Building teacher candidates’ adaptive expertise: engaging experienced teachers in prompting reflection

Abstract

Adaptive expertise supports teachers’ balance between efficiency and innovation, a requirement for teachers to respond to the changing realities of teaching practice. For special educators, students’ variability, role complexity, and diverse instructional settings inherent to special education create unique challenges. Thus, this paper presents a reflection prompt protocol designed to elicit adaptive skills and dispositions from teacher candidates through dialogue with experienced teachers in a learning community. Pilot findings are presented to explore the protocol’s credibility in prompting adaptive expertise with both experienced teachers and teacher candidates. We offer limitations, implications, and next steps for future study of promoting teacher candidates’ adaptive expertise.