Katrien Goossens is a teacher trainer and researcher at Education & Development, University College Leuven-Limburg (UCLL) in Belgium. Katrien has experience in practice-based scientific topic and often works with teachers and schools in her research projects.
Starting Up Adaptive Expertise in Pre-Service Teacher Education
Workshop
Co-presenting with Hilde Stroobants
As soon as we start laying foundations for routine expertise in teaching, we can, and should, build strong foundations for adaptive expertise as well. Adaptive experts strive to find a balance between efficiency and adaptation. For oncoming teachers that aspiration demands a continuing meta-cognitive exercise which we facilitate through a number of reflective practices.
In UCLL’s ECE Teacher Education, we do this from early on and throughout initial teacher education. The kind of learning, that allows for nuanced and flexible thinking, requires modesty and mindfulness in how we write course materials and how we speak of theory and practice. From the start of the first year student teachers are introduced to different education philosophies and practices so they will think about how they and others perceive education and their varied roles in it.
Active use of these perspectives helps them build argumentation for their own choices in practice. On a regular basis, students need to approach one case from different theoretical frameworks and see the alternative paths these perspectives provide. Growing attention to student agency, also in very young children, led us to build in practices that support student teachers to document children’s learning and build from there. All of these efforts are further elaborated in action research that looks to improve the impact on children’s learning processes. When they enter the workforce, they have the building blocks to build adaptive expertise into their own contexts.
In this workshop, we present ways in which we facilitate adaptive expertise and discuss ways in which these initiatives can be transferred to other areas of teacher education.
