Learning Teaching in, from, and for Practice: What Do We Mean?

TLDR

Teacher preparation and professional development often use the term “practice” to refer to the what, how, and when of learning to teach, yet its meaning remains ambiguous. This essay aims to clarify the meaning of practice in learning teaching by examining four conceptions and their implications for organizing teacher learning. The author employs her research on teaching work from a practice perspective to model the nature of teaching and speculate on how that work can be learned.

Abstract

In talk about teacher preparation and professional development, we often hear the word practice associated with what, how, or when the learning of teaching is supposed to happen. In this article, four different conceptions of practice are investigated, and their implications for how learning teaching might be organized are explored. Rather than a comprehensive review of the literature, what is presented here is a set of ideas that draw on both past and present efforts at reform. The purpose of this essay is to provoke clarification of what we mean when we talk about practice in relation to learning teaching. The author draws on her own research on the work of teaching from the perspective of practice to represent the nature of the work and to speculate from various perspectives on how that work might be learned.