Core Practices in Teacher Education

An exploration of teacher education programs around the world finds common focus in the use of core practices to better prepare teachers for the classroom.

In Core Practices in Teacher Education, Pam Grossman and Urban Fraefel bring together international voices in a global showcase of practice-based approaches to teacher education. This generous volume presents the work of teacher educators and researchers from Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and Switzerland, among others, highlighting various methods for teacher preparation and instruction rooted in core practices. The contributors describe real-world implementation of methods that give preservice and novice teachers opportunities to enact practices during professional training. Examples from classrooms around the world demonstrate how this approach allows student teachers to engage in problem solving and receive feedback, providing a foundation for adaptive expertise.

Grossman and Fraefel show how a growing global movement has embraced core practices to better prepare teachers for ambitious teaching. In a thoughtful overview of the sociocultural theory and pedagogy that grounds this shift, they discuss the relationship of this work to that of 20th-century Swiss psychologist Hans Aebli and follow its trajectory through the present and beyond to predictions of where the field will move in the future.

With this volume, teacher educators and researchers interested in teacher education and professional development will gain a critical cross-national perspective and fresh insight that can be applied to their own programs. Administrators will find ample inspiration for policy and program redesign.