Abstract
<p>The concept of core practices has gained increasing prominence in teacher education, yet important conceptual questions remain unresolved. In particular, there is little agreement on what constitutes a core practice, what it means for core practices to be research-based, and how to embed them within broader teacher education curricula. This paper proposes a theoretical framework to answer these questions. Building on the defining features proposed in foundational work on core practices (e.g., Grossman et al., 2009), we argue that core practices are instructional activities enacted in social interaction, occupying a medium level of granularity between broad domains of practice and specific teaching behaviors. Elaborating on this conception, we argue that core practices may function psychologically as basic-level categories (Rosch, 1978) which novice teachers developed during their long-time apprenticeship of observation at school. Core practices thus provide ideal anchor points around which teacher education can be organized. Using the core practices of explaining and modeling, we demonstrate how core practices can be grounded in evidence-based instructional principles derived from research on learning and instruction, exemplifying what it means for core practices to be research-based. To address how such research-based core practices can be situated within a broader vision of teacher education, we propose a three-part framework in which (a) core practices serve as anchors for introducing novices to evidence-based principles from research on learning and instruction; (b) core practices are situated within middle-range theories of learning and instruction, enabling novices to decide when and why to enact them and to orchestrate different core practices in ways that promote student learning; and (c) core practices are related to the most fundamental goals of teaching, such as, for example, supporting students’ individual knowledge construction, supporting students’ participation in disciplinary discourse, or supporting students’ identity development, enabling novice teachers to deeply understand the purposes of teaching and reflect on and develop their teaching accordingly. Taken together, conceptualizing core practices as basic-level categories, grounding them in research on learning and instruction, and using them as anchors within broader teacher education curricula provides a foundation for a research-based signature pedagogy for teacher education.</p>