Systematic Selection of Innovative Pedagogies in Teacher Education Courses and Practica

Introduction: Teaching As An Informed Practice

What makes any pedagogy innovative is how it creates a unique learning environment to assist a range of learners to achieve 21^st century learning outcomes. This definition is based on the stance of the authors which views instruction as an outcome-referenced, conditions-based activity (Ragan, Smith, & Curda, 2008). Different categories of learning outcomes exist including behavioral, cognitive, social, and affective. Achieving these outcomes, according to Gagné (1965), requires different internal conditions or states of mind that the learner brings to learning and external conditions or external influences, such as instruction and personal experiences. The issue for teachers remains of how to assist students to achieve these learning outcomes. Teaching involves determining what activities and experiences, based on the nature of the content to be learned and leaner characteristics, best support that learning.

Educators choose pedagogies to create learning environments which assist students to achieve specified learning outcomes. New forms of teaching or innovative pedagogies are not delivered in isolation but are complemented by other teaching models and strategies that address the nature of what is to be learned. Increasingly, 21^st century learning outcomes have been specified for higher order thinking such as critical thinking and problem solving. One example of an innovative pedagogy is Project-Based Learning (PBL), which is based on an outcome-referenced perspective focusing on the conditions and strategies for problem solving and supporting outcomes (Hung, Jonassen, & Liu, 2008). PBL taps complementary forms of external conditions or teaching models, such as inquiry, cooperative learning, simulation, cognitive structuring (e.g., advance organizers), and role play (Joyce, Weil, & Calhoun, 2014). Teaching includes other general purpose teaching strategies, such as review, classroom management, and re-teaching. Teacher education programs provide a collaborative educational venue where teacher educators, cooperating teachers, and preservice teachers implement and model innovative pedagogies. Another attribute to innovative pedagogies and the new technologies that may underlie them is that they provide a motivating topic for educators to explore and learn from each other.

This chapter describes a systematic approach to select these new forms of teaching by using a set of seven prompts or questions to guide their selection Another chapter in this Handbook written by the first author examines how to evaluate the use of these pedagogies during teaching and more formally after a sufficient test and formative revisions have taken place. This chapter supports one of the purposes for the Handbook in that public school teachers be responsive to changing student needs and demonstrate teacher effectiveness, as required by increasing pressures of accountability (Ronfeldt, Brockman, & Campbell, 2018). The conceptual approach to this chapter is that innovative pedagogies are selected, not in terms of novelty or what is currently in vogue, but to address an ongoing awareness of student characteristics and needs, and that new forms of teaching serve to assist these students to better understand and apply what they learn in school. A feature of such informed practice is the continual appraisal of who the students are and their needs, re-thinking learning outcomes, and how new forms of teaching support those students with those outcomes.