Investigating the Potential of Guided Practice With an Enactment Tool for Supporting Adaptive Performance

Abstract

Recently, attention has focused on identifying core instructional practices that could leverage novice teachers’ development of professional knowledge and skill. To help novices learn to implement these practices, there is also increasing interest in developing enactment tools that could translate abstract conceptual tasks into more concrete steps. Less attention, however, has been paid to understanding how novices might learn to use these tools adaptively in the context of practice. We address this issue by integrating a set of theoretical considerations that together serve as a model for investigating how novices could learn within a community of practice to use a specified elicitation sequence adaptively, guided by more experienced members in that community. In our results, we provide thematic categories for the problems that arose as novices used the sequence of questions and demonstrate how these problems afforded the teacher educator opportunities to connect novices’ work to a set of professional commitments that could guide their adaptive practice. In particular, we highlight how these opportunities arose in the midst of modifying the question sequence and investigating the consequences of its enactment. Although our analysis focuses on a particular question sequence, we see our results as relevant to the development of other forms of enactment tools for use in adaptive practice across a range of professional domains.

Notes

¹ Deliberate practice allows for repeated experiences in which the individual can attend to the critical aspects of the situation and incrementally improve his or her performance in response to knowledge of results, feedback, or both from a teacher.

² The first two authors of this study.

³ Recognizing a number instantly without using other mathematical processes (Clements, 1999).

⁴ Analytic vignettes are created through descriptive details of an event, which are chosen deliberately to highlight the interpretive point being made (Erickson, 1986).

⁵ For more information about 10 frames and the Quick Images activity, see “Data Sources.”

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a grant from the Spencer Foundation.