Over the last fifteen years, the teacher education community has paid increasingly more attention to how teacher candidates learn to enact practice [1]. Research on practice-focused teacher education has offered conceptual framings for this approach, rationales for specific core practices, and empirical studies of teacher learning in practice-based courses and programs.

While not new, heightened interest in practice-based teacher education emerges from reform conversations that both respond to perennial critiques of teacher education and offer a vision that teacher education can prepare candidates to teach in more ambitious ways. Critics characterize teacher education as too theoretical or ideological, lacking coherence and a shared language and knowledge base, and paying insufficient attention to the realities of contemporary classrooms. Reformers embrace practice-focused approaches arguing that they will help new teachers be ready both to enact ambitious pedagogies and to continue learning as a professional. They claim that they have potential to help new teachers understand how to live commitments to increasing access for all learners, especially those historically marginalized in school. Yet we know little about how—and to what degree—student-teachers have opportunities to learn to enact practice in teacher education or how these opportunities differ across countries.

This international symposium uses the lens of practice-focused teacher education as a framework to examine empirical findings of four research projects studying the enactment of practice in teacher education program design and assessments. The four papers offer conceptually well-defined complementary ways to examine ways enactment of practice is (and is not) embedded in teacher education. In each study, different data sources—surveys, course observations, and videos of practice—help shed light upon these questions.

The first paper takes the student perspective in studying the opportunities to enact practice. The authors used student teacher survey data from 5 teacher education programs (in Norway, Estonia, Cuba, Chili, the US; one program per country). The following paper used classroom observation as a method to investigate both the quality and quantity of the extensiveness of the opportunities to enact practice offered in the language arts and mathematics methods courses. Data was collected practice in six teacher education programs across three countries (Norway, Finland, the US; two programs in each country). The third paper explores a guided reflection procedure which offers student teachers the opportunity to construct their own knowledge based on their personal experiences from their field work. The procedure, using video artifacts, was tested in 5 universities (in Estonia, Finland, Spain, The Netherlands; one program per country). Completing this symposium is a paper describing the process of curriculum redesign in a university-based teacher education program in Chile particularly focusing on opportunities to gradually approximate specific teaching practices. Guiding this reform is data from a student survey asking students to what extent they have opportunities to enact practice in their teacher education program.

Taken together, the studies offer an international perspective on the presence or absence of enacting practice as well as suggestions for change implementation. Additionally, each study offers different methodological approaches to measure opportunities to learn and enact teaching practices in teacher preparation.

Guiding questions for the session include:

(1)               What opportunities do student teachers have to learn to enact practice?

(2)               What will the findings of these studies imply for teacher education in practice?

(3)               What insights do the different papers provide regarding methodological approaches and challenges to studying enactment of practice in teacher education?

The session will involve four 15-minute paper presentations, in which the authors address the first two guiding questions. The discussant will then offer commentary and responses to guiding questions two and three and facilitate discussion among audience and presenters.

[1]Ball, D. & Forzani, F. (2009). The work of teaching the challenges for teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 60(5), 497-510. Beach, D., & Pedersen, R.B. (2013). Process-tracing methods: Foundations and guidelines. University of Michigan Press. Grossman, P. (2011). A framework for teaching practice: A brief history of an idea. Teachers College Record, 113(12), 2836-2843. Grossman, P., Hammerness, K., & McDonald, M. (2009). Redefining teaching, re-imagining teacher education. Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 15(2), 273-289. Hiebert, J. & Morris, A. (2012). Teaching, rather than teachers, as a path toward improving classroom instruction. Journal of Teacher Education, 63(2), 92-102. Janssen, F., Westbroek, H., & Doyle, W. (2014). The practical turn in teacher education: Designing a preparation sequence for core practice frames. Journal of Teacher Education, 65(3), 195-206. Lampert, M. & Graziani, F. (2009) Instructional activities as a tool for teachers’ and teacher educators’ learning. Elementary School Journal, 109(5), 491-509. McDonald, M., Kazemi, E., & Kavanaugh, S. (2013). Core practices and pedagogies of teacher education: A call for a common language and collective activity. Journal of Teacher Education, 64(5), 378-387. Zeichner, K. (2012). The turn once again toward practice-based teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 63(5), 376-382.