Core Practices for Preservice Teachers in Health Education Teacher Education

Abstract

This article discusses core teaching practices for health education by defining, unpacking, and describing the use of core practices in teacher education. Core practices offer health teacher-educators and health educators a set of teaching practices that can be introduced during professional preparation and then refined and mastered as health educators begin and continue their careers. Implementing core practices in health education allows teacher education programs to specifically define what they teach and to determine standards of competence for their graduates.

We suggest that there are three longstanding and pervasive problems confronting teacher educators that have been well documented in the teacher education literature: complexity, enactment and adaptation. First is the problem of the complexity of learning to teach (Ball & Forzani, 2009). Teaching is complex because of the number of decisions that a teacher must make in a lesson, how the teacher manages the many moving parts that make up a lesson, and the knowledge that a teacher must bring to bear in meeting the needs of students (Ward, 2021). How are teacher educators to determine what and how to teach their students? The content of health education is to a large extent determined by state standards and district priorities. However, pedagogy, by which we include classroom management and instructional skills, is too often given short shrift in health education teacher education programs. This is particularly the case when health is combined with physical education either as a double major or as an add-on endorsement. The complexity of teaching is also increased by ignoring essential knowledge in teacher education. Consider the amount of time most teacher education programs devote to assessment. In a recent review of health education programs in the United States (Ward et al., 2021), there were virtually no classes devoted to assessment in health education. In reviewing course descriptions in the Ward et al. (2021) study, we found that there was only tangential reference to assessment. This example highlights the challenges of many teacher education programs, namely, that too often there is too little time in the undergraduate curriculum to prepare future teachers.

Second is the problem of enactment, best thought of as the provision of learning opportunities to teach (Ball & Forzani, 2009; Lampert, 2010). In short, there is simply too little time spent by preservice teachers (PSTs) in actually learning to teach in schools or in settings that approximate teaching in schools (e.g., peer teaching on campus) in most subject matters and certainly in health education (Lampert, 2010). Increasingly, there is a belief that education on campus must develop the knowledge and skill sets needed in the field more precisely and that the focus on teacher education should focus more on the practice of teaching (Ball & Forzani, 2009).

Third is the problem of adaptation, specifically the development of the teacher’s ability to adapt their teaching to student needs (Xie et al., 2021). Because there are many differences among the students in a class, teachers need to adapt their instruction to address multiple interests and motivations (Xie et al., 2021). These conditions require teachers to make many decisions, including decisions on which pedagogies to use, that will advance the content of health education (e.g., big ideas, enduring understandings or learning progressions), aligning assessment to the instructional goals of the lesson, when they should start and stop instructional and managerial tasks, how to move forward to the next task, how detailed instruction and feedback should be given, and how they should answer students’ unexpected questions. For a teacher to respond to these conditions effectively, teachers need to be able to adapt to the changing conditions of the lesson, yet little time in teacher education is devoted to explicitly teaching PSTs to adapt (Xie et al., 2021).

How are teacher educators to address these recurring problems of teacher education? One way the teacher education field has begun to address these issues is in the development of core teaching practices grounded in practice-based teacher education (Ball & Forzani, 2009; Xie et al., 2021). In this article, we discuss core teaching practices for health education by defining, unpacking and describing their use in teacher education.

Core Practices for Health Education. We have identified 14 core practices for health education PSTs and have grouped them into three clusters of teacher learning (Ward & Snyder, 2022). Cluster 1 focuses on planning behaviors, cluster 2 focuses on actionable pedagogies in teaching, and cluster 3 focuses on teacher growth practices such as reflection and professional development (see Table 1). Each core practice consists of teacher knowledge and behaviors that result in improved teaching and, more simply, being a better teacher (Ball & Forzani, 2009; Kloser, 2014; McLeskey & Brownell, 2015; Ward & Snyder, 2022). The use of core teaching practices is increasingly commonplace in teacher education and is also being required in some state licensure requirements. For example, in 2018, the Michigan Department of Education (2018) directed that specific core practices be included in all subject matter preparation programs in the state.

Table 1. Core Practices for Health Education Teachers

Clusters and Core Practices	Description and Rationale
Cluster 1:	Planning for the Teaching of Health Education
Teaching with big ideas	A big idea is a concise statement of a health outcome. It is a way to package all of the pieces of knowledge and experiences in a unit and curriculum in a way that students can see them as related.
Enduring understandings	Enduring understandings are overarching ideas or concepts related to the big idea. They synthesize what students should understand — not just know or do — as a result of health education.
Essential questions	Essential questions are aligned with enduring understandings. It is through these questions that students unpack the subject matter of health education and find meaning.
Sequencing content	Teaching in health education should use learning progressions that are developmental, incremental and recurrent.
Teaching health content	Teaching health should result in the structuring lessons for repeated student success that results in consistent learning.
Assessing learning	Formative and summative student assessment is essential for instruction.
Cluster 2	Pedagogies for Health Education
Organizational routines/procedures rules and expectations	Teachers must develop a cooperative culture through the creation of expectations that are initially formed by rules and managerial routines.
Building a classroom community that is safe, caring and focused on learning	Developing a classroom culture that is respectful, where students feel safe and where students can risk take is an essential teaching skill set.
Facilitating classroom discussion	Classroom discussion is a one of the key pedagogies in health education and occurs in many forms with the purpose of developing students’ capabilities or skills and expanding students’ understanding, both shared and individual, of a specific concept or instructional goal.
Providing feedback to students	Feedback in its various forms is an essential teaching element to help students learn.
Adapting instruction to meet the needs of students	Addressing the diverse educational needs of individual students in today’s classrooms is a challenging task for teachers to master. The term adaptive teaching means that a teacher is responsive to the needs of students.
Developing decision-making skills in students	We believe that all health education topics and skills lead to decision making, and therefore it is important to embed it in each lesson and class period in some way.
Cluster 3:	Growing as a Teacher
Reflecting on teaching	Reflection should be purposeful and should result in maintenance of good teaching practices, refinement and a focus on improving practices and those that are less effective. Intentional decision-making is a critical teaching practice.
Developing as a teacher	You are always a student learning about teaching and who you are teaching.

Modified from Ward and Snyder (2022).

Our core practices meet Grossman et al.’s (2009) six characteristics of core practices, which

• occur with high frequency in teaching.

• novices can enact in classrooms across different curricula or instructional approaches.

• novices can actually begin to master.

• allow novices to learn more about students and about teaching.

• preserve the integrity and complexity of teaching.

• are research-based and have the potential to improve student achievement.

We do not see these practices as a final product. Rather, we see them as an evolving set of core teaching practices that should continue to be refined, empirically examined in health education contexts, and should achieve consensus among health education teacher educators.

Unpacking a Core Practice. Core practices are not just terms, ideas or values. Core practices specifically define the core knowledge and skills teachers need to be effective at their craft. In this section, we unpack two core practices, facilitating classroom discussions and teaching decision-making skills to students.

Facilitating a Classroom Discussion. Educators should have a deep understanding of skills related to effectively facilitating classroom discussions because this is a commonly used strategy in health education. Though discussions occur in classrooms every day, good classroom discussion requires knowledge, skill and practice by the teacher for it to be meaningful, relevant and effective. Witherspoon et al. (2016, p. 6) described the complexity of classroom discussion.

A classroom discussion is a sustained exchange between and among teachers and their students with the purpose of developing students’ capabilities or skills and/or expanding students’ understanding—both shared and individual—of a specific concept or instructional goal. Classroom discussions are characterized by high quality and high quantities of student talk. Teachers must ensure that discussions are built upon and revolve around both students’ contributions and the content at hand. In a discussion, the teacher’s role is to question students, take up, revoice, and press students’ ideas, structure and steer the conversation toward the learning goal(s), enable students to respond to one another’s ideas by stepping back to listen, moderate and facilitate students’ interactions, ensure that the content under discussion is represented accurately, and bring the discussion to a meaningful close.

From this description it is clear that discussions should not just occur — they take preparation. PSTs need to be able to prepare for, facilitate and close a discussion.

In health education, discussions are not only ways in which students can connect and engage with their peers, teacher and content, but they are great ways for students to practice skills, particularly decision making and communication. Beginning teachers and PSTs should know that there are many ways to facilitate discussions. Below we provide three examples of pedagogical techniques for discussion: gallery walk, affinity mapping and concentric circles.

Gallery Walk. In the gallery walk activity, students walk around the room visiting stations in small groups. As they walk, they may come to a station that has models or a poster that has a question that they can discuss. After discussing the question in their small group, they move on to the next station. At the end of the circuit, they can then discuss each question with the whole class.

Affinity Mapping. Begin by providing students with a broad question or problem that is likely to result in lots of different ideas, such as “What were the impacts of the recent COVID crisis?” or “How should we judge the believability of a web site?” Have students generate responses by writing ideas on Post-it notes (one idea per note) and placing them in no particular arrangement on a wall, whiteboard or poster board. Once a good number of ideas have been generated, have students begin grouping them into similar categories and then label the categories and begin to discuss why the ideas fit within each category, how the categories relate to one another, and so on.

Concentric Circles. Students form two circles, one inside circle and one outside circle. Each student on the inside is paired with a student on the outside; each pair faces each other. The teacher poses a question to the whole group and the pairs discuss their responses with each other. Then the teacher signals students to rotate and the students in the outside circle move one space to the right so they are standing in front of a new person. The teacher poses a new question and the process is repeated.

There are other components to classroom discussions, including asking questions and maintaining a discussion, in addition to other pedagogical discussion techniques. For these discussion techniques to work, it is clear that the teacher must prepare for discussion. To prepare, prior to teaching we recommend that PSTs (a) develop the discussion questions, (b) organize discussion materials (e.g., posters, stations), and (c) determine how to explain the discussion strategy to students. We suggest that PSTs should be taught specific discussion techniques so that they have choices in selecting which technique is best to use in particular settings so that they are confident enough that they can then adapt these techniques as they gain more proficiency. To become more proficient in these techniques, PSTs should be provided ample opportunities to practice their discussion facilitation skills.

Developing Student’s Decision-Making Skills. Another core practice that PSTs must master is developing decision-making skills in their students. Student capacity to make decisions is critical to their success in life, and life is full of opportunities to make decisions. Over time we learn about making decisions from trial and error, and we also learn the value of some decisions over others. Society expects adolescents to be able to cope with choices that life presents them on the basis of what they have learned at home or in school, yet most adolescents receive little or no formal training in the required decision-making skills, unless they receive some instruction on it in their health education curriculum. For this reason, we believe decision-making is one of the most important core practices. Most teachers and textbooks use a decision-making model to help students work through the process of decision making. Models allow students to practice decision making in a logical way so that it becomes clear how considered decisions occur. Though many decision-making models exist, it is less important which one is used. What matters more is that students use a model to inform their decisions. Ward and Snyder (2022) noted the following five pedagogical considerations of decision making that PSTs should be provided the opportunity to plan and practice.

Teach Students Active Listening Skills. Decision making is easier when students have the right information and some of that information comes from listening to others. Thus, the skills of active listening are a prerequisite for good decision making. When students use active listening, they focus on what a speaker is saying with the goal of understanding their message, comprehending the information, and responding thoughtfully. Active listening requires students to (a) maintain eye contact with the speaker, within cultural norms; (b) not interrupt the speaker; (c) repeat back key information to show they understand; (d) ask questions to seek clarification; and (e) listen to understand. Students need to understand that listening actively to others can inform students and help them make good decisions. A good source for ideas on teaching active listening is “The Value of Listening in the Classroom” (2020).

Teach Mindfulness. Teaching lessons on mindfulness has become increasingly commonplace in K–12 education, because mindfulness can counterbalance the anxiety and stress that so many students face. If students are unable to focus because they are anxious or hurried, they are less likely to make a good decision. Though mindfulness has many definitions, Jon Kabat-Zinn (1994), a pioneer of mindfulness practice, defined mindfulness as “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally” (p. 4). Mindful thinking can help students to filter out distractions and focus on the situation. This will lead to better decision making. Two good sources for ideas on teaching mindfulness are “Mindfulness for Kids” (n.d.) and “Health Moves Minds” (n.d.).

Let Students Live With Their Choices and Avoid Rescuing Them. This does not refer to situations were injury or harm could occur, but it does imply that we learn best through trial and error. Decision making grows stronger each time a student has to navigate the consequences of a good or poor decision. Consequences teach students the value of their decisions. Learning from experience is an essential life skill. However, there are other benefits to helping students learn from their decisions. Studies show that student decision making and choice are frequently listed as the most powerful motivating strategies a teacher can allow in the classroom (Quist & Gregory, 2019). When given choices by teachers, students often perceive classroom activities as more important because the decisions are meaningful and relevant to the students.

Recognize That Uncertainty Is Common to Decision Making. Uncertainty is common, and because of this, what appears to be a simple decision might have more nuance. Students experience uncertainty when they believe that a number of potential decisions or solutions may be correct or when they choose actions based on often imperfect observations, with unknown outcomes. The goal for students is not to avoid, reduce or fear uncertainty but to better understand it and its implications for their decisions.

Revisit and Reflect. Making decisions may not always lead to good outcomes, but learning from them does give the student the best way forward. Teachers must create classroom cultures that encourage students to be reflective. Such cultures include questioning and reflection activities including journaling, peer debriefing and discussion. Reexamining choices and having students reflect on their decision is an essential skill in learning from experience. Some good ideas for creating a reflective classroom can be found in Miller (2019).

Using Core Practices in Teacher Education. Core practices are grounded in practice-based teacher education (Ball & Forzani, 2009; Ward et al., 2018; Xie et al., 2021). Practice-based teacher education is a movement in education that attempts to place real-world experience or approximations of that experience in the forefront of teacher education. The movement emphasizes not only the study of the practice of teaching but practicing teaching both on-campus and in the field in different ways than have been done in the past. One difference is in the use of core practices that define, in part, the knowledge base PSTs need to begin teaching effectively and to be able to learn from that teaching.

We began this article noting three problems of teacher education: problems of complexity, enactment and adaptation. Practice-based teacher education and the use of core practices present a set of alternative practices to what we currently do in the name of teacher education. Teaching PSTs core practices is like playing sports. No one would expect a tennis player to become good after performing one serve. To have a good tennis serve performance, the player must practice the serve a great deal. Similarly, core practices require explicit teaching and a good number of opportunities to apply them. This addresses the enactment problem.

However, it is not simply a matter of frequent and more practice of teaching. PSTs should teach the same lesson more than once (Lampert, 2010; Ward et al., 2018). Teaching the same lesson to different peers or different students in schools allows PSTs to see how the lesson often varies from one class to another and differs in complexity. In so doing, these experiences teach the skill of adapting a core practice to meet differing needs of students. This addresses both the complexity and adaptation problems.

Because there are limits to the time PSTs spend in schools, they also need to practice on campus in scenarios that approximate the classroom settings in which they will find themselves teaching. Approximations require lessons being taught with similar duration and with peers or actual students in different contexts (e.g., different grade levels or simulations of students in class with cognitive delays or English as a second language, as well as variations in prior knowledge). This intentional variation specifically addresses the adaptation problem. Finally, practice-based teacher education also views the PST as a reflective practitioner, it is here that the third cluster of core practices that focuses on reflection and teacher development can be used to develop PSTs.

In summary, practice-based teacher education emphasizes the importance of rehearsing and repeatedly teaching the same lesson, as well as different lessons, to gain insight into lesson design and how to adapt lessons and instruction to meet the needs of students (Lampert, 2010; Ward et al., 2018).

Concluding Comments

The education of PSTs in health education requires a strong emphasis on teaching knowledge and skills that are found in core teaching practices. Core practices offer health teacher educators and health educators a set of teaching practices that can be mastered and then further refined by PSTs as they begin their careers. It allows teacher education programs to specifically define what they teach and to determine standards of competence for PSTs.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Phillip Ward

Phillip Ward ([email protected]) is a professor in the Department of Human Sciences at The Ohio State University in Columbus, OH.

Shonna Snyder

Shonna Snyder was an associate professor in the Department of Health, Sport and Physical Education at Gardner-Webb University in Boiling Springs, NC during the authorship of this article. She is now a research scientist with The Mast Cell Disease Society in Sterling MA.