A major educational shift

To succeed in the classroom — both professionally and pedagogically — aspiring educators must equip themselves with core teaching skills that extend past mere content knowledge.

In Teaching Core Practices in Teacher Education, author Pam Grossman argues that “the field of teacher education is in the midst of a major shift — a turn away from an intense focus on the knowledge needed for teaching to a focus on the use of that knowledge in practice.” 

However, reinforcing the shift, which “better support[s] teachers in learning to enact teaching practices skillfully and knowledgeably in ways that support student learning,” means that educators need to emphasize the performance and classroom skills that help them connect to learners and, in turn, help learners connect to course curricula. Performance tasks can help boost teacher preparation and teaching skills that empower teachers to positively affect their students' lives.

Performance tasks can be crucial tools as they help educators with the pre-service development of essential teaching competencies. The reason? By giving teachers opportunities to practice their instructional skills, these tasks offer a wealth of feedback that pre-service educators can use to enhance teaching competencies and prepare themselves for real classroom challenges.  

Leveraging formative assessments

One of the main forms of feedback is formative assessments.

These continually test student performance throughout the school year as opposed to waiting until larger, end-of-year summative assessments. Formative assessments play a pivotal role in refining teaching skills. As educators consistently practice and prove their learning with formative performance assessments, they can find areas for improvement and receive tailored guidance from their peers and instructors within teacher-preparation programs.    

In addition, formative practice is transitive — it also benefits students. Some of the key classroom competencies reinforced with formative learning skills include the following: 

• Persuasive writing: In this writing style, writers try to convince readers to agree with their specific point of view. Doing so requires skillful rhetoric and facts as well as a strong personal connection: the more connected writers are to the topic, the more invested they’ll be in arguing for it. 
• Grapho-phonemic segmenting: This practice of breaking down words and concepts into smaller parts and sounds helps learners decode language elements before creating larger, more complex meanings from the words themselves. Furthermore, “accurately and efficiently assessing grapho-phonemic knowledge...enables teachers to identify the specific grapho-phonemic skills that students have mastered and those that they are lacking” in real time. 
• Fraction word problems: Used in mathematics classes, these problem sets translate fractions and fraction equations into real-world scenarios. Not only do they encourage a greater connection to the material itself, but they also require learners to draw correlations between different disciplines: using language arts and reading, for example, to do a math problem. 
• Scaffolding and differentiating: In the classroom, teachers meet diverse learners with unique challenges. Scaffolding and differentiating work, or assessing individual skills so teachers can tailor specific instructional adjustments, is one of the most powerful goals for pre-service educators as they prepare to teach diverse student populations.

Teaching is learning

The best teachers embrace continuous learning and growth.

Be open to discussing your process. Reflect on your own performance. Use rubrics for self-assessment. And embrace the potential of performance tasks as opportunities to refine your skills and create thriving learning environments. 

Ready to take the next step in your journey to becoming a teacher?