Summary

Practice-based teacher education (PBTE) is an approach to preparing novice teachers that focuses on the importance of developing novices’ ability to enact teaching practices. Ambitious approaches to PBTE attend to the development of teacher belief, knowledge, and judgment but do so through work on practicing instructional routines that occur with frequency in the work of teaching (e.g., facilitating discussion, modeling). Some scholars of PBTE have emphasized the role of practices or common professional activities in PBTE, while others have foregrounded the importance of practicing teaching for the purpose of improvement. PBTE contrasts with other approaches to teacher education that focus on building teachers’ knowledge or beliefs without focusing on how that knowledge and belief gets instantiated in action.