- Title: Teaching Practice: A Cross-Professional Perspective
- Authors: Grossman et al
- Access the original paper here
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Paper summary
This research article examines the pedagogy of practice in professional education programs across three professions: clergy, clinical psychology, and teaching. The study uses a comparative case study design, analyzing data from eight programs through site visits, interviews, observations, and focus groups. The authors propose a framework for understanding the teaching of practice, focusing on three key concepts: representations, decomposition, and approximations of practice. The study finds that prospective teachers have fewer opportunities to engage in approximations of interactive practice compared to novices in the other two professions. The framework aims to provide a common language for discussing and analyzing the pedagogy of professional education.
What are the key implications for teachers in the classroom?
The sources focus on a framework for teaching practice in professional education, with implications for clinical psychology and the clergy, as well as teaching. The key implication for teachers in the classroom is that methods courses can better prepare teachers for the challenges of practice by providing opportunities to decompose and approximate practice.
Here are some of the ways that decomposing and approximating practice can support teaching:
- Decomposing practice makes visible the “grammar of practice,” enabling teachers to understand and enact essential elements of practice more effectively.
- Decomposing practice can help teachers develop professional vision, by focusing their attention on key components of practice and providing a language for describing and analyzing those components.
- Approximating practice allows teachers to engage in “deliberate practice” of challenging components of practice in a safe space, with opportunities to experiment, falter, and receive feedback.
- Classroom approximations of practice can help teachers avoid predictable errors in the field by providing opportunities to practice high-stakes interactions in low-risk environments.
The sources also suggest that teacher education may benefit from providing more opportunities for approximations of interactive practice. While teacher education programs typically provide many opportunities for preactive practice (e.g., lesson planning), novice teachers may need more chances to practice responding to student questions, orchestrating discussions, and addressing student resistance in the moment.
Quote
The artifice involved in such examples of the teaching of practice affords unique learning opportunities for novices. The examples that we have shared suggest that inauthenticity has its own advantages. The focus on components of complex practice allows students to hone their skills in a single element of reading, therapy, preaching, or worship before they have to manage all the competing demands and conditions of uncertainty in actual practice
