Framework for Teaching Practice: A Brief

History of an Idea

PAM GROSSMAN
Stanford University

This article represents a short history of a set of ideas and how these ideas
were taken up by others in the very way their creators might have hoped.
This happy occurrence is a rare one; all too often, ideas either wither
away or are taken up in ways that distort the original vision. This story,
however, suggests how ideas around teaching teachers can be taken up
and developed in practice, with real consequences for children and
teachers alike.
The story begins with a chapter by Deborah Ball and David Cohen
(1999) entitled “Developing Practice, Developing Practitioners.” In this
chapter, Ball and Cohen argued for the importance of grounding profes-
sional education in practice, not necessarily by locating professional edu-
cation in schools but by making the work of practitioners at the center of
professional study. Their vision of professional education owes a debt to
John Dewey’s (1904/1965) conception of the laboratory approach to
preparing teachers, in which those learning to teach become serious stu-
dents of teaching. In his article, Dewey cautioned against typical models
of student teaching, which favored extensive time observing a limited
range of practice, and argued for opportunities for novice teachers to use
the school setting as a laboratory for intensive and focused exploration
of student thinking. Ball and Cohen built on this idea by advocating the
value of using artifacts from practice—student work, classroom video,
and so on—as the foundation for building knowledge about teaching.
Such a conception of professional education requires access to rich
representations of practice, opportunities to investigate the complexity

Teachers College Record Volume 113, Number 12, December 2011, pp. 2836–2843
Copyright © by Teachers College, Columbia University
0161-4681
 Framework for Teaching Practice 2837

of teaching offline, as it were. And, perhaps not surprisingly, Ball and

Magdalene Lampert had already created such an archive through the
MATH materials. These materials included videos on an entire year of
math instruction in a third- and a fifth-grade classroom, taught respec-
tively by Ball and Lampert; the materials also included teachers’ plans
and reflections, scans of student notebooks, transcripts of class sessions,
and other instructional materials. In their book on this work, Lampert
and Ball (1998) argued for a pedagogy of investigation in which novices
would be given opportunities to pose questions regarding student think-
ing in math or classroom discourse and then use this rich set of materi-
als to try to answer those questions systematically. Through this process,
students would both learn about the teaching of math and become, in
Dewey’s terms, students of teaching.
This vision of professional education was certainly grounded in the
work of practitioners. The pedagogy of investigation described in the
book promoted a stance of professional inquiry and a healthy respect for
the necessity of grounding claims in actual evidence. Although these
investigations enriched the thinking of novice teachers, they did not nec-
essarily equip them to enact this kind of teaching in classrooms them-
selves. They remained students of teaching.
In 2003, my colleagues and I began a study of what it meant to teach
practice in the context of professional education for entering the teach-
ing, clergy, and clinical psychology fields. Our choice of professions was
guided by David Cohen’s conception of “professions of human improve-
ment” (2005) and our desire to focus on professions that include rela-
tional practices, practices that depend on the relationship between
practitioner and client to succeed. We were curious about how different
professions addressed the common challenges of preparing novices for
relational practice. We were particularly interested in how these profes-
sions prepared novices for what we described as the “contingent, interac-
tive” aspects of practice. How do you prepare novice therapists to
respond to a client’s unanticipated revelation or novice teachers to
respond in the moment to a student’s novel idea?
This 3-year study and the many hours spent observing courses designed
to teach novices to engage in complex professional work led to a frame-
work for describing the teaching of practice (Grossman et al., 2009). The
framework discusses the use of representations, decompositions, and
approximations of practice in professional education. Representations of
practice include all the different ways in which the work of practitioners
is made visible to novices during professional education. Such represen-
tations include everything from the stories told by practitioners about
practice, to written narratives and cases of practice, to videos of actual
2838 Teachers College Record

practice. Representations also include artifacts from practice, including

case records of clients, lesson plans, student work, and live observations
of practitioners, be they in field experience or observation of live therapy
from behind a one-way mirror.
Representations of practice in teaching vary in important ways, from
brief narrative accounts of a classroom dilemma (e.g., Silverman, Welty,
& Lyon, 1995) to comprehensive records of a full year of instruction in a
single teacher’s classroom, as described earlier (Lampert & Ball, 1998).
Features of these representations have consequences for what novices are
able to see and learn about practice. In investigating teacher education,
we might ask what facets of teaching practice are visible in these repre-
sentations used by a program and which facets remain invisible. Video
representations of an individual teacher’s classroom may allow viewers to
see the interactions between teacher, student, and content that make up
the lesson, but not make visible the planning that preceded the lesson, or
the interactions with colleagues and curriculum materials that shaped
that planning. Without additional information, novices might conclude
that teachers must be entirely self-reliant in designing lessons. In the
MATH materials, Lampert and Ball include their lesson plans, as well as
the student notebooks in which they record the content of the lesson, but
little is represented about their interactions with the classroom teacher
who teaches the students other subjects. No representation can be com-
plete; as Jorge Luis Borges wryly noted, if a map could include all the rich
detail of the actual topography, it soon ceases to be a map at all. The
important questions in looking at representations of practice include the
nature, range, and use of these representations across a professional edu-
cation curriculum—what they enable novices to see and learn and what
they leave opaque.
Learning from representations of practice, on their own, presents chal-
lenges for novices. One of these challenges is knowing how to look, what
to look for, or how to interpret what is observed (Dewey, 1904/1965;
Feiman-Nemser & Buchmann, 1985). Observing seamless classroom
management, novices may miss the numerous routines that at some point
the teacher established with her students. They may conclude that class-
room management is more a matter of charisma than craft. Similarly,
novices may not know what to attend to in looking at interactions
between therapists and clients, in the unfolding of a set of math problems
during a math lesson, or in an interview between a rabbi and a grieving
congregant. For students to learn to engage in complex practice, they
must first be able to distinguish the different components that go into
that practice.
We refer to this work as the “decomposition” of practice—breaking
 Framework for Teaching Practice 2839

down complex practice into its constituent parts for the purposes of
teaching and learning. Decomposing practice enables students both to
“see” and to enact practice more effectively. Some examples of the
decomposition of practice we have observed include focusing on lesson
planning in teacher education, teaching aspects of speech and delivery
for preachers, and targeting the use of self-disclosure in therapy during
the preparation of therapists. In all instances, these represent simply a
component of a larger practice (planning, homiletics, establishing a ther-
apeutic alliance), but a component that is essential to the work of the
professional.
The ability to decompose practice depends on the existence of a lan-
guage and structure for describing practice—what we’ve described as a
grammar of practice. Without such a grammar, it is difficult to name the
parts or to know how the components are related to one another. The
current efforts to create observational protocols for teaching, including
protocols such as Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS; Pianta,
La Paro, & Stuhlman, 2004), Framework for Teaching (Danielson, 2007),
and the Protocol for Language Arts Teaching Observation (Grossman et
al., 2010), all represent such grammars of practice and identify con-
stituent parts of teaching practice.
In making facets of practice visible to novices, decompositions of prac-
tice in professional education can help develop professional vision
(Goodwin, 1994) or “disciplined perception” of practice (Stevens & Hall,
1998). According to Stevens, “Disciplined perception is a set of coordi-
nated practices through which people perceive and interpret the world
in discipline-specific ways” (Stevens & Hall, p. 111). To develop such dis-
ciplined perception of a complex practice among novices, instructors
must possess a set of disciplinary categories for describing practice and,
during instruction, focus students’ attention on these components of
practice. By decomposing complex practices, professional educators can
help students learn to attend to essential elements of a practice.
These decompositions also help support students as they learn to enact
complex practices. By focusing on one component of a more complex
practice, novices have opportunities to work on a more discrete set of
moves or strategies. For example, in the preparation of clinical psycholo-
gists, we saw instructors focus on how to establish a therapeutic alliance
with a client, which was then decomposed into a smaller set of both ver-
bal and nonverbal practices. We saw multiple lessons on how to respond
to resistance, which was decomposed further into moves such as siding
with the negative or “rolling with resistance” (see Grossman et al., 2007,
for more details). Clinical psychology students then practiced these
moves, both in and out of class. Identifying such discrete moves—part of
2840 Teachers College Record

the decomposition of practice—allows for targeted practice or approxi-

mations of practice.
Virtually all professional education includes opportunities for students
to engage in approximations of practice. In activities ranging from role-
plays to moot court and student teaching, approximations require stu-
dents to engage in practice that is related, but not identical, to the work
of practicing professionals. Simulating certain kinds of practice within
the professional education classroom can allow students to experiment
with new practices under easier conditions. Approximations can also pro-
vide opportunities for novices to engage in “deliberate practice”
(Ericsson, 2002) of particularly challenging components of practice. In
his work on expertise, Ericsson argued that what differentiates high-level
amateurs from experts in areas like sports or music is not how much time
they spend practicing, but how they practice; experts spend more time
on focused repetition of the more challenging aspects of a task.
Approximations of practice are often pedagogical simplifications of
practice (Rose, 1989). By focusing on a specific component of the prac-
tice, instructors can help simplify the demands of the work. For example,
in preparing rabbinical students to conduct funerals, an instructor first
focused them on learning to listen carefully to a grieving congregant and
then, using what they had learned, craft a eulogy. In this case, the instruc-
tor conducted the actual interview, allowing students to focus on their
ability to listen and to incorporate what they learned into a eulogy.
Similarly, the role-plays we saw in clinical psychology stripped away many
aspects of client–therapist interaction to target a specific technique. Over
time, students were expected to incorporate more and more of these
components into their work.
Approximations also provide the opportunity for specific and targeted
feedback; we often saw instructors stop a role-play to provide feedback on
some aspect of the practice and then ask the novice therapist to “re-play”
the interaction. In the buzz and complexity of classroom life, it is virtu-
ally impossible to “pause” interactions to provide such specific feedback,
which makes these approximations unique learning opportunities for
novices.
Conducting this research had an almost immediate effect on my own
practice as a teacher educator. Through our research, I began to realize
how seldom we had students in teacher education approximate the more
contingent, interactive aspects of practice, instead focusing their atten-
tion on approximating lesson planning and unit planning. Although I
had always used the pedagogy of the model lesson, in which teacher edu-
cators modeled some component of teaching, I began to realize that such
approaches, although providing important representations of teaching,
 Framework for Teaching Practice 2841

left novices in the role of student rather than teacher. I began to experi-
ment with a variety of approximations of practice, particularly around
learning to engage students in rigorous academic discussions,1 and I
began to advocate for the use of more fully developed pedagogies of
enactment in teacher education (Grossman & McDonald, 2008).
The rest of the articles in this issue provide additional examples of
these efforts to build a more robust vision of teacher education that pro-
vides rich opportunities for students to learn through carefully designed
approximations of practice. Teacher educators at the University of
Michigan have taken up these ideas about decomposition and approxi-
mation in a serious and disciplined way, focusing specifically on helping
prospective elementary teachers learn to lead discussions in both reading
and math. Learning to lead rich classroom discussions represents the
kind of complex practice that is difficult to learn to enact and yet has
enormous payoff in terms of student learning. The work at the University
of Michigan is subject specific, respecting the ways in which this particu-
lar practice may vary with the subject matter being taught. The articles
provide rich descriptions of what a teacher education program, built
around this framework for the teaching of practice, might look like.
In her poem, “The Author to Her Book,” Anne Bradstreet describes
her poetry as her imperfect child that has been sent out into the world
and asks that the world treat her creation kindly. She acknowledges the
risk of sending what she describes as the “ill-formed offspring of my fee-
ble brain” into the world and her hope that others will respond. When
academics launch ideas into the pages of a journal, like Anne Bradstreet,
we can only hope for their survival. To see the ideas nurtured, developed,
and brought to fruition by others is perhaps the greatest gift a scholar can
receive.

Note

1. See http://gallery.carnegiefoundation.org/collections/quest/collections/sites/
grossman_pam/ for a representation of this work)

References

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Nisan & O. Schremer (Eds.), Educational deliberations (pp. 278–294). Jerusalem, Israel:
Keter.
2842 Teachers College Record

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PAM GROSSMAN is the Nomellini-Olivier Professor of Education at the

Stanford University School of Education. She completed her undergrad-
uate degree in English at Yale University and her Ph.D. from Stanford
University. She has published broadly in the areas of teacher education
and professional education more broadly, teacher knowledge, and the
teaching of English in secondary schools. Most recently, she studied path-
ways into teaching in New York City schools, focusing on the features of
preparation that affect student achievement. Building on this work, she
has investigated the classroom practices of middle-school English teach-
ers that are associated with student achievement. She is a member of the
 Framework for Teaching Practice 2843

National Academy of Education and currently serves as the faculty direc-

tor of the Center to Support Excellence in Teaching. A former high
school English teacher, Grossman also teaches the prospective English
teachers in Stanford’s teacher education program.