Keeping It Complex

TLDR

The study defines a rehearsal pedagogy for teacher educators and novice teachers to collaborate productively, addressing what they do together during rehearsals and where novices can learn to enact ambitious teaching principles. Rehearsals are described through quantitative and qualitative methods that capture the interactions and activities of teacher educators and novice teachers. Quantitative results show typical rehearsal structure and focus, while qualitative analysis reveals how teacher educators and novice teachers collaborate to help novices practice eliciting and responding to student performance.

Abstract

We analyze a particular pedagogy for learning to interact productively with students and subject matter, which we call “rehearsal.” Our goal is to specify a way in which teacher educators (TEs) and novice teachers (NTs) can interact around teaching that is both embedded in practice and amenable to analysis. We address two main research questions: (a) What do TEs and NTs do together during the kind of rehearsals we have developed to prepare novices for the complex, interactive work of teaching? and (b) Where, in what they do, are there opportunities for NTs to learn to enact the principles, practices, and knowledge entailed in ambitious teaching? We detail what happens in rehearsals using quantitative and qualitative methods. We begin with the results of our quantitative analyses to characterize how typical rehearsals were structured and what was worked on. We then show how NTs and TEs worked together to enable novices to study principled practice through qualitative analyses of a particularly salient aspect of ambitious teaching, namely, eliciting and responding to students’ performance.