O. Lovell on a study of acquiring teaching skills
Do people learn more about teaching from conceptual study or behavioral practice?
Ollie Lovell writes and talks about sundry education topics, posted recently about a study regarding getting teachers to adopt specific educational practices. In “If you want teachers to improve, get them to rehearse! Practice-Based Teacher Education Pedagogies Improve Responsiveness: Evidence from a Lab Experiment - Paper summary,” he explained why he was encouraged about a study, which he summarized in the post.
It’s been a while since I’ve been really excited about an academic paper.
But today, I’m excited.
Harvard researchers Zid Mancenido, Heather Hill, and colleagues have just released a new paper: Practice-Based Teacher Education Pedagogies Improve Responsiveness: Evidence from a Lab Experiment, and it’s an absolute cracker!
Why is this exciting? It’s exciting because it gets to the key question at the heart of teacher education, ‘How do we support people to actually teach better?’
Even better, it contrasts the most common approach to PD - reading, thinking, and talking about practice - with an approach that’s gathering steam in effective teacher training circles, rehearsal!
I encourage readers to read both Mr. Lovell’s summery and the original paper (Mancenido et al., 2023). As an advance organizer, here’s my quick summary: