Approximations of Practice

This chapter explores the role approximations of practice can play in scaffolding preservice teachers in learning to teach, with the goal of helping teacher educators design more effective and efficient learning experiences. It argues that approximations of practice serve as scaffolded learning experiences for preservice teachers. Teacher educators have traditionally relied on pedagogies of reflection and investigation, and supported beginning teachers in developing an important knowledge base and analytic skills for teaching. Teacher learning is situated, social, and distributed; preservice teachers construct knowledge and appropriate practice together with others and through using tools. Structuring and problematizing help make the practice of teaching both more tractable and more complex. Metacognitive scaffolding can include promoting monitoring and helping the learner maintain direction–essentially, helping the learner to continue to focus on and move toward the goal, as well as to articulate their ideas.