Practice-Based Teacher Education Pedagogies Improve Responsiveness:

One way to improve student learning outcomes at scale is to improve the quality of teacher preparation (Cochran-Smith et al., 2016; Sleeter, 2014). One way to do this is by ensuring teacher educators and policymakers have rigorous evidence to decide how to effectively and efficiently allocate pre-service teachers’ (PSTs’) limited training time (Wilson et al., 2002; Grossman, 2008). However, few rigorous research programs have systematically investigated what works, for whom and in what contexts when it comes to the pedagogies teacher educators use in their classes with PSTs. 

To address this gap, this paper reports findings from a lab experiment aimed at generating some of the first causal evidence on the relative effectiveness of practice-based teacher education pedagogies. The researchers randomly assigned 185 college undergraduates to experience one of three one-hour interventions, all aimed at developing their skills in eliciting and responding to student thinking within the context of elementary math instruction. 

These three interventions variously combined distillations of common pedagogies currently used in the field. The traditional pedagogies intervention involved reading and discussing research on teaching, followed by reflecting on personal experiences of teaching. The practice-based pedagogies intervention involved decomposing a video of expert teaching, and then approximating practice with peers and a teacher educator. The mixed pedagogies intervention involved reading and discussing research on teaching, followed by decomposing a video of expert teaching.

The rsearchers find significant and large positive effects of the practice-based and mixed conditions on eliciting and responding to student thinking as demonstrated through a written assessment and a short teaching episode. Notably, they find that only the practice-based condition improved participants’ responsiveness on a teaching task that was proximal but distinct from the one featured in the intervention. 

These findings provide lab-based causal evidence of the relative effectiveness of practice-based teacher education pedagogies in developing complex teaching practices, validating the potential value for further studies that investigate underlying mechanisms and test for ecological validity. 

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