Internationally, there is widespread agreement that quality teachers are crucial to enhancing the educational outcomes of all children (Hattie, 2008). Although this has been challenged, improving teacher quality is assumed to be a key strategy for advancing many countries’ ability to compete economically and meet rising social expectations related to diversity and equality (Furlong, Cochran-Smith, & Brennan, 2009; OECD, 2012). The emphasis on teacher quality has resulted in heightened expectations regarding teacher performance and accountability and in efforts to reform initial teacher education (ITE) in order to leverage greater teacher quality (OECD, 2012).

In the quest to identify ways of improving teacher preparation, research has produced important information about aspects such as entry routes, graduation standards, course and programme structures, knowledge and beliefs, and school-university partnerships. However, despite our growing knowledge of selected parts of ITE, teacher preparation is still not unequivocally effective in any form. We do not know, for example, why there continue to be disparities in learning opportunities and outcomes for particular groups of students based on race/ethnicity, language background, and/or socio-economic status (Villegas and Lucas, 2002).  A number of scholars have suggested that, in order to gain more powerful understandings of the outcomes of teacher preparation programmes, research needs to take a more complex and holistic view of teacher education’s contexts and processes (e.g., Cochran-Smith & Zeichner, 2005; Opfer & Pedder, 2011).

Taking cognizance of such issues, this paper reports a conceptual analysis undertaken by an international and cross-disciplinary research group called Project RITE: “Rethinking Initial Teacher Education for Equity.” Project RITE is informed by complexity theory (CT), whichposits that multi-dimensional relationships, complex feedback loops and dynamic interactions are responsible for patterns and phenomena in systems (Davis & Sumara, 2006; Haggis, 2008) rather than linear cause and effect relationships. We have integrated key ideas from complexity theory with ideas from critical realism (CR) (Bhaskar, 1987) which holds that, although reality is not fixed nor immediately accessible, complex causal mechanisms within a system produce events that are empirically observable. The team has developed a research platform that integrates ideas from complexity theory with ideas from critical realism (CT-CR) (Cochran-Smith et al., 2014), which enables an examination of teacher education in relation to intersecting systems of social inequality based on race/ethnicity, culture, language, socio-economic status, gender, and ability/disability (Walby, 2007), and also allows for investigations of complex contingent causality (Byrne, 1998).

The fundamental premise underlying Project RITE is that the goal of initial teacher education is to prepare teachers who challenge inequities by enacting teaching practices that promote students’ learning, broadly defined to include academic, social, emotional, civic and critical learning. It is this phenomenon—teacher candidates enacting practices that promote students’ learning, particularly for marginalized students—that is the major object of interest in Project RITE.  In order to meet these objectives, however, it is necessary to identify practices that promote equity, drawing on empirical research that cuts across contexts and cultures.

Specifically, this paper reports the results of a conceptual study carried out by Project RITE to define and elaborate the notion of “patterns of practice for equity.” To develop a broad, complex, nonlinear view of teaching practices that promote improved outcomes for marginalized students, we conceptualized practices at the broad level of principles or themes (which we call ‘patterns’) rather than at the more technical or even complicated level of particular techniques.

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