Core Practice Consortium

The Core Practice Consortium brings together teacher educators from across institutions, disciplines, and theoretical perspectives to grapple with questions about how better to prepare novice teachers. The group’s driving questions combine attention to practices of student-centered teaching, teacher education pedagogies to support novice learning, and the broader structures and contexts in which specific teaching practices are embedded. Practice, in the group’s view, is never decontextualized from concerns for students’ experiences in schools and the impact teachers can have in transforming the structures that constrain and shape futures for children and youth.

A central goal is to learn from the diversity in how consortium members frame their work, while also striving toward shared understandings. As a group of teacher educators who take up our work within multiple conversations in the field, we explore whether we can agree on core practices important to teaching, such as leading classroom discussions. If so, can we then come to some shared understanding of what those practices entail across teacher education and classroom contexts and begin work on teacher education pedagogies that would support novice learning? What can we learn from each other that would enhance our own teacher education practice, reshape our programs, and influence our individual understandings in ways that better meet the needs of our teacher education students?

History

Since 2012, teacher educators in the consortium have met as a whole group and in subject matter-specific groups to select and define the teaching and teacher education practices that have become our starting points in learning together. The consortium’s work creates a space for focused ongoing learning through teacher educators’ collaborations and negotiations in constructing artifacts, tools, and pursuing research. By opening our practice, our goal is to address pressing questions and critiques in teacher education.