon State University – College of Education
ORATE 2012
Introduction
 What led to this work?
 What are our guiding principles of teaching and learning to
teach?
 How do we choose specific instructional practices for
novice teachers that lead to equitable learning?
 How do we prepare teachers to use these practices in
increasingly sophisticated and authentic environments?
 How can these practices be used to build meaningful
instructional activities?
 What have been our challenges and successes in this work?
Research in Teacher
Education
 Disconnect between research on teaching and teacher
education. (Grossman & McDonald, 2008)
 Research on teaching investigates the work of teaching
and learning, however research on teacher education is
a work in progress.
 We are being pressed to identify a rigorous curriculum
that prepares new professionals for practice.
Research Community’s
Response
 “Practice-based” teacher education – an emerging trend
that seeks to change the focus of university-based teacher
education by taking the enacted work of teaching as both
content and context for preservice teachers’ learning. (Ball &
Cohen, 1999; Grossman & McDonald, 2008)
In response:
 Teacher educators have focused on the routine activities of
teaching that can be “worked on” through rehearsals and
investigation of practice with novices. Novices are asked to
understand and to perform instructional activities that are
aimed at engaging all students in learning important
content.
Ambitious Pedagogy
Ambitious teaching aims:
 To have all kinds of students – across ethnic, racial,
class, and gender categories –
 To acquire, understand, and use knowledge,
 To solve complex, sophisticated, and authentic
problems.
(Newmann & Associates, 1996; Lampert et al., 2010)
What do ambitious teachers
need to learn to do?
 Teachers need a repertoire of practices that engage
students to develop proficiency, participate in a
discipline specific discourse community, and have
facility with a range of tasks authentic to the
discipline.
 Doubly important: Teachers need to engage explicitly
and consciously in the processes and practices of
learning teaching. (Lampert, 2010)
Principles of Learning to
Teach
 Teaching is intellectual work and requires specialized
knowledge of content and pedagogy.
 Learning to teach requires repeated opportunities to
practice.
 There is value in making teaching pubic.
 We bring our histories forward. Our own learning
experiences and identifies shape what we know and do.
 Teaching is a complex activity that must be learned and
continually examined.
(Lampert, Franke, Kazemi, Learning In and From Practice Project)
Principles of High Quality Teaching

Teachers understand that children are sensemakers.

Teachers must design instruction for all children to do rigorous
academic work in school and to have equitable access to learning.

Ambitious instruction requires clear learning goals.

Teachers must know and connect with their students as
individuals and as learners.

Teachers must be responsive to the requirements of the school
and community environments.

The measure of good teaching is student learning.

Teachers represent the nature of the discipline (mathematics or
science) with integrity.

Teachers engage their students in reflecting on their own learning.
(Jackson & Cobb, 2010; Lampert, Franke, Kazemi, Learning In and From Practice Project)
High-leverage Practices
for Novice Teachers

HLPs are those most likely to stimulate significant advancements
in student thinking when executed with proficiency

Example criteria for HLPs in teaching:

Have significant power in teaching because they:
 Are central to the daily work of teaching.
 Make much more likely that teaching will be effective for students’
learning.

Essential; if teachers cannot discharge them well, they will face
significant problems

Fundamental to the development of more complex practice

Supports student work that is central to the content discipline
(adapted from Franke and Chan, 2007)
What do you think?
What teaching practices do you think are the most essential for
beginning teachers to be able to perform competently within your
discipline?
Instructional Practices

Using discourse moves in whole class and small group settings

Using appropriate questioning strategies

Representing student thinking

Organizing the use of public records and representations

Teaching toward a clear learning goal

Eliciting and responding to student reasoning

Orienting students to one another

Positioning students competently
The Border Problem
Cycles of Enactment
Observing an
instructional
activity
NEXT CYCLE
Collective
analysis of
teaching &
learning
Collective
analysis
CYCLES
of
ENACTMENT
Prepare to
teach an
instructional
activity
SAME ACTIVITY ACROSS
MULTIPLE TEACHERS AND SETTINGS
Rehearsals with
students
Rehearsals
with peers
OSU’s General
Instructional Activities
Across the cohort we engage novice teachers in cycles of
enactment on:
 Effective openings and closures
 Facilitating effective classroom discussions
 Gauging student progress and modifying instruction
Instructional Activities
(Mathematics)
Within our mathematics methods courses we engage in
multiple cycles of:
 Strings (Fosnot & Dolk, 2008)
 Number operations
 Algebra
 Launching a high cognitive task within a problem
solving context (MIST, Cobb & Jackson, 2011)
 Orchestrating problem solving (Stein et al., 2008; 2011)
Instructional Activities
(Science)

Constructing big
ideas

Eliciting student
ideas to adapt
instruction

Making sense of
material activity

Pressing students
for evidencebased
explanations
(Windschitl, Thomspon, & Braaten; 2009)
Challenges
What do you see as potential challenges?
Challenges
Forzani and Ball (2010) articulate five challenges for
professionals working toward practice-focused teacher
education. We would need to:
 Specify and develop consensus around the core tasks and
activities of teaching
 Choose the elements of practice most necessary for
entrants to the profession
 Articulate those elements at an effective grain-size
 Manage the general and subject-specific aspects of teaching
practice
 Manage the context-specific nature of practice
Successes
 We no longer just depend on novice teachers’ stories
of practice, reflections, and supervisors reports to
understand novice teachers’ practice, we support it
across multiple contexts with focused support.
 Our curriculum has gained focus and precision.
 Brought to the surface discipline-specific pedagogy in
a meaningful way.
 Has created a new level of discourse in our
community of learners
Thank you
Rebekah Elliott, Ph.D.
elliottr@science.oregonstate.edu
Ron Gray, Ph.D.
ron.gray@science.oregonstate.edu