Supporting Novices to Enact Practice in the P-12 Classroom

It is critical that novice teachers’ learning opportunities in the P-12 classroom build on what they learn inside the teacher education classroom, and help novices develop increasing competence as they work with real children. Teacher education pedagogies that focus on supporting novices to enact practice in the P-12 classroom are an important tool for ensuring this, and are thus central to the work of field instructors, mentor teachers, and others engaged in teacher education across diverse contexts.

Because this category of teacher education pedagogy typically entails novices’ actual doing of teaching in the P-12 classroom, it sits in the “enact” phase of the learning cycle. Through field-based pedagogies like field tasks or coaching, teacher educators, field instructors and mentor teachers can guide novice teachers in practice-based activities among real children and in actual classrooms. Novice teachers might teach a portion of a lesson alongside their mentor teacher, for example, or they might interview a child or teach a lesson to a small group as part of a field task.

Adapted from:
McDonald, Kazemi, and Kavanagh, 2013; Lampert et al., 2013;
Teacher Education by Design

When teacher educators engage novice teachers in work around this category of pedagogy by supporting them to enact practice in the P-12 classroom, they typically have novices work directly with children inside classrooms and communities. Thus, of the three categories of teacher education pedagogies, this falls closest to “real” classroom teaching. However, even in this case, novice teachers’ enactments of instruction are still typically brief, less complex, or in some way scaffolded by teacher educators, field instructors or mentor teachers.