Preparing Teachers to Learn from Teaching

Source: Journal of Teacher Education, Vol. 58, No. 1, 47-61 (2007)

The authors propose a framework for teacher preparation programs that aims to help prospective teachers learn how to teach from studying teaching. The framework is motivated by their interest in defining a set of competencies that provide a deliberate, systematic path to becoming an effective teacher over time.

The framework is composed of four skills, rooted in the daily activity of teaching, that when deployed deliberately and systematically, constitute a process of creating and testing hypotheses about cause-effect relationships between teaching and learning during classroom lessons.
In spite of the challenges of acquiring these skills, the authors argue that the framework outlines a more realistic and more promising set of beginning teacher competencies than those of traditional programs designed to produce graduates with expert teaching strategies.