Educating teachers to enact the science of learning and development

Abstract

Drawing on recent syntheses of the emerging science of learning and development and its implications for school practice, this article examines the kinds of preparation teachers need to enact such practices. We synthesize research on how children learn and develop and research on how effective preparation programs support teachers in developing the knowledge, skills, and dispositions associated with developing the whole child. This includes the “what” of teacher preparation – the content educators need to learn about children and their and learning – and the “how” of preparation – the strategies for educator learning that can produce deep understanding, critical skills and dispositions, and the capacity to reflect, learn, and continue to improve. Preparing educators to acquire and use these insights holds promise for generating the kinds of education that enable children ultimately to learn independently and thrive.

Introduction

Over the last several decades, we have learned a great deal about how people learn and develop from research in neuroscience, the developmental and learning sciences, and fields like anthropology, sociology, and social psychology. Recent syntheses of this research and its implications for educational practice, published in a series of articles in Applied Developmental Science (Cantor et al., 2018; Osher et al., 2018) have pointed to important transformations in teaching practice needed to ensure that children experience the secure relationships, skillful teaching, and personalized supports that will enable healthy development and successful lives, including for those who have experienced adverse conditions.

The knowledge that we now have causes us to affirm many principles of developmentally appropriate practice that were uncovered more than a century ago, while simultaneously requiring us to challenge assumptions that drove the design of 20^th century education and still live at the core of instructional practice, school organization, and policies governing everything from testing and the allocation of curriculum to school discipline. This knowledge unseats old assumptions that intelligence is genetically determined and fixed at birth, that school opportunities are appropriately allocated based on tests that rank children in terms of their differential potential, that learning follows a uniform trajectory and is best accomplished by memorizing ordered information, and that punishment effectively guides behavior.

The needed transformations – from assembly line school designs, standardized teaching practices, norm-referenced testing, and exclusionary discipline to supportive communities that enable personalized attention to the development of human potential– create a tall order for educators. To accomplish this goal, educators not only need deep knowledge of how children develop and learn, but skills to transform that knowledge into supportive schoolwide practices in organizations that were not typically designed to develop children holistically or to build on their cultural experiences and prior knowledge to create success for each of them.

To be sure, there are exceptional schools that accomplish these goals, and there are exceptional preparation programs that fully support teachers and school leaders in this work (see, for example, Darling-Hammond et al., 2019b; Wechsler et al., 2022). A growing number of universities are incorporating elements of this knowledge base. Still, the wide variation in licensing standards, pathways to entry, and supports for educator preparation – and the scarcity of partner schools that fully instantiate these practices – means that highly-developed approaches that connect coherent coursework with aligned clinical experiences are not yet widespread in the field. Just as the call to use the science of learning and development to shape schoolwide practice places significant new demands upon educators and schools, so too the need for educators to learn how to implement such practices places new demands upon educator preparation and professional development.

These demands come, in part, from the breadth and depth of the content educators must master, but also from the need to provide them with models and experiences of the sort of teaching and learning they will be expected to enact in schools. The practices implied by the science are more personalized and student-centered, more focused on deep, transferable learning, and more concerned with equity than practices that are widely found in many schools. This poses the chicken-egg problem of how to prepare professionals for practices that are not widespread which led to the creation of teaching hospitals in medicine. These sites for state-of-the-art practice are essential to the enactment professional must learn and pose one of several challenges for teacher education in this time.

To take advantage of our growing knowledge, we will need comprehensive efforts to support all educators in developing the knowledge, skills and dispositions associated with developing the whole child – including children’s social, emotional, cognitive development, their physical and mental health, and their identities, interests, and skills for learning. These understandings and their lived expression need to take the socio-cultural contexts of both children’s and teachers’ lives into account and address the biases and deep inequalities in opportunity that continue to characterize society and schools. We will also need a social commitment to provide the resources to enable all educators to gain access to this preparation and to enable all children to gain access to these well-prepared educators.

This article seeks to contribute to these demands by integrating emerging knowledge about learning and development with new insights into teacher education approaches that can address some of the difficult challenges outlined above. In this article, we take up the question of educator development for enacting the science of learning and development, examining both the “what” of teacher preparation – the content teachers need to know about how to support children’s development and learning – and the “how” – the strategies for educator learning that can produce deep understanding, sophisticated skills, and social-emotional capacities that allow schools to surmount historic biases and enable educators to reflect, learn, and continuously improve their individual and collective practice.

Foundations for teacher preparation

A synthesis of advances from the science (Cantor et al., 2018; Osher et al., 2018), linked to educational research, has identified Implications for Practice of the Science of Learning and Development (Darling-Hammond et al., 2019a) and a set of Design Principles for Schools for putting this knowledge into action (Learning Policy Institute & Turnaround for Children, 2021). These point to the following principles that provide a foundation for educators’ knowledge base:

1. The brain and development are malleable. The brain grows and changes throughout life in response to experiences and relationships: The brain’s capacity develops most fully when children feel emotionally and physically safe; when they feel connected and supported; and when they have engaging opportunities to inquire into the world around them.

Supportive, responsive relationships with attuned and empathetic adults are essential for children’s development and can buffer the potentially negative effects of even serious adversity.

1. Learning is social, emotional, and cognitive. Emotions and social relationships affect learning. Positive relationships, including trust in the teacher, and positive emotions, such as interest and excitement, open up the mind to learning. Negative emotions such as fear of failure, anxiety, and self-doubt reduce the capacity of the brain to process information and to learn. Learning is shaped by intrapersonal awareness, including the ability to manage stress and direct energy in productive ways, and by interpersonal skills, including the ability to interact positively with others, resolve conflicts, and work in teams. These skills can be taught.

2. People actively construct knowledge based on their experiences, relationships, and sociocultural contexts. Children and adults dynamically shape their own learning, connecting new information to what they already know in order to learn. This process is facilitated when teachers draw connections to students’ prior knowledge and experiences; create engaging, minds-on tasks; watch and guide children’s efforts, and offer constructive feedback with opportunities to practice and revise work toward growing competence.

3. Variability in human development is the norm, not the exception. The pace and profile of each child’s development is unique. Because each child’s experiences create an individual trajectory for growth, there are multiple pathways – and no one best pathway – to effective learning. When schools try to fit all children to one pace and sequence, they miss the opportunity to reach each child, and they can cause children to adopt counter-productive views about themselves and their own learning potential, which undermines their progress.

4. Adversity affects learning—and the way schools respond matters. Each year in the United States, at least 46% of children are exposed to violence, crime, abuse, or trauma, as well as homelessness and food insecurity. These adverse childhood experiences create toxic stress that can affect attention, learning, and behavior. Poverty and racism, together and separately, make chronic stress and adversity more likely. In schools where students encounter punitive responses rather than support for handling adversity, their stress is magnified. Schools can buffer the effects of stress by creating supportive environments that are personally attentive and culturally responsive; facilitating supportive adult-child relationships that extend over time; teaching social and emotional skills; and offering integrated student supports that enable healing and recuperation as they remove obstacles to learning.

In addition to understanding how children develop, it is important to consider the kind of learning today’s young people need to engage in. In a context where knowledge is rapidly expanding and technologies and societies are rapidly changing, children need well-developed critical thinking and problem solving skills; the capacity to find, analyze, synthesize, and apply knowledge to novel situations; interpersonal skills that allow them to work with others and engage effectively in cross-cultural contexts; self-directional abilities that allow them to manage their own work and complex projects; abilities to competently find resources and use tools; and the capacity to communicate effectively in many ways.

Developing these kinds of skills requires a different kind of teaching and learning from prior eras when learning was conceptualized as the acquisition of facts and teaching as the transmission of information to be taken in and used “as is.” The National Research Council’s review (2012), for example, indicates that the kind of learning supporting these higher order thinking and performance skills is best developed through inquiry and investigation, application of knowledge to new situations and problems, production of ideas and solutions, and collaborative problem-solving. These tasks, in turn, require strong self-regulation, executive functioning, and metacognitive skills; resourcefulness, perseverance, and resilience in the face of obstacles and uncertainty; the ability to learn independently; and curiosity, inventiveness, and creativity. This means students need opportunities to set goals and assess their own work and that of their peers so that they become increasingly self-aware, independent learners. To become productive citizens within and beyond the school, students also need positive mindsets about self and school, along with social awareness and responsibility (Stafford-Brizard, 2016).

To accomplish these goals, teachers and school leaders need a common knowledge base about child development and learning in the many ways it unfolds for diverse learners, along with skills to enact the practices that can support optimal learning and development. In subsequent sections, we outline the knowledge, skills, and dispositions teachers need to support children and engage their families in thoughtful, culturally competent, and equitable ways. We then discuss how preservice preparation programs can help teachers develop practices grounded in this knowledge base, with examples of how some programs are meeting this challenge.

What do teachers need to know and be able to do?

Following on the publication of the National Academy of Science’s initial report on How People Learn (National Research Council, 2000), the National Academy of Education (NAE) convened a panel of researchers to examine the research on practices teachers can engage in to support effective learning, and the research on strategies that enable teachers to learn these practices. The resulting report, Preparing Teachers for a Changing World: What Teachers Should Learn and be Able to Do, outlines both the content and processes that should be part of teacher education in order to develop teachers’ knowledge, skills, and dispositions to be able to teach diverse students in ways that foster deep learning (Darling-Hammond & Bransford, 2005).

Centered around a vision for practice, these include:

• knowledge of learners and how they learn and develop within social contexts,

• an understanding of the subject matter and curriculum to be taught in light of the social purposes of education, and

• an understanding of teaching in light of the content and learners to be taught, as informed by assessment and supported by a productive classroom environment.

Two decades ago after it released How People Learn, the National Academy of Sciences (2018) released How People Learn II, summarizing advances that emphasize the influences of sociocultural and motivational factors on learning. The report explains how learning is influenced by cultural, social, emotional, and physiological experiences and how motivation is fostered when learners perceive the learning environment as a place where they belong and where their sense of agency and purpose is promoted. Shaping these contextual factors productively is a critical goal for educator preparation. To do this, knowledge about learners, curriculum, and teaching must be joined with skills of curriculum design and instruction, inquiry, reflection and diagnosis to produce the adaptive expertise that enables teachers to make the connections between children and content that are necessary for learning. And these skills must be further joined to dispositions and attitudes that support teacher empathy, social-emotional capacity, cultural competence, and a commitment to equity in support of each child’s well-being if teaching is to support the optimal development of each child (See Figure 1).

Figure 1. The “What” of Teacher Education.

Knowledge about learners and learning

Learning and development affect each other, and both are deeply embedded in socio-cultural contexts. This means that teachers must understand and appreciate children’s different experiences. In order to teach students whose prior knowledge and experience reflects diverse cultural and linguistic traditions, teachers must understand development and the learning process deeply. The fundamental concepts that educators must understand regarding learning and development are summarized below and elaborated throughout this article. (For more detail about the science behind these concepts, see the companions to this article in Cantor et al., 2018; Osher et al., 2018; Darling-Hammond et al., 2019a).

Learning

Understanding the learning process is fundamental to expert teaching. Children’s prior knowledge and experiences, their cognitive strategies, and their motivation all affect their process of learning (National Academy of Sciences, 2018). Thus, teachers need to know how to surface and build on those prior experiences, understand how children are thinking, and construct tasks that are approachable and motivating. Using a “funds of knowledge” framework (Moll et al., 1992), educators can learn how to captivate children’s interest and foster deep learning by linking experiences and skills from children’s everyday life and culture to classroom instruction (Lee, 2017). Recognizing that not all school tasks are intrinsically exciting, teachers can learn to construct tasks that are motivating, not only because they may connect to students’ interests or experiences, but also because they include opportunities for collaboration and inquiry and are approachable, offering scaffolds for progress that create expectancies of success (Brophy, 2013). Knowing that the opportunity to make choices about the learning process supports students’ motivation, develops their sense of agency, and ultimately effects their learning (Patall et al., 2008), teachers can learn to integrate the appropriate amount and kind of choice into their assignments.

It is also helpful for teachers to understand how children coordinate and regulate many different cognitive processes, including memory and attention, as they are learning. They need to help children integrate new information with what they already know by developing mental models of how things work and ideas connect. By understanding how cognitive processes operate, teachers can enable greater learning, including higher order thinking and problem solving, by reducing unnecessary cognitive load and by scaffolding learning in deliberate ways.

Development

Understanding developmental pathways and progressions in all of the domains of development – social, emotional, cognitive, academic, physical, and psychological – is crucial for understanding and designing effective learning environments that are optimal for each child. Teachers must also understand that children develop in different domains at different times and rates. Identifying the zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978) for each learner in each domain is a starting point for instruction, enabling the teacher to build on what a specific child already knows in providing supports for what they are ready to learn.

Teachers need to know how to support the development and integration of social and emotional learning with cognitive development and academic learning. In addition to social skills, such as cooperation and communication, and emotional skills, including empathy and emotional awareness, these include self-regulation, executive function, a sense of efficacy, and a growth mindset (Stafford-Brizard, 2016). Skilled teachers model these skills, provide explicit instruction, and infuse opportunities to practice throughout the day (Jones & Bouffard, 2012).

Children’s development relies on supportive conditions, including positive relationships; physical, emotional, and identity safety; and a sense of belonging and purpose (Osher & Kendziora, 2010). To support these needs, educators must learn how to create school and classroom environments that explicitly recognize the value of each child and develop a mutually caring community. This requires explicit understanding of the ways in which marginalized students experience social identity threats that hinder learning (Major & Schmader, 2018), along with proactive efforts to eliminate these threats. Social identity or stereotype threat results from societal or school-delivered messages that students holding certain identities are less capable or worthy as a function of race, ethnicity, language background, immigration status, gender, sexual identity, economic status, disability or other trait. Such threats, which induce stress and anxiety that undermine performance, can be communicated from other students in the form of ostracism or bullying or from adults who communicate low expectations or negative views. Teachers can counteract social identity threat by affirming and conveying confidence in their students, setting high expectations, and enabling students to reach those expectations (Steele, 2011).

Language

Language is the medium of instruction, and teachers need to know how to help students develop language skills including reading, writing, listening, and speaking for academic purposes. This includes the academic language they need to do work in school (e.g., discipline-specific vocabulary and concepts) and the ways that language is used – for example, in textbooks, essays, lab reports, or classroom discussions. It also includes the development of language proficiency for those whose first language is English and those for whom it is not (Nagy & Townsend, 2012; Valdes et al., 2005). Given evidence that multilingualism benefits cognitive development and literacy development, this also includes preservation and use of the native language to the greatest extent possible (Kuo et al., 2016; Marian & Shook, 2012).

Knowledge of subject matter and curriculum goals

Understandings of development and learning provide the foundation on which teachers learn to build successful curriculum to guide the learning process. To this foundation they add their understanding of content: Teaching in ways that enable students to learn and apply knowledge requires that teachers have a deep and flexible knowledge of subject matter so that they can represent ideas in powerful ways that connect to students’ experiences, organize a productive learning process for students who start with different levels and kinds of prior knowledge, assess how and what students are learning, and adapt instruction to different learning approaches (Darling-Hammond & Bransford, 2005).

Knowledge of content combines with knowledge about learning and learners to create pedagogical content knowledge (Shulman, 1986), which is the foundation for teaching subject matter deeply so that students can transfer and use their knowledge (Grossman et al., 2005). This knowledge, which is unique to each subject area, enables teachers to integrate core concepts from the disciplines with the modes of inquiry specific to the discipline – such as scientific investigation, mathematical modeling, literary analysis, historical inquiry, or artistic performance. It allows teachers to select materials purposefully and offer explanations to provide a sense of the big ideas and how they are connected, structuring hands-on inquiries that engage students actively in using the material to make sense of how concepts build on each other and fit together. It helps them develop multiple and varied representations of key concepts that make them vivid and accessible to diverse learners, building on their different experiences.

Content pedagogical knowledge, when combined with instructional design knowledge, enables teachers to design, sequence and pace appropriate activities; diagnose and respond to student learning needs with appropriate scaffolding; and integrate social, emotional, and academic skills. Even when a curriculum framework and materials are provided for teachers, they must still decide when and how to use different materials to reach their students, including what instructional strategies, activities, representations, and differentiations may be needed to support learning most effectively. These aspects of curriculum construction – defined as the process of developing a process of learning to reach a goal – require integrating knowledge about students’ cognitive, social and emotional processes with curricular content in ways that promote growth in students’ understanding, sense of efficacy, and motivation (Reigeluth & Carr-Chellman, 2009).

This stands in contrast to the century-old “factory model” view that teachers merely need some canned techniques for teaching and the ability to follow pre-determined curriculum packages or textbooks rather than the deeper understanding of learners and learning that will allow them to design classroom environments and activities, and choose or adapt useful curriculum materials, to support individual children whose pathways to learning are unique.

Effective use of technology is now a central element of instructional design, providing curriculum materials that can be interactive as well as static, means for representing concepts in multiple media, tools for communicating with others, online capacity for research and inquiry, and platforms for mathematical modeling and data analysis, among many other affordances. Much has been learned about how to use technology to support instruction and learning effectively – including for supporting multilingual learning and expanding the capacities of students with disabilities – that can change developmental trajectories while promoting competence and confidence for learners at any age and stage (National Academies of Sciences et al., 2018).

Knowledge about teaching

Knowledge for teaching diverse learners

Content pedagogical knowledge must be combined with knowledge of how to teach students who bring with them distinctive experiences, motivations, interest, and developed abilities. This ability begins with pedagogical learner knowledge: the “ways in which teachers deal rigorously and supportively with learners” (Grimmett & MacKinnon, 1992). Tools for getting to know students and how they think and learn (including how they think about themselves as learners) need to be combined with knowledge about learning modalities, differences, and disabilities; language development; cultural contexts; and differentiation of instruction to support each learner’s cognitive, social, and emotional development and learning (Banks et al., 2005).

One aspect of this work is the use of multimodal teaching strategies that deliberately support success for students with distinctive strengths and needs, like those that are part of Universal Design for Learning. Neuroscience has demonstrated that every human brain is different, and every path to learning will vary as well (Cantor et al., 2018). A critical aspect of enabling success for diverse learners without labeling, tracking, and stigma is the use of multiple modalities of engagement and expression in the classroom—and the use of multiple representations that can connect to students’ different experiences and prior knowledge.

Assessment

Knowledge of assessment of, for, and as learning is also critical so that educators can appropriately identify what students are learning, how they are thinking, and what they are ready to learn. It is critical for educators to understand assessment as a tool to inform teaching and support learning, not merely to assign grades (Hattie, 2012). The information educators receive from ongoing formative assessments can help them understand what students are learning and provide information on their zones of proximal development in different domains to gauge what they are ready to learn next. Interpreting and using this information well requires a solid understanding of development, learning, content, and curriculum. Teachers should also understand how specific elements of assessment design—like clarity of criteria, the ways in which feedback are given, and opportunities to reflect and revise work in response to feedback – can affect students’ motivation and their ability to develop the learning strategies, goals, and self-assessment skills that allow them to monitor and guide their own learning.

Classroom management

To create a productive environment for learning, teachers need to know how to build classroom communities. In developmentally-grounded classrooms, management begins with knowing students well; planning and facilitating developmentally appropriate, engaging tasks; and creating an identity-safe environment that demonstrates respect for students’ experiences, engages them in co-constructing norms, and provides them with constructive roles within the classroom community (Steele & Cohn-Vargas, 2013). Teachers also need to know how to create educative and restorative approaches to supporting behavior by using reinforcing and reminding language; approaching students in a nonthreatening manner; presenting students with problem-solving options as a means of deescalating challenging situations; and using non-punitive, restorative consequences that allow students to make amends when needed (Gregory et al., 2016).

Skills teachers need to enhance learning and development

The science of learning and development demonstrate that, because each child’s learning journey is unique, teaching cannot be standardized if it is to meet students’ needs. Teachers must develop adaptive expertise, which allows them to make judgments about what to do based on both general and specific knowledge of learners and their paths to learning, as well as curriculum goals (Bransford et al., 2005). To create adaptive experts whose knowledge can be effectively applied in a variety of circumstances, preparation programs must teach their students the “whys” and “whens,” not simply the “how to’s.” This adaptive expertise enables teachers to learn to think pedagogically, plan based on students’ prior knowledge and needs, reason through dilemmas, and analyze student learning to develop appropriate curricula for diverse learners. Being an adaptive expert involves not only mastering a body of knowledge but also being a lifelong learner with the ability to work with others in searching for new answers when needed.

Inquiry skills are extremely important. Because the learning process is embedded in the linguistic, cultural, and developmental experiences of students, teachers must learn how to discern these experiences, so they can plan in light of their students’ needs and to support their progression along multiple developmental pathways–physical, social, emotional, cognitive, linguistic, and psychological. They need tools and practices that allow them to learn about their students’ different ways of learning, prior experiences and knowledge, and cultural and linguistic capital. For example, teachers need to learn how to learn about the strengths and needs of individual students through careful observation and listening, as well as such techniques as regular check-ins and class meetings, conferencing, journaling, and classroom surveys.

Teachers also need culturally-sensitive listening and questioning skills to use both with students and when meeting with families as authentic partners. These skills can enable teachers to learn about their students’ lives and learning strategies and to create more coherent, well-reinforced learning opportunities between home and school. These, in turn, can help create environments where students feel culturally respected and emotionally and intellectually safe.

Because teachers have multiple goals, students are many and diverse, and teaching requires the integration of many different areas of knowledge, teachers need well-developed observation and analytic skills to assess student progress and to make sound decisions about curriculum, instruction, and assessment in response to the needs of the particular students they teach. Meeting these needs depends, further, on knowing how to take them into account while undertaking a purposeful journey toward curriculum goals that produce deep understanding of subject matter for students.

Curriculum design skills build on an understanding of content and instructional design translated into the ability to select materials and develop lessons and units of instruction that can achieve worthwhile learning objectives. When teaching these lessons, teachers need skills for scaffolding the learning process through the choice of materials, design of tasks, and use of helpful questions and supports to guide learners.

When they are teaching, teachers need a wide range of instructional skills that combine to create effective pedagogies. These include, for example, skills for explaining concepts and modeling strategies, leading discussions, managing collaborative group work, eliciting and interpreting students’ thinking, implementing norms and routines for classroom discourse and work, checking student understanding, and providing useful feedback (Ball & Forzani, 2009).

Behind the scenes, teachers must also deploy skills of reflection and diagnosis. Teaching is a particularly complex profession, because it is never routine, has multiple goals that need to be addressed at the same time, involves diverse groups of students, and demands multiple kinds of knowledge to be synthesized in a way that allows teachers to make sense of their students’ worlds (Lampert, 2001). Given these complexities, it is imperative that teachers develop the metacognitive ability to reflect on what they see happening with student learning each day, so that they can identify and plan the next steps to support students in multiple areas of development, ranging from bolstering confidence to filling specific knowledge gaps to supporting social or emotional skills and habits. Preparing teachers who can learn from teaching, as well as learning for teaching, is one of the key challenges (Ball & Forzani, 2009).

Helping teachers learn to practice in these ways requires both coursework and clinical work that, together, help teachers understand students and how they learn while also developing skills and tools to organize and manage rich learning experiences. Studies have found that teacher education programs that have a greater impact on the initial conceptions, practices, and effectiveness of new teachers are those that connect theory and practice in coherent and mutually reinforcing ways (Hammerness et al., 2005).

Dispositions

A key insight from the science of learning and development is that the social-emotional skills, habits, and mindsets educators bring to their work with children can either support or hinder development and learning (Darling-Hammond et al., 2019a). Teachers who have the awareness, empathy, and cultural competence to understand children’s experiences, needs, and behaviors sympathetically can promote positive attitudes, behaviors, and confidence in their students. In this section, we describe the dispositions needed to effectively integrate the science of learning and development into practice.

Social-emotional capacity

Creating an environment in which all students are respected, nurtured, and made to feel safe depends not only on teachers’ classroom management skills but also on their social-emotional skills (Jones & Bouffard, 2012). Furthermore, teachers’ role in cultivating students’ social-emotional skills is accomplished through modeling of those skills, as well as direct instruction. In order to support the development of social and emotional skills in children, teachers themselves need to learn and embody skills for managing adversity, directing energy in productive ways, and interacting positively with others. This includes their own ability to be empathic and caring toward students; their ability to affirm students’ identities and academic progress in ways that support both student self-confidence and competence; and their interpersonal skills for addressing students’ needs in the classroom and for using care and discretion in tapping outside-of-classroom resources (Darling-Hammond et al., 2019a).

Empathy

To build trust and positive relationships, teachers need to be able to practice empathy and view children’s behaviors through the lens of child development and with an understanding of the effects of trauma. This allows teachers to understand that problematic behaviors are typically the result of unmet needs that can be identified and addressed. While teachers’ personal qualities are often viewed as inherent, rather than learned, research shows that empathy can be developed, and it can transform relationships with students.

For example, in an experiment where middle school math teachers were given an empathy-enhancing experience, their interactions with students were transformed (Okonofua et al., 2016). Teachers in the empathic mindset condition read articles about the benefits of good student-teacher relationships that explained how students’ experiences can cause them to act out, and encouraged teachers to maintain good relationships with students even in the face of conflict. They were asked to reflect on and write about how they could understand students’ experiences and sustain positive relationships even when challenges arise. Two months later, these teachers sread another article about a teacher who respected her students and wrote about how they show respect to their students. In the control condition, teachers read articles about the benefits of technology-based learning, and wrote about how they could bring a technology-based curriculum into their classroom. In the classrooms of teachers who were randomly assigned to the empathic mindset condition, suspension rates were half those in the control group classrooms, disrupting the pattern of exclusion that produce academic failure.

In addition, teachers’ perceptions of their similarities with students impact their relationship with students and, in turn, affect student achievement. Research has found that teachers who learn that they share commonalities with their students experience and support more positive relationships. In one study, when teachers learned about their similarities to students, the students’ academic achievement improved significantly, with the greatest effect for historically underserved Black and Latino students (Gehlbach et al., 2016).

Social-emotional well-being

Consistent with biological evidence that relationships impact brain development and learning, increasing evidence points to the importance of teachers’ mental health and wellness for students’ success (Jennings & Greenberg, 2009). Not surprisingly, high levels of teacher burnout coupled with inadequate skills to manage stress are associated with poorer student academic and behavioral outcomes (Herman et al., 2018). Conversely, teachers’ social and emotional health translates into enhanced efficacy and job satisfaction (Jones et al., 2013). Helping educators learn stress management skills, as well as other social-emotional skills, is key to their effectiveness and to reductions in burnout and turnover in teaching. Furthermore, when educators have developed these skills, they can teach them to their students to support their success.

Among the tools available to support educators’ social-emotional skills and wellness is training in mindfulness—which develops a calm attentiveness and awareness of experiences, often through attention to breathing and physical sensations, coupled with an attitude of openness and non-judgment. There is a growing body of literature documenting the physical and mental health benefits of mindfulness practice (Khoury et al., 2013), which can increase the capacity to respond calmly and skillfully based on the needs of the current moment. In a classroom environment where there are many competing demands for attention, developing the capacity to recognize what is happening in the moment and respond calmly and flexibly contributes to teachers’ adaptive expertise. Studies find that training in mindfulness can reduce teachers’ stress and emotional distress, help them regulate emotions, and develop greater social-emotional competence, sense of self-efficacy and well-being, improved instructional practices, and emotional support for students (Crain et al., 2017; Flook et al., 2013; Roeser et al., 2013). Mindfulness-based programs that support educators in implementing positive coping mechanisms when dealing with stressors can also mitigate the impacts of chronic emotional stress, a particular job hazard in education when caring educators are continuously concerned about trauma that impacts their students’ lives (Roeser et al., 2013).

Cultural competence and commitment to equity

Strongly related to teachers’ development of capacities like empathy are the beliefs they carry and feedback they provide to their students. As noted earlier, teachers’ perceptions of students shape expectations that often predict student achievement apart from prior ability. While the vast majority of teachers enter the profession with a passion for fostering children’s learning, growth, and development, implicit bias can nonetheless color how they interact with their students. Thus educators need to proactively cultivate positive and affirming attitudes in order to create culturally sensitive and identity-safe environments (Steele & Cohn-Vargas, 2013).

Schools foster or impede these beliefs to the extent that they group or track students in ways that convey messages about perceived ability, deliver stereotypic messages associated with group status, and emphasize ability rather than effort (e.g., “innate intelligence” vs. “hard work”) in their judgments about students and their attributions of causes of success (Dweck, 2000).

That affirming attitudes can make a difference in outcomes is suggested by the growing number of studies finding that students of color achieve at higher levels, attend school more regularly, and feel more cared for in the classroom when they have teachers of color (Cherng & Halpin, 2016; Egalite & Kisida, 2018), likely because these teachers demonstrate strong belief in their students’ abilities (Ladson-Billings, 2009). All teachers can affirm students by communicating their confidence that students can learn; encouraging children to excel; and building on the individual and cultural resources they bring to the school, ranging from social knowledge of the community to mathematically rich pasttimes such as chess and sports, to expressive use of language in popular culture (Lee, 2017). Such teaching relies on a disposition toward capitalizing on the funds of knowledge that are abundant in children’s households and communities (Moll et al., 1992; Nasir et al., 2014) rather than a deficit-based orientation.

Teachers’ use of affirmations that students are seen as competent and valued also mitigates the effects of social identity threat or stereotype threat, which undermines performance. Many dozens of studies have shown that when teachers demonstrate their belief in student ability and provide feedback and supports clearly aimed at improvement, performance on tests, grades, and other academic measures improve significantly in ways that are maintained over time (Steele, 2011). Teachers who respect cultural differences are more apt to see all students as capable learners and to offset stereotype threat by conveying their faith in students’ abilities.

Strategies that convey respect and concern for students – the basis of culturally responsive pedagogy – create a foundation for meaningful relationships and positive academic results (Carter & Darling-Hammond, 2016; Irvine, 2003). Practices and dispositions associated with culturally responsive pedagogy include (a) recognizing students’ culturally-grounded experiences as a foundation on which to build knowledge; (b) respectful interactions with students and families; (c) an ethic of deep care; and (d) a critical consciousness and sense of efficacy about learning and equity-oriented change that is consciously transmitted to students (Carter & Darling-Hammond, 2016; Ladson-Billings, 2009; Villegas & Lucas, 2002).

Sense of efficacy

The knowledge, skills, and dispositions that are associated with teacher effectiveness are also related to teachers’ sense of efficacy. Efficacy refers to the beliefs individuals hold about their ability to successfully carry out a specific course of action (Bandura, 1997). Teachers’ sense of efficacy affects their investment of effort, their enthusiasm for teaching, their classroom processes, and students’ experiences (Zee & Koomen, 2016), as well as student motivation and achievement (Tschannen-Moran & Hoy, 2001).

Teachers are likely to feel a greater sense of efficacy when they have a strong professional learning community, which, in turn, strengthens their knowledge and skills for teaching (Chester & Beaudin, 1996). Preparation to teach also strengthens efficacy. Teachers who complete preparation before they enter the field feel more efficacious and are more likely to remain in teaching (Darling-Hammond et al., 2002; Ingersoll et al., 2014), and produce higher student achievement (Clotfelter et al., 2007). Attrition rates are half as great for new teachers who have had comprehensive pre-service preparation, including strong clinical experiences and coursework in learning, development, and curriculum, as for beginning teachers who did not have such experiences (Ingersoll et al., 2014). Many of these features – including the study of curriculum materials and carefully supervised clinical practice – also distinguish programs whose graduates are more effective in supporting student learning gains (Boyd et al., 2009).

Training that improves classroom environments, such as that associated with some social-emotional learning programs, has also been found to promote greater self-efficacy, more positive attitudes toward teaching, teaching practices that are supportive of students (Rimm-Kaufman & Sawyer, 2004), and positive academic and behavioral outcomes for students (Brock et al., 2008).

Key strategies and practices for educator preparation

Preparation programs that can successfully develop this set of knowledge, skills, and dispositions must take into account several well-known challenges of learning to teach that are more pronounced when the kind of teaching sought requires pedagogies many teacher candidates will not have experienced when they were students:

• First, learning to teach requires a reframing of educators’ own previous experience as students in order to think about and understanding teaching in new ways, a problem that Lortie (1975) termed “the apprenticeship of observation.”

• Second, learning to teach requires new teachers not only learn to “think like a teacher” but also to “act like a teacher”—what Kennedy (1999) has termed “the problem of enactment.” Teachers need not only to learn what to do, but to be able to do it.

• Finally, learning to teach requires that new teachers act purposefully to achieve multiple goals within a complex and busy classroom, full of students who each bring their own knowledge, ideas, and social and cultural experiences with them—what researchers have called “the problem of complexity” (Darling-Hammond & Bransford, 2005).

All three of these challenges must be addressed in the design of programs that can help teachers become effective in achieving 21^st century curriculum goals with diverse learners. Below we describe key strategies for program design as well as key practices within programs.

Key strategies for educator preparation program design

Pedagogical alignment

A critical program strategy for enabling candidates to learn sophisticated approaches to teaching that extend beyond their previous school experience is pedagogical alignment around a coherent vision of whole child development, learning, and teaching. A number of studies of effective preparation programs have found that this kind of coherence is a critical factor in allowing candidates both to visualize and to enact the curricular and instructional approaches their programs are seeking to convey (for reviews, see Hammerness et al., 2005; Ronfeldt, 2021). In both their coursework and clinical work settings, new teachers should experience the very kinds of teaching strategies they are expected to develop for the pupils they work with, so that they have a deep personal understanding of the strategies they can use and rich models of practice on which to draw (Darling-Hammond et al., 2019b). Thus, learning about pedagogy derived from the science of learning and development also means learning with and through such pedagogy.

Enactment of the science of learning and development in practice becomes both the goal and the guide for teacher educators. Further, in order for candidates to develop robust understandings, it is important for them not only to study individual ideas but to see how they interact to produce a coherent vision of learning related to a vision of teaching and schooling.

Well-designed clinical experiences

A corollary of this pedagogical alignment is extensive engagement in clinical practice that instantiates the practices educators need to learn. In programs that prepare educators to teach in new ways, teacher candidates experience those practices both through modeling of student-centered pedagogies they see in the courses they take and the schools in which they complete their student teaching or residency placements. These are carefully selected and designed to emulate the practices candidates are learning about in their courses, providing practical models for novices to observe and knowledgeable mentors to provide feedback and coaching, relate work in the classroom to coursework, and create opportunities for reflection.

Recent research has found that well-designed clinical experiences for student teachers are associated with stronger retention, feelings of preparedness, and observed teaching effectiveness. As summarized in a review by Ronfeldt (2021) these clinical experiences are “(1) aligned with other program dimensions including coursework (program coherence); (2) occur in field placement schools with strong professional learning environments and that match employment schools on student demographics, school, and grade levels; and (3) include instructionally effective cooperating teachers who also provide high-quality coaching” (p. 20). Other research has found that quality professional development for cooperating and mentor teachers also strengthens the clinical experience and its outcomes (Hollins & Warner, 2021).

Just as the invention of the teaching hospital in medicine was designed to bridge the divide between theory and practice by ensuring a place where best practices could be observed and learned, so strong school-university partnerships are critical to creating clinical placements that are consonant with the theoretical learning candidates are undertaking. Training in such settings has been found to increase candidate retention and later effectiveness, as well as the effectiveness of veteran teachers in these contexts (for a review, see Darling-Hammond, 2014). Ideally, such partnerships avoid the frequent incongruity – dubbed the “two-worlds pitfall” – that can occur between teacher education programs that are out of synch with the schools at which their student teachers spend time (Feiman-Nemser & Buchmann, 1985).

The strong outcomes of Finnish teacher education have been attributed in part to the fact that all teachers are trained in partner schools that are part of the regular public school system but are connected to universities, which select the expert mentor teachers who work in these schools and include them as clinical members of the university faculty, while professors teach many of the courses on site. Faculty of the partner schools and universities work closely together designing strategies, modeling practices, and researching their effects, as is increasingly the case in Australia, Singapore, Canada, as well as the United States (Darling-Hammond et al., 2017).

These relationships can extend beyond school walls, as researchers have found that prospective teachers may form a shallow impression of their students if they work only in the school setting. Programs which enable student teachers to be involved in the community more broadly – for example by working in after school, recreation, or social service programs – provide them with a deeper understanding of their students’ and families’ lives outside of school and opportunities to overcome barriers to knowing their students well, while also helping these teachers to better meet the needs of all students (Boyle-Baise, 2002; Gallego, 2001).

A developmental approach to the development of educators

Finally, educator program design should take a developmental approach to the development of educators, consciously supporting educators to become increasingly expert. Just as children go through stages of development as they learn in various domains, so do teachers – from a focus on self to a focus on the student; from unexamined assumptions about teaching acquired when they were students to a thoughtful set of perspectives about teaching acquired from professional knowledge and inquiry into many students’ experiences; from attention to their own acts of teaching to attention to their students’ processes of learning. With useful experience and guidance, teachers grow increasingly adept at understanding learning, teaching, and their students, developing the adaptive expertise that enables them to think, analyze, and act effectively in response to their contexts and students’ needs, making productive decisions when many variables are in play. Well-designed, impactful experiences can allow these developmental processes to unfold more quickly and fully than might occur without this support.

To encourage adaptive expertise, teacher educators should promote both candidates’ ability to manage the classroom efficiently and their ability to create thoughtful curriculum. It is important to develop novices’ proficiency in basic classroom functions so that they can get beyond classroom management to the important work of promoting learning. Developing proficiency requires opportunities to practice a skill, get feedback, reflect, and practice again, something that is increasingly part of teacher preparation programs that tie clinical experiences to students’ learning from the very beginning of the program, rather than attaching student teaching as a dollop at the end of several years of coursework.

A key element in freeing up people’s capacities to learn new skills is to reduce unnecessary cognitive load that consumes mental space needed for important new learning (called “germane” load). Rather than over-simplifying the complex work of teaching – for example, by memorizing theories or practicing decontextualized skills – extraneous load can be reduced by using open-ended tasks (e.g., rather than finding the best solution, find as many solutions as possible), teaching in multiple modalities so that candidates can learn in the ways that are easiest for them, using worked examples (e.g., in the teaching setting, start by critiquing an already developed curriculum plan, rather than develop a curriculum from scratch) as learned in the training of health professionals (van Merriënboer & Sweller, 2010).

If candidates are focused on accomplishing learning goals with students in practice, they will begin to see the complexities of teaching more effectively. Within this broader conception of goal-focused work, intrinsic load can be managed by sequencing learning tasks from simple to complex (e.g., start by teaching part of a lesson, later the entire lesson, and later an entire unit; working with a small group of students in the classroom while building up to teaching the whole class; studying the learning of a single child while building up to analyzing classwide learning).

Studies have shown that, with the right set of learning experiences, new teachers can develop more expert practices much sooner and more fully than earlier thought (Darling-Hammond & Bransford, 2005, p. 381). These findings parallel recent findings in cognitive development showing that, given well-chosen tasks with appropriate scaffolding and supportive learning environments, children can learn much more than may have been anticipated by biologically based theories of stage development.

Key practices for educator preparation

These overaraching strategies support a set of preparation practices research has shown make a strong difference in the capacities of educators. As shown in Figure 2, these include:

Figure 2. The “How” of Teacher Education.

• Anchoring candidate learning in the study of human development and learning

• Integrating theory and practice

• Providing opportunities for authentic practice, assessment, and feedback

• Engaging in inquiry and reflection

• Collaborating in professional learning communities

Anchoring candidate learning in the study of human development and learning

There are many competing goals held by stakeholders in the education enterprise – from acquiring basic skills and democratic values to producing skills for the workplace and opportunities for social mobility (Labaree, 1997). However, to the extent that society views equal opportunity and the development of the social, emotional, cognitive, and moral/ethical capacities of each young person as fundamental goals of education, then deep understanding of human development and learning – in all its diversity – is the foundation and guide for the use of all other knowledge about teaching. Without these understandings, the study of curriculum or teaching methods is little more than a set of rudderless techniques. Educator preparation programs vary widely in the extent to which they emphasize learning about child and adolescent development and learning. According to a report commissioned by the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), in the United States, “most educators … have not been prepared to apply knowledge of child and adolescent development and learning and are thus not sufficiently able to provide developmentally oriented instruction” (Snyder & Lit, 2010). In many states, alternative certification programs that provide fast-track pathways into teaching do not offer courses in child development. In some states that have cut back on training requirements, even traditional programs lack such courses.

In other cases, development is taught as part of a class in educational psychology that focuses on textbook principles not directly tied to what children and teachers do in the classroom. More transferable learning has been achieved by universities that have instead designed courses on child or adolescent development connected to fieldwork where child case studies and classroom observations make the knowledge base applicable to practice (Darling-Hammond et al., 2019b).

In reviews of practice across preparation programs, common recommendations include:

• Teacher preparation curricula should integrate developmental science principles throughout all courses so that candidates learn principles of development as they apply to learning, classroom management, curriculum, teaching methods, and other areas.

• Course content should be combined with practical application, for example, through supervised student teaching and mentoring, as well as classroom video examples, role plays, lesson and unit planning, child study, and family engagement.

• Candidates should be placed in classrooms for their student teaching experiences with teachers who have expertise in applying the principles of social, emotional, and academic development and learning.

• Faculties of education should hire personnel with expertise in development and learning domains and provide professional development to other faculty so they can infuse the sciences of learning and development into preservice teacher and principal education.

• Licensing and accreditation systems should focus more on teachers’ learning opportunities that integrate theory and practice so that when teachers enter the classroom, they are well prepared to understand and teach children effectively (Schonert-Reichl et al., 2015; see also Snyder & Lit, 2010).

Integrating theory and practice

Scaffolding teachers’ performance to reach greater mastery also requires skillfully integrating clinical experience with coursework, which allows teachers to learn and practice ever more sophisticated applications of knowledge and skill.

Modeling practice

In impactful programs, instructors, supervisors, and cooperating teachers model practices they expect candidates to use, name them, explain why they are powerful, and indicate how they can be applied. For example, in San Francisco’s Teacher Residency program, operated in collaboration with Stanford University and the University of San Francisco, candidates learning to teach English learners experience a class taught in an unfamiliar language, along with the strategies they can use to make the content and the language increasingly accessible. Then they more fully develop those pedagogies in both their university-based classroom and in the school classrooms where they are simultaneously apprenticing.

Similarly, at Bank Street College, candidates take up real world mathematics problems in groups, collaboratively solving them and then sharing their solution strategies with others as they learn to transfer these teaching strategies to their own classrooms, enabling their own students to unpack misconceptions and deeply understand the mathematics (Darling-Hammond et al., 2019b).

Integrating coursework and clinical work

Additionally, integrating theory and practice simultaneously, while reflecting on the results and refining next attempts, is critically important for solving the challenges of enactment and gradually dealing with the challenges of complexity. Teacher education programs that incorporate clinical practice throughout the learning experience (rather than saving it as a culminating project at the program’s end) produce stronger knowledge and more effective practice (Darling-Hammond, 2014).

Learning scientists have long known that providing theoretical knowledge along with the opportunity for hands-on inquiry is more effective than either alone (Schwartz & Bransford, 1998). Programs that integrate coursework and clinical work design evidence-based methods for teaching in fieldwork experiences as well as in readings, discussions, and carefully constructed assignments, engaging in intentional integration that enables candidates to understand the practical relevance of theory and how to theorize practice (Darling-Hammond et al., 2019b). To support these integrated field experiences, effective programs maintain productive partnerships with schools in which teacher candidates can experience teaching practice aligned with learning theory, under the guidance of carefully selected mentor teachers.

Developing content pedagogical skills

Content pedagogy courses should allow teachers to apply curriculum, instructional, and assessment knowledge to practice as novices learn to create deeper learning experiences for their own students. Combining content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge has already been described as a way of supporting higher order thinking and transfer; teachers who learn to work with the “core concepts” of their disciplines give students the tools to apply practices of inquiry and ways of reasoning, conceptual frameworks, underlying structures, and fundamental knowledge in those disciplines, opening up new ways of seeing the world and building understanding (Darling-Hammond & Bransford, 2005).

For example, Stanford University offers a full-year curriculum and instruction sequence, conducted alongside student teaching in which all of the concepts are observed and applied, with content-specific pedagogical training provided by instructors who were themselves expert classroom teachers in their disciplines. Most of the cooperating teachers were themselves once students in this same program, so their practice is deeply informed by the same set of understandings. This course sequence starts with essential questions about the “why” of teaching the discipline, them moves on to the “how,” from lesson planning to larger curriculum units, culminating in a performance assessment in which candidates plan and teach a unit, collecting and analyzing evidence of student learning with keen attention to issues of developmental and language supports, cultural responsiveness, and equity-enhancing practices (Darling-Hammond et al., 2019b). These content-specific courses introduce candidates to the theories and pedagogical approaches that will help them create productive learning experiences that help students engage in critical thinking and inquiry. Content-specific methods also require candidates to examine students’ developmental needs in subject-specific contexts, giving teachers the opportunity to apply learning from across their preparation experiences.

Learning from cases

Application is not limited to student teaching which, while highly beneficial, does not give prospective teachers experience managing every classroom problem they might encounter. As in medicine, law, and other professions, case methods provide another useful link between theory and practice that allows for the exploration of theories and dilemmas as they occur in real classrooms. Both writing and analyzing cases can help candidates develop more expert thinking and reasoning skills, while surfacing some of the more challenging problems teachers face. Effective case methods – which are well-connected to central theories and broader underlying principles of practice – help “students move from an initially simplistic explanation of a situation to a more sophisticated, theory-based explanation” (Hammerness et al., 2002). Recent research illustrates how case-based teaching can surface prospective teachers’ misconceptions, help them understand the complexities of teaching, and enable them to relate theory to situated dilemmas of practice (Gravett et al., 2017).

Providing opportunities for authentic practice, assessment, and feedback

Human beings learn in large part from acting and reflecting on the results of their actions. Learning is accelerated by thoughtful feedback that recognizes strengths and identifies areas for next steps (Hattie, 2012). This is as true for teacher candidates as it is for their students. Many effective programs use a Teaching/Learning Inquiry Cycle as a means for developing reflective practice, framing teaching as a cycle of (1) planning, (2) teaching, (3) monitoring student learning and adjusting practice, and (4) reflection and development of next steps. In the University of Colorado, Denver’s Urban Teacher Education Program, university-based faculty, site supervisors, site professors, and clinical teachers in the partner schools all use this approach to guide candidates’ teaching experiences, building feedback and reflection consistently into their preparation (Darling-Hammond et al., 2019b).

Effective preparation programs use a wide range of authentic assessments that allow for the application of skills and knowledge and offer opportunities for candidates to bring together theory and practice to demonstrate their learning. These include regular informal and formal evaluations of student teaching and other demonstrations of skills, as well as culminating assessments, such as capstone portfolios. These portfolios typically include video and analyses of teaching and student learning illustrating how candidates address student needs as well as the demands of the curriculum. It is critically important that these assessments, along with the standards and rubrics used to evaluate teaching performances, recognize that teachers’ actions must respond thoughtfully to students rather than marching through standardized procedures and techniques without regard to children’s experiences and needs. Fortunately, teaching standards exist that can help leverage this kind of instruction. In contrast to mechanistic views of teaching embedded in some state and local teacher evaluation systems, the research-based professional standards developed by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards and related standards for beginning teachers developed by many states and countries (see e.g. Darling-Hammond, 2021) offer a developmentally grounded view of teaching and learning.

By examining teaching in the light of learning, these standards—and their associated performance assessments, which can include teacher plans, classroom video, evidence of student learning, and commentaries describing why specific decisions were made– define teaching effectiveness as responsive to students’ backgrounds, experiences, and learning needs. Studies have found that these assessment processes stimulate teacher learning (Chung, 2008; Lustick & Sykes, 2006; Sato et al., 2008) are related to teacher effectiveness (Goldhaber et al., 2016; National Research Council, 2008).

These kinds of assessments can help develop adaptive expertise by helping teachers learn to attend to students’ thinking and development and to reflect productively on the relationship between teaching decisions and student learning and behavior. Performance tasks and portfolios of teaching measured against shared standards with opportunities for feedback provide a structured means of reflecting on and documenting learning experiences. For example, at Alverno College, long known for the use of authentic assessments for evaluating student abilities, candidates complete a series of performance assessments throughout their coursework and fieldwork, demonstrating how they analyze student development and learning, plan and implement teaching, and evaluate the outcomes to determine next steps. Candidates assemble portfolios of their practice about which they are interviewed at several junctures. These demonstrate how they are developing the dispositions and mind-sets teachers need to help all students develop their full potential (Darling-Hammond et al., 2019b).

Engaging in inquiry and reflection

Inquiry strategies guide reflection and application, preparing candidates to ask productive questions when they encounter novel teaching challenges in different schools and community contexts, while modeling inquiry-based approaches candidates can employ with their own students. Practitioner inquiry can be used to help student teachers become more analytic, developing the important skills of observation, listening, and learning from practice.

Inquiring through autobiography

Many programs have found that, before prospective teachers can inquire productively into the lives of their students, it is important for them to query their own experiences. Prospective teachers base many of their beliefs about teaching and learning on their own idiosyncratic educational experiences. Confronting, and reflecting upon, these implicit theories is part of the developmental process for novice teachers as they progress from thinking about themselves and their teaching to focusing more on student learning. The use of autobiography is helpful in determining the implicit theories of education and preconceptions that they bring to the table. Having student teachers write educational autobiographies can bring assumptions about students, teaching, and learning to the surface, where they are available for critical examination. And while writing their own autobiographies requires students to reflect on their assumptions, reading the biographies of others enables them to gain new perspectives on teaching, learning, and contexts for development (Baumgartner et al., 2002).

At Trinity University in San Antonio, TX, for example, candidates in the MAT program complete a racial autobiography assignment. Drawing on Singleton and Linton (2006) Courageous conversations about race: A field guide for achieving equity in schools, this assignment is aimed at helping candidates expand their understanding of the development of their own racial identities and, through coming to know themselves and others, increase their ability to know their students. Candidates write about their feelings toward, understanding of, and engagement with race as these have progressed in their program and in their lives, and they share this autobiography with their cohort. The assignment is assessed on the analysis of their experiences and how candidates have come to understand them through the work.

Inquiring through child case studies

Systematic observation and case studies of children provide another powerful pedagogy to help shape student teachers’ developmental learning. Drawing on data from observation, interviews, records, and analyses of student work, teachers can directly apply what they are learning about different aspects of child development and learning to the case of a specific child. The case construction process enables learners to apply their theoretical knowledge to concrete examples and to evaluate their progress.

Meaningful child observation assignments for prospective teachers typically use guiding questions geared toward specific concepts. Sometimes observations are linked to specific learning tasks which can help prospective teachers learn how to identify the zone of proximal development for students in different domains. At other times the observation is of children during free time, when they are able to choose activities, providing insight into how the child approaches learning and clues into social, emotional, and physical abilities in different contexts.

As one example of this process, candidates at Bank Street College – one of the early developers of the observational approach – conduct child cases in many courses. One of the first of these, the Observation and Recording course, is designed to help prospective teachers learn to look closely and nonjudgmentally at evidence about children to inform all aspects of their teaching. Candidates read texts on the observation and study of children while applying what they learn over several months of assignments. These include weekly written observations of a child at school, a paper examining the child in the context of their peers, an age-level study designed to see the child in the light of developmental theory, and observations of the child as a member of a learning community. Class discussions sharpen candidates’ understanding of children as well as their evidence-seeking skills and awareness of their own potential biases.

A similar assignment used to anchor the Adolescent Development course at Stanford University asks teacher education candidates to shadow a student through a full day of school, meet with family members at home or in the community, and collect evidence of student work and learning – as well as interviewing and observing the student in school – so as to develop a more complete understanding of the student’s experiences and to plan productive avenues of instruction. Weekly observation logs that form the basis for the final case emphasize nonjudgmental observation, so that student behaviors are not labeled, but rather examined to gain insight into the student, and to form questions for the teacher to pursue. The class highlights a different component of adolescent development each week – including cognitive, emotional, social, and physical development - and residents use their observation logs to synthesize the information they gather in light of these topics (Darling-Hammond et al., 2019b). Similar case studies of learning are conducted in courses on literacy, English learner development, and special education. Ultimately, child observation assignments help teachers develop the close observational skills and the ability to interpret developmental data they will need to construct tasks that meet children where they are and move them along the developmental pathways.

Action research

Productive teacher education develops teachers who can learn from teaching as much as it prepares candidates for teaching. Action research is an important tool that is increasingly used in countries around the world to develop skills for continuous improvement of teaching focused on students and their learning (Darling-Hammond et al., 2017). Described by Cochran-Smith and Lytle (1993) as “intentional, systematic, and rigorous inquiry,” practitioner research can focus on the needs of particular students, on questions about classroom practice (for example, whether a new approach to teaching mathematics is more productive), or on questions about school practices, such as the effects of the schoolwide discipline policy. A major goal is for educators to develop an inquiry stance toward their work and to develop skills for both asking productive questions and analyzing evidence that can contribute to answers.

An action research project used in the Newark-Montclair Urban Teacher Residency at Montclair State University in New Jersey resembles a clinical research project at the University of Melbourne in Australia. In both cases candidates form an inquiry question and engage in multiple cycles of planning, acting, observing, and reflecting on the results. At Montclair, residents collaborate in a series of workshops to consider their students’ needs and to discuss how to improve instruction in light of their research findings, with the goal of understanding how they can conduct inquiries that will continually improve their practice (Darling-Hammond et al., 2019b). At Melbourne, candidates present the results of their cycle of inquiry and practice in a Clinical Praxis Exam to a university-assembled panel of practitioners and faculty, describing a project in which they have identified student needs, identified and enacted interventions, and evaluated the effects of their efforts (Darling-Hammond et al., 2017).

Practitioner inquiry can also support cultural learning, whether through child case studies or analyses of school and community practices. As Villegas and Lucas (2002) note:

By studying schools, prospective teachers can learn about the nature of the school as an institutional culture, exploring ways in which the context outside the classroom influences the lives of students and teachers. They can see the ways in which school policies and practices both support and hinder teachers’ efforts to be culturally responsive…. If they study schools where equity and social justice are priorities, they might learn about ways that teachers can work collectively to bring about changes in their schools that will increase access to knowledge for all students. (p. 145)

Collaborating in professional learning communities

Finally, the context of learning in teacher education is important. In particular, learning within professional communities provides mutual support, opportunities to learn from others’ perspectives and expertise, and modeling for leading a collaborative classroom. Pre-service programs organized in cohorts and clinical work within teaching teams create professional communities in which teachers can observe one another, share practices, develop plans together, and solve problems collectively. Interacting with students, other prospective teachers, expert teachers, and the tools of teaching (lesson plans, assessments, etc.) allows novice teachers to access “experiences, practices, theories, and knowledge of the profession” that would otherwise be unattainable (Hammerness et al., 2005).

Within programs and schools, professional learning communities may also be organized according to subject areas, grade levels, or areas of practice. They may create learning communities across schools and universities, and such a community can be an integral part of clinical partnerships between educator preparation programs and professional development schools. An example of this comes from the University of Colorado, Denver, where the model of school-university partnership is based on the concept of simultaneous renewal. Ongoing professional learning and improvement of practice are part of the work of candidates, clinical teachers, university faculty, and school staff. University faculty are hired for their expertise in practice as well as research, and coursework is connected to clinical experiences. With k-12 student learning as the top priority, school and university educators collaborate to prepare new teachers and enhance the learning of veteran teachers, while engaging in collaborative inquiry.

Professional learning communities act as a source of support for candidates, providing them with places to get and share teaching and curriculum ideas and to solve problems of practice, while learning to create such communities in their own classrooms. Such communities also allow candidates to learn how to manage challenges that arise in collaborative work and to practice giving and receiving feedback. Working with other educators is part of professional practice and helps candidates experience how many perspectives can come together to produce a well-formed outcome, both in the classroom and in the school more broadly. This preparation for teamwork and collaboration helps prepare new teachers to modify and improve the schools they will eventually enter, hopefully enabling them to positively shape both their own classroom environments and the school as a whole (Darling-Hammond et al., 2019b).

Summary and conclusion

Emerging knowledge from the science of learning and development holds great promise for the realization of children’s potential as educators gain a deeper understanding of how to use these insights to support students through safe communities and secure relationships; integrated social, emotional, and academic supports; and the kinds of teaching that enable children ultimately to guide their own learning. Concentrated efforts are needed to create professional learning opportunities that can help educators develop the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to enact these insights. These efforts will be most successful if they offer pedagogical alignment that allows educators to experience the same kinds of learning they will use with students and if they engage educators in sustained, collegial efforts to practice new skills and strategies.

Furthermore, since these insights imply a set of practices very different from the presumptions on which many schools are based, a broader conception of learning is needed – one in which learning for school and system redesign is essential. This learning should aim to build a collective understanding of how schools can be designed for strong relationships; provide environments full of safety and belonging; offer rich learning experiences; explicitly develop social, emotional and cognitive skills and mindsets; and ensure that student supports are readily available to remove barriers to learning. In these settings, teachers prepared to enact the science of learning and development will be able to make a significant difference in the lives of the students they serve.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Chan Zuckerburg Initiative under Grant 2018-196711.