pre service teacher essay

Changing Expectations for the K-12 Teacher Workforce: Policies, Preservice Education, Professional Development, and the Workplace (2020)

Chapter: 5 preparing teachers to meet new expectations: preservice teacher education, 5 preparing teachers to meet new expectations: preservice teacher education.

As described in the previous chapters, student demographics and expectations for student learning have changed dramatically in the past two decades, and with them, the demands placed on teachers. Preservice teacher education—a vast and varied enterprise—plays a key role in preparing teacher candidates for these new conditions and increased responsibilities. Whether present approaches to teacher education fulfill that role well, and whether or not teacher education has changed in response to changes in expectations for students, have been the subjects of considerable debate. Given the size of the teacher workforce and the sheer scale of teacher education in the United States, it is perhaps not a surprise to find variation in the quality of programs or in their impact on individual graduates. Some past research has yielded critiques of teacher education as a weak intervention, largely ineffective in persuading teacher candidates of the need for deep specialized preparation or providing them with a sufficient understanding of the students they would likely be teaching ( Book, Byers, and Freeman, 1983 ; Olsen, 2008 ). Policy makers, 1 academics, and advocacy groups alike have issued sweeping critiques ( Levine, 2006 ; National Council on Teacher Quality [NCTQ], 2018).

Such all-encompassing critiques do not provide much empirically based guidance on the ways teacher preparation could be improved. There is evidence that some features of teacher preparation can make a difference with respect to teachers’ sense of efficacy ( Darling-Hammond, Chung, and

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1 For remarks by Education Secretary Arne Duncan at Teachers College, Columbia University, see https://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/teacher-preparation-reforming-uncertain-profession .

Frelow, 2002 ; Ronfeldt, Schwarz, and Jacob, 2014 ) and with teachers’ retention in the profession ( Ingersoll, Merrill, and May, 2014 ; Ronfeldt, Schwarz, and Jacob, 2014 ). For example, a requirement of a capstone project as part of teacher preparation is associated with teachers’ students exhibiting greater test score gains ( Boyd et al., 2009 ).

States and institutions have undertaken initiatives to strengthen the quality of preservice preparation and to develop systems of teacher accountability based on outcome measures (e.g., see Chief Council of State School Officers [CCSSO], 2017 ). Case study research supplies persuasive examples of programs and practices with the capacity to shape the knowledge, practices, and dispositions of novice teachers ( Boerst et al., 2011 ; Darling-Hammond and Oakes, 2019 ; Lampert et al., 2013 ). Finally, the availability of large administrative datasets in some states has enabled quantitative research that seeks to uncover the relationship between a teacher’s enrollment in a particular program and the learning subsequently demonstrated by that teacher’s students. Although the last of these developments has been controversial on multiple grounds, it may spur additional research that could fruitfully inform improvements in preservice education. 2

This chapter provides a “broad strokes” characterization of teacher education opportunities to meet new expectations and respond to changing student demographics, drawing on scholarship about what does happen in teacher preparation programs while also noting arguments about what should happen in teacher preparation programs (e.g., CCSSO, 2017 ; Darling-Hammond and Oakes, 2019 ; Espinoza et al., 2018 ), particularly with regard to producing novice teachers who are prepared to be successful with all students. It explores the range of visions promoted by teacher preparation programs and describes scholarship about preservice teacher preparation in general as well as highlights particular programs that are engaging in innovative approaches that show promise for recruiting—and supporting—teacher candidates from a diverse range of backgrounds.

The chapter also describes mechanisms for influencing preservice teacher education, provides illustrative cases of institutions and programs that represent deliberate and strategic responses to both the demographic changes and the evolving shifts in expectations for teaching and learning, and describes policies and practices designed to recruit, prepare, and retain teachers of color. It also highlights reform efforts in teacher education in recent years.

2 Goldhaber, Liddle, and Theobald (2012 , p. 34) conclude: “There is no doubt that evaluating teacher training programs based on the value-added estimates of the teachers they credential is controversial. It is true that the value-added program estimates do not provide any direct guidance on how to improve teacher preparation programs. However, it is conceivable that it is not possible to move policy toward explaining why we see these program estimates until those estimates are first quantified. Moreover, it is certainly the case that some of the policy questions that merit investigation . . . require additional data.”

In this chapter and the following two chapters, discussion is framed around the capacity of teacher education, inservice professional development, and the school workplace to:

• Recruit, prepare, and retain a diverse teacher workforce.
• Prepare and support teachers to engage students in the kind of conceptually rich, intellectually ambitious, and meaningful experience encompassed by the term “deeper learning.”
• Prepare and support teachers to work with a student population that is ethnically, racially, linguistically, culturally, and economically diverse.
• Prepare teachers to pursue equity and social justice in schools and communities.

The committee acknowledges that these goals of teacher education are closely intertwined. In particular, it is noted throughout Chapters 2 and 3 that achieving goals of “deeper learning” will require the capacity to work effectively within a diverse landscape of students, families, and communities.

A SPRAWLING LANDSCAPE

This section provides a brief overview of what might best be described (borrowing a phrase from Cochran-Smith et al., 2016 ) as a “sprawling landscape.” Amid that sprawling landscape are the contributions and limitations of existing research. This chapter identifies cases in which preservice preparation programs seem particularly well positioned to attract and prepare teachers with the capacity and disposition to meet high expectations for an increasingly diverse student population. The chapter highlights programs that are part of colleges and universities as well as programs that have evolved in organizations outside institutions of higher education.

The Scale and Variability of Preservice Teacher Education

As noted above and described in Chapter 4 , preservice teacher education is marked by a range of pathways into teaching, which vary considerably from state to state. The different interpretations of the term “alternative route” complicate how to analyze and report trends in preparation. The National Research Council ( NRC; 2010 ) report Preparing Teachers: Building Evidence for Sound Policy concluded that distinctions between “traditional” and “alternative” routes are not clearly defined, and that more variation exists within the “traditional” and “alternative” categories than between them. States vary in the definition of “alternative” they use

in federal Title II reports, and many of the “alternative” routes included in those reports are based in institutions of higher education. Yet it is worth noting that while the past 20–30 years have witnessed a proliferation of “alternative routes” (however defined—within or outside of institutions of higher education [IHEs]), the majority of prospective teachers continue to be prepared by traditional programs within IHEs. Eighty-eight percent of the organizations that offer teacher preparation programs are 2- and 4-year colleges and universities, including minority-serving institutions (see Box 5-1 ). The remaining 12 percent are school districts, nonprofit organizations, and other entities that run state-approved alternative teacher preparation programs. Alternative routes to teacher certification tend to enroll more racially diverse student populations than traditional programs ( U.S. Department of Education, 2016 ). Finally, state-level data in California reveal the

prominent place now occupied by online teacher preparation programs; in data reported for 2016–2017, five of the top six producers in that state were online programs, and the top five online producers accounted for one-third of all completers. 3

Like K–12 education in the United States, most preservice teacher education (with the exception of some online programs) is varied and localized: programs differ considerably among and within states. Programs are accredited by the states, which vary in terms of their requirements for preservice teacher candidates ( Cochran-Smith et al., 2016 ; NRC, 2010 ). Even within states, where state standards and regulations govern program

3 Detailed information can be found at https://www.ctc.ca.gov/docs/default-source/educator-prep/standards/adopted-tpes-2016.pdf?sfvrsn=0 .

accreditation and teacher licensure, programs of teacher preparation vary in size, duration, curriculum, and the nature of field experience ( NRC, 2010 ).

The discussion that follows describes general characteristics and trends in preservice teacher education over the past 20 years. It focuses in particular on characteristics that bear on the likelihood that teacher preparation programs will successfully recruit a more diverse teacher workforce and that they will develop the kind of curriculum, pedagogy, and learning experiences that are responsive to changing demographics and expectations.

What makes this task challenging is that the field lacks empirical evidence about what programs are effective, why, and for whom. Most state data systems fail to link preservice teacher candidates to inservice outcomes. Part of the problem has to do with the disagreement about what constitutes effectiveness (i.e., should indicators of effectiveness be student test scores, teacher retention rates, or closing achievement gaps among groups of students, or some other measure?). The NRC report Preparing Teachers (2010) called for research on the development of links between teacher preparation and outcomes for students, but that call has yet to be fulfilled. The problem also has to do with the difficulty in examining the causal effectiveness of teacher preparation programs, given all the confounding variables—including individual teacher traits—that might explain teacher success. The chapter instead examines qualitative research that dives deeply into program aims, characteristics of programs, innovations in practice, and accountability of programs.

The Visions of Teaching and Teachers Conveyed by Programs

The field lacks national data about the nature/substance of teacher preparation programs and the degree to which they have changed in any collective way over time, clearly signaling a critical area for research. There are, however, indicators of general shifts and developments in teacher preparation. For example, as highlighted in Chapter 2 , the past two decades can be characterized as an “era of accountability” in education generally, and in teacher education specifically, in which federal, state, and professional association policy initiatives have been aimed at measuring outcomes such as student achievement ( Cochran-Smith et al., 2018 ). This focus on outcomes is a shift from previous accountability emphases on measuring inputs ( Cochran-Smith et al., 2018 ). Even if national data are lacking, there is evidence that increased attention to standards, accreditation, and the development and growing influence of new players committed to advancing equity and justice, such as the Education Deans for Justice and Equity ( Cochran-Smith et al., 2018 ), have led to changes in teacher preparation, as reflected by case studies of programs.

A report by the National Academy of Education ( Feuer et al., 2013 ) describes the variety of organizations that conduct evaluations of the quality of teacher preparation programs in the United States, including the federal government, state governments, national organizations (e.g., accreditors), private organizations (e.g., NCTQ), and individual programs themselves. It notes that selection or development of appropriate measures is a key component of designing a study of teacher preparation program quality. The measures might include assessments of program graduates’ knowledge and skills, observations of their teaching practice, or assessments of what their pupils learn. Measures of program features could include analyses of course syllabi, qualifications of program faculty, and program uses of educational technology. The report describes general strengths and limitations of varying types of measures.

High-profile reports on teacher education (e.g., Educating School Teachers [ Levine, 2006 ] and Powerful Teacher Education: Lessons from Exemplary Programs [ Darling-Hammond, 2006 ]) have singled out specific programs as exemplars of excellence. Whereas these programs vary greatly in terms of program design, it is important to recognize that judgments about what constitutes “excellence” are often based on subjective assessments of what teacher preparation ought to look like rather than empirical, causal evidence on the effectiveness of teacher education.

Other reports describe programs that highlight particular approaches to program design, such as close connections to local communities ( Guillen and Zeichner, 2018 ; Lee, 2018 ). Scholars looking at program similarities and differences across countries also have selected and described programs because of particular features they had, such as an intention to be coherent ( Jenset, Klette, and Hammerness, 2018 ). The large international comparative study of preparation of mathematics teachers for elementary and lower secondary school ( Tatto et al., 2012 ) described features of nationally representative samples of teacher preparation programs. All of these studies provide more information about what goes on in teacher preparation, but none can support causal claims about the effects of programs or program features on desired outcomes.

In the recent volume Preparing Teachers for Deeper Learning Darling-Hammond and Oakes (2019) identify seven “exemplars” that include public and private colleges and universities, a teacher residency program, and a “new graduate school of education” embedded in a charter management organization (see Box 5-2 ). These exemplars as described in the volume suggest that they are aligned with the five principles of deeper learning: (1) learning that is developmentally grounded and personalized; (2) learning that is contextualized; (3) learning that is applied and transferred; (4) learning that occurs in productive communities of practice; and (5) learning that is equitable and oriented to social justice ( Darling-Hammond and

Oakes, 2019 , pp. 13–14). The programs are diverse across many axes but all “have track records of developing teachers who are strongly committed to all students’ learning—and to ensuring, especially, that students who struggle to learn can succeed” ( Darling-Hammond and Oakes, 2019 , p. 25). Common features of these programs are that they have a coherent set of courses and clinical experience (these programs have intensive relationships with schools and carefully matched student teaching placements that share the programs’ commitments to deeper learning and equity); instructors model powerful practices rather than lecture and teach through textbooks; there is a strong connection between theory and practice; and they use performance assessments to evaluate teacher candidates’ learning (pp. 323–324). Interpretation of key terms, such as “coherent,” “intensive relationship,” and “powerful practice,” are still matters of judgment.

Pondering the question of what would constitute a “strong intervention” in preservice teacher education requires considering the conception of teachers and teaching conveyed by teacher preparation programs. Preparing

Teachers ( NRC, 2010 , p. 44) notes, “All teacher preparation programs presumably have the goal of preparing excellent teachers, but a surprising variation is evident in their stated missions.” The sheer scale of preservice teacher education in the United States, combined with the fact that teacher preparation is governed at the state level, suggests wide variation in the degree to which a distinctive and coherent vision undergirds a given program. Although many web-based descriptions provide only vague and generic portraits of a program’s conception of teachers and teaching, some institutions and programs articulate a goal to recruit and prepare teacher candidates who fit a strongly conceptualized and distinctive vision of teaching, and describe a program designed to embody that vision.

Program Coherence and Integration

Programs of teacher education confront the challenge of preparing prospective teachers for a complex and multi-faceted professional role, one that requires not only specialized knowledge related to the subjects, grades, and students they are likely to teach but also the capacity to assume responsibilities beyond the classroom and to engage in productive communication with professionals in other specializations (social work, school psychology, health professions). Yet long-standing criticisms of teacher education point to its fragmented or “siloed” character as a limitation on the quality of preparation experienced by teacher candidates ( Ball, 2000 ; Grossman, Hammerness, and McDonald, 2009a ; Harvey et al., 2010 ; Lanier and Little, 1986 ; Scruggs, Mastropieri, and McDuffie, 2007 ; Stone and Charles, 2018 ). This siloed nature takes the form of university coursework disconnected from clinical field experience; classroom teachers being trained separately from special education teachers, social workers, school psychologists, or other specialists focused on the development and well-being of students; elementary teachers prepared separately from early childhood educators, or from middle and high school teachers; and preservice preparation segmented from induction experiences and ongoing professional development. Achieving a conceptually coherent and experientially integrated program proves challenging for teacher education programs; Darling-Hammond terms this “probably the most difficult aspect of constructing a teacher education program” (2006, p. 305), but also underscores the importance of providing teacher candidates an “almost seamless experience of learning to teach” (p. 306).

The most prominent efforts to bridge the silos in the past two decades center on strengthening the relationship between university coursework and clinical practice, and on enhancing the quality of student teachers’ field experiences. These efforts respond most directly to complaints that candidates receive little help in bridging theory and practice in their preparation, with training in content knowledge separate from training in classroom

management and pedagogy ( Ball, 2000 ). Some programs are addressing the chasm between university coursework and clinical practice by situating university courses within school sites ( Zeichner, 2010 ), with results some scholars see as promising ( Hodges and Baum, 2019 ). National associations have taken steps to promote higher quality approaches to clinical experience, closely integrated with other components of teacher preparation, as reflected most recently in the “proclamations” issued by AACTE’s Clinical Practice Commission (2018) .

CHARACTERISTICS OF TEACHER CANDIDATES

Every occupation must find ways of attracting newcomers to its ranks. The individuals who enroll in programs of teacher preparation bring with them a view of teaching as an occupation, and a set of experiences, perspectives, and motivations that shape their decision to enroll. Three developments in the past 20 years deserve particular attention, as they may shape both the capacity and motivation of new teachers to respond to changing student demographics and to expectations for teaching and learning in the 21st century. The committee offers a few illustrations of initiatives that have been started; however, the examples highlighted represent a small subset. Given time constraints, the committee was unable to offer a comprehensive review of all national efforts.

First, individuals who are now becoming teachers, with the possible exception of career changers (see Box 5-3 ), likely attended school during the era of test-based accountability. Their ideas of what it means to teach—the goals of learning, the nature of classroom instruction, the form and role of assessment, the relationships between teachers and students—may have been influenced strongly by the kinds of accountability-based instruction that evolved in the wake of No Child Left Behind (NCLB; see Chapters 2 and 3 ). Elementary instruction in particular shifted under NCLB to focus increasingly on math and reading at the expense of social studies, science, and the arts, and to emphasize narrowly defined, standardized forms of assessment ( Dee and Jacob, 2010 ; Dee, Jacob, and Schwartz, 2013 ).

A second development conceives of teaching as short-term public service. The advent of Teach For America (TFA) introduced the premise that “that young, highly educated individuals will stimulate achievement and motivation in low-performing schools, even if they remain only a short period; a corollary but more implicit premise is that high turnover of such teachers will do no harm to students or schools, presuming that programs and schools are able to recruit a steady supply” ( Little and Bartlett, 2010 , p. 310). Although teachers recruited by TFA and by similar recruitment efforts (including the hiring of overseas-trained teachers) represent a small percentage of the teacher workforce (see Chapter 4 ), they are concentrated

in high-minoritized and high-poverty schools and districts ( Bartlett, 2014 ; Clotfelder, Ladd, and Vigdor, 2005 ). More important than their numbers may be the staying power of the institutional logic of teaching as short-term service rather than a career for which one requires in-depth preparation and ongoing opportunity to learn (see Chapter 4 ).

A third development of the past two decades entails efforts to recruit a more diverse pool of teacher candidates, with respect to both teachers’ demographic characteristics (more teachers of color and male teachers) and teachers’ ability to help remedy chronic shortages in STEM fields, special education, and bilingual education (as discussed in Chapter 4 ). A report issued by the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education (AACTE) ( King and Hampel, 2018 ) identifies several initiatives intended to diversify the workforce, including Federal TEACH grants, state-level scholarships, foundation-supported initiatives, and AACTE initiatives. Most supply financial incentives or supports, but AACTE has also adopted the idea of a Networked Improvement Community to help institutions increase the number of Black and Hispanic/Latino men (see Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 2019 ). TFA’s current teacher corps is now half people of color ( Teach For America, 2019 ), with active recruitment from MSIs, reflecting the organization’s success in meeting one of the workforce’s top agenda items.

PREPARING TEACHERS TO ENGAGE STUDENTS IN DEEPER LEARNING

As described in Chapter 3 , teaching for deeper learning arguably requires teachers to have deep command of content knowledge (i.e., disciplinary knowledge) and specialized content knowledge for teaching (i.e., knowing how to teach disciplinary knowledge and practices), as well as strong practical training in what it means to engage and empower learners from diverse communities through culturally relevant education. Intentional, purposeful instruction in disciplinary learning is critical to developing students’ deep learning. Deeper learning also involves cultivating the disposition and ability to work effectively with a diverse population of students and families.

However, the constant refrain that teachers must be able to serve “all students” tends to emphasize academic competencies and render opaque some of the complex issues entailed in working for equity and social justice both in and beyond the classroom that in fact impact academic success ( Cochran-Smith et al., 2016 ; Darling-Hammond, 2006 ). Some “deeper learning” documents focus learning outcomes principally on academic competencies, often characterizing this as a pursuit of “excellence.” A notable example of this can be observed in the creation of particular standards such as computer science (e.g., Grover, Pea, and Cooper, 2015 ). In contrast, the five principles identified in the Darling-Hammond and Oakes (2019) book Preparing Teachers for Deeper Learning explicitly reference learning for equity and social justice. A substantial body of research suggests that each of these aims—achieving depth of understanding and skill, and catalyzing

equity and social justice—present daunting challenges and tensions that may be compounded by the tendency to address “excellence” and “equity” as divergent rather than convergent aspects of an equitable learning ecology ( Khalil and Kier, 2018 ).

Having acknowledged this dilemma, and having underscored the intersection of the preparation goals identified here, this section concentrates on approaches that teacher preparation programs have developed to supply novice teachers with deep specialized content knowledge for teaching ( Ball, Thames, and Phelps, 2008 ) and with the ability to design and enact instruction that engages students in rich, complex, and authentic tasks. Three developments are highlighted: the movement to focus on professional practice, with particular focus on “core” or “high leverage” practices (and critiques of that movement); field experiences; and innovations in teacher education pedagogy.

Practice-Based Teacher Education

As described in Chapter 3 , developing the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to support an increasingly diverse set of learners to engage in deeper learning requires significant shifts in what teaching looks and sounds like in most U.S. classrooms. It can be challenging to support preservice teachers in shifting their conceptions of instruction so as to be able to teach in ways substantially different from those experienced as K–12 students. Over the past two decades, a growing appreciation for the multi-faceted and specialized nature of teachers’ knowledge has been joined to a richer conceptualization of the complexities of professional practice (see Box 5-4 ). Shulman (1987) introduced a taxonomy of teacher knowledge that in turn stimulated a substantial body of empirical research (especially on the nature of “pedagogical content knowledge”) as well as further conceptual refinements ( Ball, Thames, and Phelps, 2008 ; Gess-Newsome, 2015 ).

In a widely cited essay, Ball and Cohen (1999) present a compelling case for why this multi-faceted and specialized knowledge requires professional learning opportunities rooted in practice, especially if our educational system aspires to “deeper and more complex learning in students as well as teachers” (p. 5). Ball and Cohen envision professional education “ centered in the critical activities of the profession—that is, in and about the practices of teaching ,” but caution that this does not entail a simplistic recommendation to locate more of teacher preparation in schools and classrooms, where the immediacy of classroom activity may limit teachers’ ability to gain new insight into central problems of practice. Throughout, they urge (and illustrate) the thoughtful, collective analysis of well-chosen records of professional practice that include samples of student work, video-records

of classroom lessons, curriculum materials, and teachers’ plans and notes. Ball and Cohen nonetheless acknowledge that centering professional learning in an intensive consideration of practice would represent a fundamental, systemic change in the organization of teacher education and in the role of teacher educators.

Grossman and colleagues (2009b) developed a framework of the pedagogies of practice-based teacher education that elaborates on Ball and Cohen’s (1999) call to center professional education on practice. The framework is grounded in a cross-field study that included teacher education together with preparation for the clergy and for clinical psychology. It distinguishes between pedagogies of investigation , which focus on analyzing and reflecting on records of practice (e.g., video recordings, student work), and pedagogies of enactment , or “opportunities to practice elements of interactive teaching in settings of reduced complexity” ( Grossman and McDonald, 2008 , p. 190). Analyzing records of practice to reflect upon and improve teaching, while necessary, is not sufficient for supporting novices to develop the enact the “contingent, interactive aspects of teaching” ( Grossman, 2011 , p. 2837)—especially when the goals of teaching are, for many novices, substantially different from what they experienced themselves as K–12 learners (see Box 5-5 ).

One issue in practice-based teacher education entails deciding what aspects of practice to focus on with novices, and when, and why. Grossman, Hammerness, and McDonald (2009a , p. 277) argued for the value in focusing teacher education on “core practices,” which the authors describe as those that occur with high frequency in teaching; can be enacted in classrooms across different curricula or instructional approaches; allow teachers to learn more about students and about teaching; preserve the integrity and complexity of teaching; and are research-based and have the potential to improve student achievement. (See also Ball et al., 2009 for a discussion of “high-leverage practices.”)

Facilitating whole-class discussions is an example of what might count as a “core” or “high-leverage” practice. Substantial research has indicated that engaging students in whole-class discussions, in which students are supported and pressed to reason about central ideas, and to connect their ideas to those of their peers, deepens students’ understanding of content and competence with disciplinary forms of argument and reasoning (e.g., Fogo, 2014 ; Franke, Kazemi, and Battey, 2007 ; NASEM, 2018 ).

In 2012, a group of educators from multiple institutions and subject matter disciplines formed the Core Practices Consortium (CPC) to advance program innovations and a related research agenda. The premise underlying the work of the Consortium is that focusing on a selected set of core practices may better prepare novice teachers to “counter longstanding inequities in the schooling experiences of youth from historically marginalized communities in the U.S.” ( Core Practice Consortium, 2016 ). Although CPC participants share a set of commitments and understandings, the core practices they identify “vary in grain size, content-specificity, exhaustiveness, and other features” ( Grossman, 2018 , p. 4). For example, TeachingWorks, a center at the University of Michigan School of Education, identified

19 high-leverage practices that include leading a group discussion, building respectful relationships with students, and checking student understanding during and at the conclusion of lessons. A set of core science teaching practices in secondary classrooms was developed by a Delphi panel of expert science teachers and university faculty; these practices include engaging students in investigations, facilitating classroom discourse, and eliciting, assessing, and using student thinking about science ( Kloser, 2014 ). Also using a Delphi panel, a set of core teaching practices for secondary history education were developed, including employing historical evidence, the use of history concepts, big ideas, and essential questions, and making connections to personal/cultural experiences ( Fogo, 2014 ).

Some scholars have questioned the compatibility of organizing teacher education coursework around high-leverage practices with a commitment to advancing equity and social justice ( Philip et al., 2018 ; Souto-Manning, 2019 ). Dutro and Cartun (2016) argue that calling some practices “core” necessarily suggests other practices are peripheral. They suggest that while choosing to focus on routine aspects of teaching can be of great value, it is important for teacher educators to remain vigilant in interrogating what is identified as central and what is less so. Moreover, they call for teacher educators to support novices to treat and approach teaching as complex, especially when narrowing focus to a particular form of practice. Similarly concerned with what is centered and what is pushed to the periphery, Philip et al. (2018) argue that a focus on core practices may result in the parsing of teaching into discrete, highly precise skills with not enough consideration into the character and complexity of local schooling contexts, and thus “decenter justice” (p. 6).

Recent research, including studies involving scholars affiliated with CPC, has begun to shed light on the impact of the core practices approach and issues related to equity. Several studies focus on determining whether and how core practices are evident in the planning and instruction of novice teachers. For example, Kang and Windschitl (2018) conducted a mixed-methods study of the lessons taught by two groups of first-year science teachers; one group had completed a “practice-embedded” program organized around core practices, and the second group completed a program that did not feature a core practices approach. The research team found that the graduates of the practice-embedded program were significantly different from the comparison group with respect to the opportunities for student learning embodied in the lesson plans (goals, tasks, tools) and in the level of active science sense-making evident in classroom discourse (see Chapter 6 for similar findings related to inservice professional development).

In an extension of that research, Kang and Zinger (2019) explicitly take up questions regarding the relationship between preparation in core practices and outcomes centered on equity and social justice. The authors

draw on a longitudinal (3-year) case study of White women as they completed a program focused on core practices in science teaching and then in their first 2 years of teaching as they taught students from ethnically, linguistically, and economically diverse backgrounds. Even within a small case study sample of three teachers, they found variations in the teachers’ use of ambitious science teaching practices (enabled or constrained in part by their workplace context), but also found that the awareness of core practices alone did not help novice teachers adopt teaching methods that reflect a critical consciousness about racism and systemic, structural inequity. The researchers attributed these results in part to a preparation program in which coursework focused on cultural diversity and equity remained separate from coursework on science teaching methods.

In a second example, Kavanagh and Danielson (2019) investigated novice elementary teachers’ opportunities to attend to issues of social justice and facilitate text-based discussions in a literacy methods course, and the ways novices integrated the two domains when reflecting on their teaching practice. The literacy methods course was co-taught by a literacy methods instructor and a foundations instructor. Data included video recordings of the literacy methods course in which the novices prepared to teach text-based discussions (specifically in the context of interactive read-alouds), video recordings of the novices engaging elementary students in read-alouds, and novices’ written reflections on their videos.

One finding concerned differences in teacher educator pedagogies as they relate to a focus on social justice issues or content. Kavanagh and Danielson found that when teaching about facilitating a text-based discussion, teacher educators supported the novices to both analyze and try out (e.g., rehearse) specific moves one might make during an interactive read-aloud, and to reason about their instructional decisions. However, while novices engaged in conversations about social justice in relation to planning for text-based discussions (e.g., which text to select in relation to their students’ lived experiences), novices rarely engaged in discussions of social justice in relation to their actual facilitation of text-based discussions. Kavanagh and Danielson write: “When TEs . . . support[ed] teachers to attend to social justice in their teaching, justice was exclusively treated as an element of lesson planning rather than as a factor in in-the-moment instructional decision making, or instruction . . . Only on extremely rare occasions did novices discuss attending to social justice while making in-the-moment instructional decisions.” (p. 19). Further, when reflecting on video recordings of their teaching, novices discussed issues of facilitating text-based discussions much more frequently than issues of attending to social justice (p. 19).

Kavanagh and Danielson suggest that novices’ tendency to center issues of content and decenter issues of social justice when reflecting on their instructional decision-making is likely shaped by the pedagogies employed

by the teacher educators. “While [Teacher Educators] frequently represented, decomposed, and approximated practice with novices, they rarely did so when supporting novices to attend to social justice” (p. 30). On the basis of these findings, and in relation to the ongoing debates about the relationships between “core practices” and advancing social justice and equity, Kavanagh and Danielson suggest the value in understanding more deeply how teacher educators might more purposefully integrate attention to specific forms of practice (e.g., facilitating a text-based discussion) and social justice concerns (e.g., representation of students, addressing classroom power relations during a discussion) in the context of practice-based teacher education.

The Field Experience

One hallmark of professional education in all fields is its reliance on practical experience to help novices develop key skills and cultivate professional judgment. Numerous correlational studies have shown some aspects of clinical experiences to be positively associated with measures of teacher effectiveness and retention (e.g., Boyd et al., 2009 ; Goldhaber, Krieg, and Theobold, 2017 ; Krieg, Theobold, and Goldhaber, 2016 ; Ronfeldt, 2012 , 2015 ). Ronfeldt (2012 , p. 4) points to variations in the degree to which programs take an active role in selecting and overseeing field placements, citing the NYC Pathways Study 4 conducted by Boyd and colleagues (2009) as an example.

[P]rogram oversight of field experiences was positively and significantly associated with teacher effects. More specifically, new teachers who graduated from programs that were actively involved in selecting field placements had minimum experience thresholds for cooperating teachers and required supervisors to observe student teachers at least five times had higher student achievement gains in their first year as teacher of record.

Recent scholarship points to the relationship between field experience and teacher candidates’ perceptions of the quality of their program and their preparedness to teach. Using longitudinal data from the Schools and Staffing Survey, Ronfeldt, Schwarz, and Jacob (2014) found that teachers who completed more methods-related coursework and practice teaching felt they were better prepared and were more likely to stay in teaching. These findings applied to teachers no matter what preparation route they

4 The NYC Pathways Study reviewed the entry points for teachers in New York City through an analysis of more than 30 programs, including a survey of all first-year teachers. The study examined the differences in the components of the teacher preparation programs and examined the effects related to student achievement.

took. In an experimental study of a project called Improving Student Teaching Initiative (ISTI), Ronfeldt et al. (2018) found that teachers randomly assigned to placements evaluated as more promising rather than less promising (in terms of various measures of teacher and school characteristics) had higher perceptions of the quality of the instruction of their mentor teachers and the quantity and quality of the coaching they received. Additionally, candidates in the more promising placements were more likely to report better working conditions, stronger collaboration among teachers, more opportunities to learn to teach, and feeling better prepared to teach ( Ronfeldt et al., 2018 ). In their study of six Washington State teacher education programs, Goldhaber, Krieg, and Theobald (2017) found that teachers are more effective when the student demographics of the schools where they did their student teaching and those of their current schools are similar. Scholarship also shows an association between the effectiveness of the mentor teacher and the future effectiveness of teacher candidates ( Goldhaber, Krieg, and Theobald, 2018 ), using value-added as a measure of effectiveness.

Research on preservice preparation in multiple fields, including teacher education, points to the difficulties that novices may encounter in integrating their academic preparation with their clinical or field experience ( Benner et al., 2010 ; Cooke, Irby, and O’Brien, 2010 ; Grossman et al., 2009b ; Sheppard et al., 2009 ; Sullivan, 2005 ). Those difficulties may be compounded when novices lack access to clinical experiences in settings that reflect high standards of professional practice and that prepare novice professionals to take a reflective and questioning stance toward their own practice. As Ball and Cohen (1999) caution, some clinical experiences do little to disrupt or address the “apprenticeship of observation” ( Lortie, 1975 ) that teachers bring with them to their field experiences and student teaching: that is, the thousands of hours in the classroom spent observing teaching as students. This apprenticeship of observation may reinforce the conservatism of teaching practice if teacher education, including clinical experience, does not offer opportunities for preservice teachers to seriously study their own experiences and practice, and engage in “substantial professional discourse” ( Ball and Cohen, 1999 , p. 5).

Concerns about the quality of clinical experience seem particularly warranted in situations where teacher candidates have little or no field experience, or where candidates are permitted or even required to find their own placement sites for early field experiences and/or student teaching ( Levine, 2006 ). In a study of mathematics and science teachers using the 2003–2004 Schools and Staffing Survey, and the supplement, the 2004–2005 Teacher Follow-up Survey, Ingersoll, Merrill, and May (2012, 2014 ) found that 21 percent of new teachers did not have any practice or student teaching before their first job, and the rates were even higher for science teachers: 40 per-

cent had no practice teaching. The latest data from the 2015–2016 National Teacher and Principal Survey indicate that this has not changed: 23 percent of first-year teachers in 2015 had no practice teaching ( Ingersoll, personal communication, 2019 ). This matters because the amount of practice teaching teachers candidates have is associated with whether they remain in the field as teachers ( Ingersoll, Merrill, and May, 2014 ). However, much is not known about how the student teaching experience contributes to teacher candidates’ development ( Anderson and Stillman, 2013 ). Much of the scholarship tends to focus on changing beliefs among teacher candidates rather than the development of teaching practice, and a more robust research base is needed to understand the role such development plays in teacher preparation ( Anderson and Stillman, 2013 ).

Innovations in Teacher Preparation

Efforts to strengthen the quality of clinical experience have taken center stage in recent years, spurred in part by high-profile reports such as the Blue Ribbon Panel report, Transforming Teacher Education through Clinical Practice: A National Strategy to Prepare Effective Teachers (NCATE, 2010; see also the report of the AACTE Clinical Practice Commission, 2018 ). In addition, some studies have demonstrated the potential of field experiences to support teacher learning when well designed and coordinated with campus coursework ( Darling-Hammond, 2006 ; Lampert et al., 2013 ; Tatto, 1996 ). Three recent innovations in the organization of clinical experience, discussed below, show promise for developing teacher candidates’ practice, particularly in working in urban and high-need contexts.

Clinical Experiences

In an approach modeled after medical rounds attended by physicians in training, Robert Bain and Elizabeth Moje at the University of Michigan developed a project to integrate student teachers’ discipline-specific preparation with their preparation to tackle problems of practice in the field ( Bain, 2012 ; Bain and Moje, 2012 ). The Clinical Rounds Project was launched in 2005 with a pilot in the area of social studies; it has since expanded to include methods instructors, field instructors, interns, and practicing classroom teachers across five content areas: social studies, mathematics, science, English language arts, and world languages. The project seeks to integrate the disparate components of the teacher education program through a spiraling program of study. Teacher candidates rotate through classrooms of carefully selected mentor teachers (called “attending teachers”) who model selected practices and intervene in the teaching of teacher candidates to offer real-time feedback. Based on video of preservice

teachers working in the field and on other project documentation, Bain (2012) reports several changes evident in the “Rounds” cohorts compared to previous cohorts: a new conception of the teacher’s role; a heightened appreciation for the kinds of curricular and instructional tools they would need to achieve their goals; a deeper understanding of the challenges their secondary students are likely to experience in the history classroom; and end-of-program perception that their coursework and field experiences had been fruitfully integrated.

Methods courses located at school sites (sometimes referred to as a hybrid space) can facilitate new connections between teacher candidates, practicing teachers, and university-based teacher educators in new ways that can address the historical divide that exists between campus and field-based teacher education and enhance teacher candidates’ learning. This hybrid space has the potential of creating a partnership among key stakeholders (K–12 students, teacher candidates, university faculty, and mentor teachers) characterized by more egalitarian and collegial relationships than conventional school-university partnerships ( Zeichner, 2010 ).

Different kinds of hybrid spaces exist. Some examples include having “studio days” focused on teaching English learners, with prospective teachers working jointly with experienced teachers to focus on language structures ( Von Esch and Kavanagh, 2018 ); incorporating K–12 teachers and their knowledge bases into campus courses and field experiences (e.g., by having teachers with high levels of competence spend a residency working in all aspects of a preservice teacher education program); incorporating representation of teachers’ practices in campus courses (through writing and research of K–12 teachers or multimedia representations of their teaching practice); and incorporating knowledge from communities into preservice teacher preparation ( Zeichner, 2010 ).

Many other clinical innovations exist and are in various phases of development. Empirical research is needed to explore the effectiveness of these innovations on a range of outcome measures (e.g., teacher candidates’ future effectiveness related to student achievement and in centering equity and justice in their teaching) as well as the feasibility and cost of implementing them. Some clinical approaches, such as microteaching, have been used for many years ( Grossman, 2005 ) and continue to be common components of field instruction, with adaptions to make use of current contexts ( Abendroth, Golzy, and O’Connor, 2011 ; Fernandez, 2010 ).

Technological Innovations

Teacher preparation programs are increasingly using technological innovations in a range of ways in attempts to better prepare teacher candidates ( Hollett, Brock, and Hinton, 2017 ; Kennedy and Newman Thomas,

2012 ; Rock et al., 2009 , 2014 ; Schaefer and Ottley, 2018 ; Scheeler et al., 2006 ; Sherin and Russ, 2014 ; Uerz, Volman, and Kral, 2018 ). eCoaching through bug-in-ear technology is a relatively new technology that allows for discreet coaching to be offered via an online coach or supervisor ( Hollett, Brock, and Hinton, 2017 ; Rock et al., 2009 , 2014 ; Schaefer and Ottley, 2018 ; Scheeler et al., 2006 ). Current research examines the way bug-in-ear technology can enhance teacher preparation programs ( Hollett, Brock, and Hinton, 2017 ; Schaefer and Ottley, 2018 ; Scheeler et al., 2006 ), especially the long-term benefits for special education teachers-in-training ( Rock et al., 2009 , 2014 ).

Video recordings of practice are used for reflection, peer collaboration (e.g., through a “video club”), evaluation, and coaching. In response to the increased use of video recordings, there has been a corresponding development in video sharing platforms (e.g., Edthena, Torsh Talent, Class Forward, Iris Connect). For example, in one recent study of preparation for mathematics teaching, Sun and van Es (2015) designed a video-based secondary-level mathematics methods course, Learning to Learn from Teaching (LLFT), in which teacher candidates studied video cases of teaching to learn to notice features of ambitious pedagogy, with particular attention to analysis of student thinking. Researchers compared videos of teaching practice between teacher candidates enrolled in the LLFT course and teacher candidates in the same program from a prior year who did not take the LLFT course. They analyzed the videos along the dimensions of (1) making student thinking visible, (2) probing student thinking, and (3) learning in the context of teaching. Sun and van Es found that the teacher candidates in the LLFT course enacted responsive teaching practices attending to student thinking with more frequency.

Technology-supported simulations provide preservice teacher candidates opportunities to hone classroom management and instructional skills with multiple opportunities for practice without experimenting on actual students. This standardized tool is often found in other professions such as medicine, business, and the military. There are forms of simulations that are not aided by technology, such as work being done at Syracuse University in which actors play the part of students in the simulations (similar to the work being done within medical schools) and experimental efforts at the University of Michigan with an assessment that utilizes a “standardized student.”

According to one teacher educator and researcher with extensive experience with this technology, an effective simulation needs to have three critical components: “(a) personalized learning, (b) suspension of disbelief, and (c) cyclical procedures to ensure impact” ( Dieker et al., 2014 , p. 22). For example, TLE TeachLivE, a mixed-reality teaching environment, provides a room for the teacher or teacher candidate to physically enter that

simulates an actual classroom, with “virtual students” as avatars (played by a live “actor” offsite) ( Dieker et al., 2014 ). Teachers interact with the virtual students (who represent a range of ages, cultures, backgrounds, and abilities), teach new content, and monitor students as they work independently. Following feedback or self-reflection, the teacher candidates may re-enter the virtual classroom to attempt different responses and strategies to support student learning ( Dieker et al., 2014 , p. 3).

PREPARING TEACHER CANDIDATES TO WORK WITH DIVERSE POPULATIONS

At their best, all of the approaches outlined above—developing a command of core practices in subject-specific teaching, participating in well-designed clinical experiences integrated with coursework, and capitalizing on new technologies—should aid in the preparation of teachers to work with a diverse student population. Some recent studies supply evidence that field experiences in local communities—beyond classrooms and schools, and where preservice teachers are carefully prepared and guided through mediation, debriefing of these experiences, and connecting these experiences to the rest of their program—may help teacher candidates develop a richer understanding of students whose backgrounds differ from their own ( McDonald et al., 2011 ). Yet the charge that teacher preparation programs fail to effectively prepare teacher candidates for the students they teach remains a common theme in the scholarship on teacher preparation (Anderson and Stillman, 2010; Cochran-Smith et al., 2016 ).

As illustrated in Chapter 3 , one response to the disconnect between teachers (who are predominantly White, middle class, and female) and their students has been to emphasize the tenets of culturally relevant pedagogy and culturally sustaining pedagogy that support multilingualism and multiculturalism. Although a full characterization of teacher education faculty was beyond the scope of this report, teacher education faculty including adjunct faculty (which as of 2007 were 78% White) may play a key role in “how urgently a program works to address race and ethnicity” ( Sleeter, 2017 , p. 158).

There is no shortage of approaches and programs designed to prepare teachers for increasing cultural diversity, conceptualized in terms of social class, ethnicity, culture, and language ( Major and Reid, 2017 ). However, there is no single “formula” ( Major and Reid, 2017 , p. 8) for implementing these approaches because, as Gay (2013) argues, the sociocultural context in which instructional practices are taught should influence the approaches used: “Culturally responsive teaching, in idea and action, emphasizes localism and contextual specificity” ( Gay, 2013 , p. 63). As Major and Reid (2017) observe, “Cultural and linguistic difference is inevitably overlaid

with larger historical and political issues of migration, indigeneity, invasion, economic power, citizenship and racism. All of these are realised differently in different contexts and require teachers to understand their own cultural positioning and power in relation to the varieties of cultural difference with which they are engaged” (p. 11).

To what extent do teacher preparation programs foreground approaches for teaching multilingual, multicultural students? Critics argue that most teacher programs fall short. In their review of the literature on culturally responsive schooling for indigenous youth, Castagno and Brayboy (2008) found that schools and classrooms were failing to meet the needs of Indigenous students; they also found that although much theory and scholarship has been devoted to culturally responsive schooling for Indigenous populations, the main tenets of such pedagogies are often essentialized or too generalized to be applicable and effective. Similarly, few teachers develop the required skills to effectively work with emergent bilinguals—skills such as gauging students’ language development and content understanding and using informal and formal assessments to promote literacy development ( López and Santibañez, 2018 ). Scholars who have examined these issues argue that the consequences of these failures are serious, with consequences for a range of indicators of student success, including achievement, classification as emergent bilinguals, and high school completion ( López and Santibañez, 2018 ).

In one effort to advance the integration of culturally relevant pedagogy preparation into programs of teacher education, Allen and colleagues (2017) developed a conceptual framework that “requires teacher educators and candidates to pose questions that disrupt, deconstruct, reimagine, and develop concepts in an effort to promote academic rigor and higher-order thinking” (p. 18). The authors urge questions that challenge the “status quo” curriculum, the nature of classroom and field learning opportunities, the content of the program, instructional practices, and avenues for voice.

Given the demographic divide between teacher candidates and the students they teach, preparing teacher candidates to address issues of diversity and focus on equity in meaningful, authentic, and practical ways is critical. Teacher preparation programs vary dramatically in their approaches. Box 5-6 highlights two approaches that show promise for developing teacher candidates’ will and capacity to value students’ diverse backgrounds and engage in culturally sustaining pedagogy ( Paris and Alim, 2017 ): (1) valuing students’ funds of knowledge from outside of school and (2) building relationships with the students’ communities.

This section highlights principles, commitments, and pedagogies that hold promise for preparing teachers to work for equity and social justice. Preparing teachers to work for equity and social justice is not the

same as preparing teachers to work with a diverse student population ( Cochran-Smith, 2004 ). Rather, it involves preparation that fosters a deep understanding of the structures and processes that reproduce inequality, cultivates a disposition to act in ways that interrupt those structures and processes, and equips teachers for equity-oriented leadership.

Educators have been calling for teacher preparation that reflects commitments to equity for decades ( Fraser, 2007 ). For example, a recent issue of Teachers College Record compiled articles devoted to the goal to “reclaim the power and possibility of university-based teacher education to engage in transformations that prioritize the preparation of asset-, equity-, and social justice-oriented teachers” ( Souto-Manning, 2019 , p. 2).

As discussed earlier, the philosophical approach of culturally sustaining pedagogy directly seeks to foster linguistic, literate, and cultural

pluralism with the aim of positive social transformation for education. Culturally sustaining pedagogy is an assets-based approach that addresses the colonial aspect of contemporary schooling and actively works to disrupt anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, anti-Brownness, model minority myths, and other ways in which schools foster colonialism and seeks to provide an alternative to the dominant “White gaze” ( Paris and Alim, 2017 , pp. 2–3).

Contemporary teacher education scholarship continues to argue that programs are not adequately preparing teachers to enact teaching in ways that are informed by equity-oriented interpretive frames ( Carter Andrews et al., 2019 ; Sleeter, 2017 ). Such programs may employ interpretive frameworks in coursework and field experience and engage in activity that deepens teacher candidates’ understanding, skills, and commitments (e.g., asset

mapping, placement in community-based organizations). Unfortunately, many scholars claim that most programs tend to fall short of equipping teacher candidates with a deep understanding of structural inequalities and tools needed to create more equitable opportunities (e.g., Carter Andrews et al., 2019 ; Cochran-Smith et al., 2014; Sleeter, 2017 ). Understanding how to prepare teacher candidates for this kind of work is an area for both research and innovation.

MECHANISMS FOR INFLUENCING PRESERVICE TEACHER EDUCATION

If preservice teacher education is to be a more uniformly coherent and demonstrably effective contributor to the quality of teachers and teaching in the 21st century, it will require change at multiples levels and in multiple respects. Thinking about levers for change proves challenging. Nonetheless, four (admittedly overlapping) categories of influence occupy a prominent place in the available research literature and in educational journalism.

First, teacher education has been increasingly shaped by regulatory and policy mechanisms including professional standards, program admission criteria, state licensure requirements, and program accreditation. Over the past two decades, policy makers supported new and flexible pathways into teaching while simultaneously moving to tighten accountability for program outcomes ( Cochran-Smith et al., 2018a ). States and other accrediting bodies have specified criteria for admission that emphasize both the academic qualifications of individuals and the formation of a diverse pool of teacher candidates. Standards of professional teaching practice encompass the expectations outlined in Chapter 3 , although the field lacks the kind of empirical evidence to know with certainty how standards translate into preparation and practice outcomes. Nonetheless, changes in licensure requirements and program accreditation mark a shift from program inputs and components to teacher candidate outcomes, with some states requiring candidate performance assessment for licensure and/or program accreditation ( AACTE, n.d. ).

A second potential source of influence on teacher education are the multiple institutional or professional associations and networks that populate the teacher education terrain, as well as various policy-related organizations that include teacher education policies on a broader agenda of educational reform. Professional associations of teachers and teacher educators have served as mechanisms for developing and promoting research-based conceptions of learning that in turn have influenced programs of teacher preparation and professional development; a well-known example

is the conception of mathematics learning advanced by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics in the late 1980s ( NRC, 2001 ). Professional associations with institutional (rather than individual) membership are more likely to promote broad programmatic priorities, as NCATE did by appealing to program to place field experience as the center of teacher preparation, and AACTE did in 2018 when it followed up with a set of proclamations regarding clinical practice ( Little, 1993 ). 5

A third source of influence takes the form of targeted change initiatives. Some initiatives have emerged from within the field of teacher education, led by teacher educators and teacher education researchers. Among the examples that span several decades are the Holmes Group and the more recent CPC. Other initiatives flow from initiatives or funding streams supported by the federal government (such as support for Teach For America and for alternatives to university-based teacher preparation). Still others stem from private corporations, venture capitalists, or foundations that have altered the landscape of teacher education through their investments in new institutional entities (such as new Graduate Schools of Education) and their ties to federal policy makers. Some private-sector initiatives recruit institutions that agree to pursue a particular reform agenda; Teachers for a New Era, launched by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, presents one well-funded example (see Box 5-7 ).

Finally, the committee acknowledges the potential of ideas, messaging, and exemplars to stimulate new organizational arrangements and practices. The rapid spread of terms such as “deeper learning” and “core practices” points to the potential for influence though the technology-aided and network-supported spread of new ideas and associated exemplars. Powerful ideas may be developed and spread by any number of entities, including public agencies, universities, reform organizations, private foundations, networks, and individuals—and by numerous means including social media, conferences, publications, as well as privately and publicly funded initiatives. Of course, the rapid spread of organizing ideas and images does not signal common definitions of what those terms mean (in fact, rapid spread may impede such common definition, complicating the conduct of related research), nor does it entail uniform endorsement of any given idea or approach ( Aydarova and Berliner, 2018 ; Zeichner, 2014 ).

5 More information regarding NCATE’s appeal to place field experiences at the center of teacher preparation can be found at http://www.highered.nysed.gov/pdf/NCATECR.pdf . More on AACTE’s proclamations can be found at https://secure.aacte.org/apps/rl/res_get.php?fid=3750&ref=rl .

The past 20 years has witnessed a proliferation in the pathways to teacher preparation and a range of innovations in teacher preparation programs including in the field and in technology. Preservice teacher education content, goals, and approaches have changed due in part to the accountability movement, increased attention to deeper learning, the changing nature of standards for what teachers should know and be able to do, and increased attention to equity. Qualitative studies of programs suggest that factors leading to stronger candidates include program coherence, instructors’ modeling of powerful practices in methods courses, a strong connection between theory and practice, and intentional design of the field experience. However, the committee did not find evidence to support policies that would address questions about systems-level issues in preservice teacher preparation due to the high degree of variation in institutional type and mission, as well as decentralization of control that is built into the historical development of colleges and universities ( Labaree, 2017 ).

In general, there is a lack of systematic research or evidence beyond anecdotes and case studies about teacher preparation programs’ content and effectiveness, and whether these programs have changed over time. Despite a call nearly ten years ago ( NRC, 2010 ) for an independent evaluation of teacher education approval and accreditation, no such evaluation has been initiated.

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Teachers play a critical role in the success of their students, both academically and in regard to long term outcomes such as higher education participation and economic attainment. Expectations for teachers are increasing due to changing learning standards and a rapidly diversifying student population. At the same time, there are perceptions that the teaching workforce may be shifting toward a younger and less experienced demographic. These actual and perceived changes raise important questions about the ways teacher education may need to evolve in order to ensure that educators are able to meet the needs of students and provide them with classroom experiences that will put them on the path to future success.

Changing Expectations for the K-12 Teacher Workforce: Policies, Preservice Education, Professional Development, and the Workplace explores the impact of the changing landscape of K-12 education and the potential for expansion of effective models, programs, and practices for teacher education. This report explores factors that contribute to understanding the current teacher workforce, changing expectations for teaching and learning, trends and developments in the teacher labor market, preservice teacher education, and opportunities for learning in the workplace and in-service professional development.

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• Our Mission

Engaging Pre-Service Teachers in Authentic Writing Instruction

As a writer, I know firsthand how important it is for me to share what I've written and receive feedback on my work. And as a teacher of writing -- from my initial experience in the middle school classroom up to my current work as a teacher educator at Central Michigan University and director of our Chippewa River Writing Project -- I want my students to experience this, too. It is with this understanding in mind that I teach my methods course, ENG 315: Writing in the Elementary and Middle School .

My Teaching Context

Unfortunately, I know that many of my pre-service teachers come to my course with a jaded view of writing. If high school hadn't already taken a passion for writing out of them, four years of college certainly have. Thus, I must teach my preservice teachers how to re-envision themselves as writers and, consequently, as teachers of writing.

Many of them have "played the game of school" quite well, and they want to be given very detailed assignments with specific rubrics in order to know that they are meeting the goals. Yet writing is messy, recursive, and should be challenging in an authentically intellectual and emotional way. School (as they have typically experienced it) doesn't usually teach writing in such a manner -- but I do. Thus, we explore a variety of genres and publish work with numerous digital writing tools, three of which I will elaborate on here, with links to further descriptions of the assignments.

This I Believe

Employing the same writing strategies as the essay series for which this assignment is named, one piece of personal writing they compose is a This I Believe essay . We discover the components of a good essay by analyzing three essays of their choice, and then I remind them that "to essay," as a verb, means to make an attempt, to test, to try and to practice. Since they are so accustomed to writing essays that have so many requirements, these less stringent guidelines are actually more difficult for them to grasp. I have to encourage them to take a risk with their writing. Finally, after they have shared their work in peer response groups, they record the final product as a podcast using a tool such as Soundcloud . Here is an example from Megan , who wrote about the value of sports in her life.

Digital Storytelling

After this, they create a digital story . With the idea that they will combine narration, photos, music and other video effects to create a coherent, thoughtful digital story, I ask students to take one of their prior pieces of writing and revise it into a script. I also encourage students to look through their digital photo albums and decide what stories they might want to tell. This is not just about a great vacation or a particular set of friends. Instead, they need to think carefully about developing characters, advancing a plot, and having an overall theme. For instance, Jodi wrote about her experiences with the Alternative Breaks program over the course of her college career, using dozens of digital images that she’d collected and turning them into a compelling digital story .

Multi-Genre Research Project

Finally, as the culminating experience, I ask students to prepare a multi-genre research project focused on a topic related to teaching of writing. There are two main goals for this assignment. First, I want my pre-service teachers to delve deeper into a topic of personal interest that relates to the teaching of writing. Second, I want them to explore the topic in a manner that will be professionally useful beyond ENG 315. They utilize multiple genres including a classroom newsletter, mini-lessons, handouts for students and additional genres of their choice. The topics that they choose are varied, as are the ways in which they present those topics through various genres. Occasionally, I hear back from my students via email or if I meet them at a professional conference, and they often tell me how the multi-genre research project was the most useful assignment from any of their methods classes.

The Benefits of a Writerly Life

In the end, I know that these approaches work for the majority of my students and help them rethink what it means to be both a writer and teacher of writing. Perhaps the most lasting testament to my work as a teacher educator is one of the most recent. This past summer, I was able to co-author an article about digital storytelling with a fellow English educator Kristen Turner and, more importantly, one of my pre-service teachers, Jodi Stratton, whose digital story is mentioned above. Near the end of the article, Jodi reflects on her growth during the course: "As a writer, I have been able to see my process of writing and how I can use my words to create a powerful message."

My goal as a teacher educator, and my sincere hope as a writer myself, is that Jodi and all of my pre-service teachers will now be able to bring their reinvigorated passion for writing back to their own students. Therefore, I work diligently to help my pre-service teachers live a writerly life, at least for 15 weeks, in hopes that they will carry a sense of curiosity, inquiry and genuine respect for young writers back into their own teaching practice.

What assignments do you give your pre-service teachers to shape their writing and thinking?

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Examining pre-service teachers’ feedback on low- and high-quality written assignments

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• Published: 16 April 2024
• Volume 36 , pages 225–256, ( 2024 )

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• Ignacio Máñez   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-8093-1945 1 ,
• Anastasiya A. Lipnevich   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0190-8689 2 ,
• Carolina Lopera-Oquendo   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9355-5843 3 &
• Raquel Cerdán   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-8283-8995 1  

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Assessing student writing assignments and providing effective feedback are a complex pedagogical skill teacher candidates need to master. Scarce literature has closely examined the type of feedback that pre-service high-school teachers spontaneously deliver when assessing student writings, which is the main goal of our study. In a sample of 255 high school teacher candidates, we examined the type of feedback that they provided when assessing two writing assignments that differed in quality. One thousand eight hundred thirty-five comments were analyzed and coded into 11 sub-categories. Results showed that candidates’ feedback not only focused on task performance but also on the writing process. Although candidates provided critical and past-oriented evaluations frequently, they also crafted feedback in a neutral tone and included future-oriented suggestions. Further, feedback varied as a function of candidates’ gender, academic discipline, and students’ quality of writing. Teacher training programs may use this information to design resources to address nuances of feedback provision.

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Among the many skills expected of pre-service teachers (or teacher candidates), one crucial aspect is their capacity to effectively evaluate and provide high-quality written feedback on students’ written assignments. This ability plays a vital role in enhancing writing outcomes and fostering the development of students’ writing skills across academic subjects (e.g., Dempsey et al., 2009 ; Duijnhouwer et al., 2010 , 2012 ; Graham, 2018 ; Graham et al., 2020 ; Parr & Timperley, 2010 ). Proficiency in writing is an indispensable skill that holds significance across a multitude of domains. Its importance resonates throughout various academic, professional, and creative pursuits and transcends academic subjects. In their recent meta-analysis, Graham et al. ( 2020 ) synthesized effect size from 56 studies that examined the impact of content-related writing on student learning in science, social studies, and mathematics across Grades 1 to 12. The findings indicated that writing about content significantly enhanced learning (effect size = 0.30) in a consistent manner, irrespective of subject, grade level, or the specific features of writing activities, instruction, or assessment. One of the key predictors of student writing development is the feedback provided by teachers, and previous research has shown that both experienced in-service teachers and novice teachers tended to struggle when generating effective feedback (Evans, 2013 ; Junqueira & Payant, 2015 ; Orrell, 2006 ; Ropohl & Rönnebeck, 2019 ; Ryan et al., 2021 ; Underwood & Tregidgo, 2006 ). Furthermore, the bulk of the literature has focused on examining how in-service teachers provide written feedback on students’ writing (e.g., Otnes & Solheim, 2019 ; Parr & Timperley, 2010 ), generally neglecting the pre-service teachers’ sub-population (e.g., Dempsey et al., 2009 ; Fong et al., 2013 ; Lee, 2014 ). Understanding the feedback pre-service teachers naturally provide is crucial for designing effective courses and resources to improve this critical skill in teacher preparation programs. This study is one of the first to provide a fine-grained picture of the type of written feedback that high school teacher candidates deliver when assessing written assignments. Hence, we had the following two goals: (1) we investigated what type of feedback teacher candidates, who are training to be high school teachers, provide, and (2) we examined the extent to which the quality of the student’s essay, teachers’ gender, and academic discipline predicted the type of comments they generate.

1 Characteristics of instructional feedback

Feedback is one of the most powerful instructional interventions teachers can use to help students to increase their knowledge and skills (Hattie, 2009 ). Countless reviews and meta-analyses have suggested that feedback has a potential of enhancing students’ performance and learning (e.g., Black & Wiliam, 1998 ; Evans, 2013 ; Hattie & Timperley, 2007 ; Kluger & DeNisi, 1996 ; Li & DeLuca, 2014 ; Shute, 2008 ; Winstone et al., 2017 ; Wisniewski et al., 2020 ). However, it is not uncommon for studies to show non-significant, or even negative, effects on students’ outcomes (e.g., van der Kleij et al., 2015 ). Over the last decades, scholars have proposed a number of theoretical frameworks to explain how feedback works and what factors contribute to its effectiveness (e.g., Lipnevich & Panadero, 2021 ). After conducting a review of the most prominent feedback models, Panadero and Lipnevich ( 2022 ) proposed an integrative framework that covers five components that may explain the large variability of feedback effects on learning. The components are message, implementation, student, context, and agent (MISCA). Of these five groups of factors, in the current study, we focus on message (characteristics of written feedback comments), student (quality of writing), and agent (teacher candidates’ gender and academic discipline), while considering the context (writing). Next, we delve into some of the key parameters related to the content of the feedback messages.

To date, numerous researchers have proposed feedback typologies and taxonomies that range from simple dichotomies (e.g., verification vs. elaborated feedback, Kulhavy & Stock, 1989 ) to more fine-grained categories that cover a range of specific types of feedback (Hattie & Timperley, 2007 ; Shute, 2008 ). Describing all typologies and taxonomies is out of scope of the current paper, so we would like to direct the reader to Panadero and Lipnevich ( 2022 ) and Lipnevich and Panadero ( 2021 ) for their review. Instead, we will focus on categories that we selected for our study. These categories have been systematically acknowledged to be crucial in the feedback literature, and include focus, content, emotional valence, and orientation of feedback.

Firstly, research has often explored the focus of teachers’ feedback. In their seminal work, Hattie and Timperley ( 2007 ) distinguished four main foci, i.e., task, process, self-regulation, and self. Task-focused feedback is intended to bring students’ attention to the specifics of the task at hand and allows them to know how successful they were in meeting teachers’ criteria. Process-focused feedback, on the other hand, allows students to comprehend what actions they have or should have deployed to solve the task. The third focus has to do with students’ self-regulation and refers to how students can monitor their own learning. The final focus of feedback is on the self and refers to personal characteristics of a student. It is important to mention that feedback that focuses on the process usually incorporates self-regulatory information, pointing out actions or strategies to self-evaluate the task performed. Hence, disentangling these two types may be problematic. The extant literature suggests that teachers’ feedback should focus on the strategies and processes of writing (i.e., process-focused feedback) because such comments provide opportunities for transfer and have a higher chance to improve the writing process. Focusing exclusively on students’ task performance may improve the current task, but higher order writing skills will be unlikely to develop (Hawe et al., 2008 ; Parr & Timperley, 2010 ). Despite this claim, recent findings show that both in-service and pre-service teachers provide predominantly task-focused feedback when assessing student writings (Arts et al., 2016 ; Dysthe, 2011 ; Fong et al., 2013 ).

Closely related to the previous category, the content specificity of the feedback is arguably one of the most relevant variables to explore. When it comes to written assignments, it is important to be aware of what features of student writing teachers refer to when delivering feedback (Dempsey et al., 2009 ). In such context, feedback may refer to surface features such as grammar, spelling or punctuation, or deep features such as students’ writing style or the quality of the ideas they express. As a general recommendation, teachers are expected to provide content-level and higher-level stylistic comments (Graham, 2018 ), but findings suggest that they predominantly focus on surface errors (see, for example, Arts et al., 2016 ; Hawe et al., 2008 ).

Thirdly, emotional valence is inherent in any communicative act and hence represents an important characteristic of teacher feedback (Lipnevich & Smith, 2009 ; Lipnevich et al.  2021b ; Dawson et al., 2021 ; Pitt & Norton, 2017 ; Ryan & Henderson, 2018 ). Research has shown that students’ writing is influenced by their emotions (Graham, 2018 ; Lipnevich et al., 2021a ), and feedback is one of the key antecedents of achievement emotions (Pekrun, 2006 , 2022 ). To better understand instructional practices and their impact on learning outcomes, it is crucial to consider the emotional valence of teacher comments (Graham & Harris, 2018 ; Yu, Geng, et al., 2021 ; Yu, Zheng, et al., 2021 ). Recent studies have categorized teacher feedback on student writing as constructive (neutral), positive, or negative (Fong et al., 2018 ), depending on the affective information transmitted and emotions it elicits (Goetz et al., 2018 ; Pekrun, 2006 ). Positive messages usually include praise comments about a product ( Congratulations! I see how well you’ve framed your writing! ), an action ( You’ve done great job selecting information from those websites! ), or personal characteristics that have played a favorable role in good performance (e.g., You’re very organized! ). On the other hand, negative messages usually comprise critical remarks about failures and shortcomings, including evaluative judgments about other’s performance or personal characteristics ( I expected more from you! ). Besides this positive-negative dichotomy, feedback may also be neutral in tone when it conveys information on how students may improve without including an evaluative or normative component. Such informative feedback comments that mainly state or explain what actions students should undertake to improve their work have a potential of improving student writing from a constructive perspective (Fong et al., 2018 ; Graham, 2018 ; Hattie et al., 2021 ).

The final category in our classification includes feedback orientation . Broadly speaking, teachers may provide comments aimed at evaluating past actions/outcomes or suggesting ways to enhance students’ performance, and both types, in combination, may help students to learn how to monitor their writing skills (e.g., Duijnhouwer et al., 2012 ; Pitt & Norton, 2017 ; Price et al., 2011 ). While the former let students know where they are, the latter let them know where they need to go and offers strategies on how to get there (Parr & Timperley, 2010 ). Past-oriented evaluative comments, especially those focused on negative aspects of the students’ performance, may inhibit student’s engagement with feedback or, in the best scenario, encourage students with higher achievement levels (Pitt & Norton, 2017 ). Beyond evaluative feedback, literature suggests that effective learner-centered feedback should include information about future-oriented processes and actions that students may undertake so as to improve their learning (Ryan et al., 2021 ). However, teachers appear to rarely deliver future-oriented comments when assessing written assignments (Arts et al., 2016 ).

Examining the type of feedback messages that pre-service teachers provide may shed some light on their strengths and weaknesses when delivering feedback on writing and help teacher education programs to better design their curricular activities. In our study, we did exactly that: we investigated the types of feedback that pre-service teachers provide on students’ written assignments.

2 Feedback on writing

Unarguably, writing is critical to success in today’s societies (Freedman et al., 2016 ) and teachers from different disciplines rely on assigning specific types of writing to support learning (Bazerman, 2009 ; Smagorinsky & Mayer, 2014 ). Although writing has been traditionally taught in language courses (Klein & Boscolo, 2016 ), efforts have been made in recent years to promote writing as a critical learning activity in other disciplines (e.g., Kiuhara et al., 2020 ; MacArthur, 2014 ; Wallace et al., 2004 ). Although social studies teachers are more likely to use writing to promote learning, followed by science and then mathematics teachers (Gillespie et al., 2014 ; Ray et al., 2016 ), meta-analytic work by Graham et al. ( 2020 ) shows that writing promotes school-aged students’ learning independently of the academic discipline (science, social studies, or mathematics) and the academic level (elementary, middle, or high school).

Teachers frequently assign a variety of writing activities, such as composing reports, summarizing information, building stories or narratives, or defending arguments. These assignments require students to engage in a broad spectrum of cognitive and metacognitive processes that teachers must consider when assessing their written products. For instance, students may set goals, strategically plan their compositions, activate prior knowledge, elaborate on new ideas or arguments, integrate information, monitor their comprehension and the quality of their written product, assess text structure, or search for spelling errors. These operations require considerable effort and are not always executed with consistent success by students (Graham & Harris, 2000 ).

Guiding students towards improved writing proficiency and enhanced learning outcomes through constructive feedback is of paramount importance. However, assessing and fostering writing while ensuring the effectiveness of teachers’ feedback is a complex endeavor. Teachers’ ability to design and deliver effective feedback is among the most relevant skills to acquire (Boud & Dawson, 2021 ; Graham, 2018 ). Nevertheless, providing feedback on writing assignments can be time-consuming and challenging, and it does not always guarantee significant learning gains (Duijnhouwer et al., 2012 ; Kellogg & Whiteford, 2009 ). The differences in the impact of feedback on writing may be attributed to the inherent complexity of this skill. Students vary in their ability to process feedback cognitively, affectively, and behaviorally, while teachers provide messages that are highly variable and specific to individual work (Parr & Timperley, 2010 ; Ryan et al., 2021 ). In addition to attributes of students and messages, teacher characteristics also may influence the type of feedback that is provided (see Panadero & Lipnevich, 2022 ). For example, research exploring potential gender differences among teachers in assessing and grading students’ performance has yielded varied results (Read et al., 2005 ). Some studies have indicated that male teachers tend to exhibit a bias favoring male students in their grading (Lavy, 2008 ), while others have not found consistent evidence to support this assertion (Doornkamp et al., 2022 ; Lindahl, 2016 ). In general, the body of research suggests that male teachers may tend to be more stringent in their assessment of students’ performance (Cheng & Kong, 2023 ; Lopera-Oquendo et al.,  2023 ). However, it is worth noting that Read et al. ( 2005 ) discovered no statistically significant gender differences in how history higher education tutors presented feedback comments on students’ written work. These variations and disparities in assessment and grading practices based on gender could potentially result in distinct interactions through feedback comments when evaluating high school students’ writing, an area that has not been extensively explored in the literature.

Considering the plethora of feedback-related consideration, the extant literature on written feedback suggests that there is not a single correct way to deliver effective feedback on writing. We do know that, ideally, comments should include enough information to let students know where they are (point a), where they are going (point b), and what actions they should undertake to get from point a to point b (Parr & Timperley, 2010 ). On the whole, findings support the claim that feedback on writing assignments should be specific and tailored to the student’s writing proficiency, include explanations, strategies, and future-oriented suggestions, provide clear actionable information, use a dialogic tone and, at the same time, avoid simple praise comments and grades because they lack relevant information to facilitate learning (Lipnevich et al., 2021b ).

Recent studies have delved into how teachers design and deliver written feedback on writing for both traditional (e.g., Arts et al., 2016 ; Hattie et al., 2021 ; Otnes & Solheim, 2019 ; Parr & Timperley, 2010 ; Peterson & McClay, 2010 ) and second-language language learners (e.g., Bitchener & Ferris, 2012 ; McMartin-Miller, 2014 ; Montgomery & Baker, 2007 ; Wigglesworth & Storch, 2012 ). These studies showed that teachers provided feedback that comprised surface comments, focusing on students’ writing mechanics rather than on content and higher-order writing skills (e.g., Arts et al., 2016 ; Hawe et al., 2008 ). Otnes and Solheim ( 2019 ), for example, found that school teachers’ written feedback on students’ writing was usually composed of directive messages in a non-dialogic tone and that it often included clear praise/criticism comments without further explanations.

Researchers also highlighted the importance of considering the students’ current writing level to craft accurate feedback (Ropohl & Rönnebeck, 2019 ). For instance, Duijnhouwer et al. ( 2012 ) found that teachers provided more strategies when assessing weaker writing compared to higher quality work. Furthermore, the higher number of strategies teachers provided within their feedback comments was associated with lower levels of students’ self-efficacy. In general, previous findings revealed that the quality of teachers’ written feedback when assessing a piece of writing can predict students’ progress (Hattie et al., 2021 ; Parr & Timperley, 2010 ). Unfortunately, studies also demonstrated that high school teachers were less likely to deliver high-quality actionable feedback compared to university professors (see, for example, Hattie et al., 2021 ). One of the possible explanations for less than optimal feedback that students receive on their writing is due to the fact that teachers often learn to assess their students’ knowledge and skills on the job (Orrell, 2006 ). In other words, teacher education programs may be lacking adequate training to enhance pre-service teachers’ assessment skills that comprise basic rules and approaches to feedback provision (DeLuca & Bellara, 2013 ). Thus, controlling for the quality of student essays, we examined feedback on writing that teachers in training provided.

3 Pre-service teachers’ feedback on student writing

Compared to compendiums of studies that have investigated feedback provision skills of in-service teachers, pre-service teachers’ approaches to written feedback delivery have received significantly less attention (e.g., Dempsey et al., 2009 ; Fong et al., 2013 ; Guénette & Lyster, 2013 ; Junqueira & Payant, 2015 ; Ropohl & Rönnebeck, 2019 ). The studies that do exist suggest that beginning teachers struggle to devise effective feedback to support students’ writing skills and task performance. For instance, Guénette and Lyster ( 2013 ) explored the type of written feedback pre-service high school ESL teachers gave to their students on their written assignments and identified that the bulk of comments comprised specific surface-level corrections and task-focused features, similar to what their in-service counterparts usually do (Furneaux et al., 2007 ). Conversely, in their analysis of pre-service teachers’ written feedback on a hypothetical essay, Fong et al. ( 2013 ) found that teacher candidates focused on both the task and the process outcomes, and that the process-oriented comments were seen to be positively related to writing improvements. Further, a recent study conducted by Ropohl and Rönnebeck ( 2019 ) examined pre-service high school chemistry teachers’ written feedback given to 8 th graders’ written plans to conduct an experimental study. These authors observed that pre-service teachers tended to provide descriptive and evaluative comments with little future-oriented information, and that students’ writing accuracy influenced the number of comments delivered, with low-performing students receiving more feedback.

Although these studies contribute to our understanding of pre-service teachers’ feedback practices, several critical limitations limit generalization of the findings: (a) a single-case study or a small sample of pre-service teachers has been employed (e.g., Fong et al., 2013 ; Guénette & Lyster, 2013 ; Junqueira & Payant, 2015 ; Ropohl & Rönnebeck, 2019 ), (b) a small number of feedback comments were analyzed (e.g., Fong et al., 2013 ; Ropohl & Rönnebeck, 2019 ), (c) feedback comments were classified as a function of a single dimension (Fong et al., 2013 ), (d) no differences in feedback provision as a function of teacher characteristics (e.g., gender or discipline) were explored, and (e) little is known about the teachers’ attempts to adapt the feedback comments to the students’ writing proficiency (Ropohl & Rönnebeck, 2019 ). Our study aims to overcome these limitations and fill the gap in the current literature.

4 The current study

In the current study, we examined teacher candidates’ feedback practices and investigated whether the type of comments pre-service teachers delivered depended on their individual characteristics (i.e., gender, academic discipline) as well as the quality of students’ writing. To better understand pre-service teachers’ feedback practices, we held the quality of student writing constant for all participants, used two standardized essays of low and high quality, and did not provide information about the gender of the student to avoid possible gender bias. That is, all teacher candidates were asked to provide feedback on the same two essays. Pre-service teachers’ comments were then coded into four categories, i.e., focus, content, emotional valence, and past and future orientation. The following research questions guided this study:

RQ1: What kind of feedback messages do pre-service high school teachers provide when assessing an academic writing assignment?

RQ2: To what extent do pre-service teachers’ gender and academic discipline, as well as students’ quality of writing, predict the type of feedback that pre-service teachers provide?

5.1 Participants and procedure

A total of 282 master’s degree students in the high school education teacher training program from a public Spanish university participated in this study. An online instrument was administered in two different course cohorts at the end of 2020 and 2021 academic years. Participants who omitted more than 80% of questionnaire items were deleted, so 255 observations were retained in the final dataset (90.4%, N = 171 in 2020, N = 84 in 2021). Table 1 summarizes the participants’ demographic characteristics. 64.7% of the participants ( N = 165) were women; 71.4% were between 21 and 25 years of age, and about two-thirds of the sample (62.4%, N = 159) was enrolled in the language teaching specialization program.

This study adheres to institutional and governmental regulations governing research involving human participants. Participation was approved by the ethical review committee 2022-0460-QC and followed the guidelines of the Declaration of Helsinki. All participants were informed about the nature of the study, i.e., general research goal, procedures, and the absence of potential risks associated with participation. They were also informed about the confidentiality and anonymity of the data collected, as well as their right to withdraw at any time. Before engaging in the study, participants were asked to provide informed consent to participate.

This study was conducted online, with the questionnaire presented in Qualtrics. The task consisted of providing feedback on two anonymous essays with different levels of performance (one strong and one weak exemplar) selected from the Colombian standardized test in writing communication SABER T&T, then providing grades using analytic and holistic scoring approaches. Second, participants were asked to complete the Receptivity to Instructional Feedback scale (Lipnevich et al., 2021a ; Lipnevich & Lopera-Oquendo, 2024 ) and the Big Five Personality Inventory (BFI; Goldberg, 1993 ), and to report their demographic and academic background information. Finally, participants were asked to define the term “feedback” so as to gather information about their feedback conceptions. For the purposes of the current paper, we will not consider participants’ grading, personality variables, and feedback receptivity and will focus exclusively on teacher candidates’ feedback comments.

Before commencing the task, the participants received the essay prompt along with the instructions that the authors of the essay had received:

Next you will find a controversial topic. Please write an argumentative text justifying your position: ‘The parliament is currently discussing a bill to allow adolescents under the age of 14 to undergo cosmetic procedures. This bill has generated a lot of controversy, with some people in favor and some against this proposal. Do you agree that Spanish adolescents under the age of 14 should be allowed to undergo cosmetic procedures?’ .

Next, the participants were shown two essays written by high school students on the above prompt and were invited to provide comments the same way they would in their own classes. Figure S 1 a, Supplementary Materials depicts the comments interface. To provide a comment, teacher candidates could highlight words or sentences they wanted to comment upon. Next, a pop-up box was displayed. Students could provide up to eight comments of unlimited length (Figure S 1 b, Supplementary Materials). Each participant performed this task twice, once for the strong essay and once for the weak essay. Despite the fact that participants were enrolled in the teacher training program, they did not receive specific training on how to provide feedback when assessing written assignments prior to participating in this study.

5.2 Data coding

Pre-service high school teachers’ feedback comments were coded according to the four dimensions of feedback: focus of feedback, content specificity, emotional valence, and past and future orientation. In order to perform the analysis, each category had two or three subcategories to classify the feedback comments. The definition of each subcategory along with some representative examples can be found in Table 2 .

A total of 1835 feedback comments were coded ( N = 1104 in 2020, N = 731 in 2021) by two researchers for each data collection cycle separately. For the 2020 sample, two researchers jointly coded 50 comments and then independently coded 100 comments (14% of the total number of comments) to get calibrated. On average, the level of agreement was above 85% and the inter-rater reliability indexed by Cohen’s κ was .66, ranging from .33 ( p < .001) to .94 ( p < .001) for task and criticism subcategories, respectively, showing acceptable agreement (Table S 2 , Supplementary Material) (McHugh, 2012 ). Disagreements were solved through discussion. The remaining feedback comments were randomly divided in two sets of 550 comments that shared a 25% of comments to make sure that the calibration remained consistent through the coding process. This follow-up coding calibration also showed acceptable agreement (95.5%), while the average of Cohen’s kappa was κ = .89 for each set, ranging from .64 ( p < .001) to 1.0 ( p < .001) for future-oriented directive and process subcategories, respectively. For the 2021 sample, the process was almost identical. Two researchers, one of whom was a new coder who did not participate in the previous coding procedure, jointly coded 50 comments. The remaining comments were randomly divided into two sets of 400 comments that shared 40% of the sample for measuring consistence between the two coders. The level of agreement was above 89% and the inter-rater reliability measured with Cohen’s κ was .75, ranging from .58 ( p < .001) to .88 ( p < .001) for future-oriented directive and task subcategories, respectively, showing acceptable agreement. Discrepancies were solved through discussions with the third researcher, who participated in the coding procedure for the 2020 sample.

5.3 Data analysis

Descriptive information about characteristics of the feedback comments was examined for both the strong and the weak essay. For the first research question, frequencies for each subcategory for the total sample and by candidates’ gender and academic discipline were calculated. Z -tests to compare observed proportions were then estimated.

For the second research question, a set of multiple logistic regression models using a binomial distribution were fitted to estimate the main effect of pre-service candidates’ gender and academic discipline and the quality of the essay (strong vs. weak performance) on the probability to provide comments in each subcategory. The proportion of comments in each subcategory was used as a dependent variable (which is an event/trial form variable rather than a binary observation), whereas candidates’ gender, academic discipline, and cohort were used as predictors. Further, Zero-Inflated Poisson (ZIP) and Zero-Inflated Negative Binomial (ZINB) distributions were estimated to deal with the overabundance of zero counts in some subcategories. Model goodness-of-fit statistics were calculated for selecting the best model fit by subcategory. Better models correspond to smaller Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) and Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) (Friendly & Meyer, 2016 ). Plot analyses were also generated for checking model assumptions. All analysis were conducted using R software version 4.1.2 (R Core Team, 2021 ). In order to control the inflation of Type I error resulting from multiple comparison within the same sample, p -values were adjusted using Benjamini-Hochberg method.

6.1 Descriptive statistics

One thousand eight hundred thirty-five feedback comments were coded into the aforementioned subcategories (852 and 983 for the strong and the weak essays, respectively). Table 3 presents descriptive characteristics of feedback messages for the total sample and the two levels of writing quality (strong and weak). Each participant provided an average of five feedback comments ( M = 5.10, SD = 1.97, range = 1–8). About 95% of the comments comprised 1–3 sentences ( M = 1.52, SD = 1.02, range = 1–11). On average, comments were 19 words long ( M = 19.14, SD = 20.74, range = 1–247). Therefore, sentences were, on average, 13 words long ( M = 12.59, SD = 8.64, range = 1–80). Participants somewhat tailored their comments to the students’ writing performance. Small differences were found for the total number of comments ( d = .47), with the weak essay receiving, on average, one extra comment compared to the strong essay. Differences in the number of sentences per comment and their length (i.e., word count) were negligible, which means that participants did not adapt the length of the comments to the quality of the essay. Further, differences in feedback characteristics by cohort were even smaller, with effect sizes ranging from .31 (comments by participants) to .07 (sentences by comment) (Table S 1 , Supplementary Materials). Next, we explored whether the content of the feedback comments varied as a function of the quality of the writing (i.e., weak versus strong essay).

6.2 Characteristics of the type of feedback pre-service teachers provided

We first computed the overall descriptive statistics for each feedback subcategory to draw a general picture of the comments provided (Table 4 ). Regarding the focus of the feedback, 1423 (77.5%) included information about students’ task performance and 789 (43%) referred to the writing process (i.e., strategies followed or to be followed when writing). When it comes to the specific content of the essay, 379 (20.7%) feedback comments referred to grammar/spelling/punctuation aspects, 1020 (55.6%) pointed out aspects of the students’ writing style, and 822 (44.8%) included information about the ideas and arguments expressed within the essay. For the emotional valence of the feedback, 284 (15.5%) included praise, 827 (45.1%) included criticisms, and 757 (41.3%) were delivered in a neutral tone. Regarding the feedback orientation, 1317 (71.8%) comments were past oriented, 343 (18.5%) included future-oriented directive actions to be performed, and 817 (44.5%) included future-oriented suggestive actions.

There were differences in the type of comments provided on the strong and weak essays. When assessing the weak essay, teacher candidates provided a higher number of feedback comments about grammar ( p = .001), critics ( p < .001), past-oriented evaluations ( p = .007), and futured-oriented suggestions ( p <.001), compared to the strong essay. Conversely, the strong essay received a larger number of feedback comments about the writing process ( p = .011), the quality of the ideas expressed ( p = .021), praise ( p < .001), neutral comments ( p < .001), and future-oriented directive comments ( p < .001), compared to the weak essay. No differences were found for the number of feedback comments referring to the task performance and the writing style.

Next, we computed descriptive statistics for each subcategory as a function of the quality of the writing and teacher candidates’ gender (Table 5 ) (see Table S 3 for the distribution of feedback comments as a function of writing quality and cohort). Findings suggested that female candidates were more focused on grammar aspects ( p = .006 and p = .006 for strong and weak essays, respectively) than male candidates. In contrast, male candidates commented more on the quality of the ideas than female candidates ( p = .006 and p = .004 for the strong and weak essays, respectively). Regarding the emotional valence and orientation components, there were no significant differences in the proportion of comments by gender.

We also computed descriptive statistics for each subcategory as a function of the quality of the essay and candidates’ academic discipline (Table 6 ). Regarding the focus of feedback, a statistically significant difference was found in the proportion of participants who commented on the task by the area of specialization in the weak essay. Results showed that social science and science teacher candidates referred to task performance in almost every comment assessing the weak essay (90.2 and 84.4, respectively). Interestingly, across disciplines, teacher candidates provided a similar proportion of comments about the writing process independently of quality of essay. When it comes to content specificity, results showed that language teacher candidates delivered a higher proportion of comments related to grammar aspects in the weak essay compared to candidates in other disciplines ( p < .001) but delivered a lower number of comments related to the quality of ideas ( p = .04 and p < .001 for the strong and weak essays, respectively). There were no significant differences in the proportion of comments related to the writing style among disciplines.

Regarding the emotional valence of the feedback messages, results showed that candidates from the three disciplines delivered neutral or praise comments more frequently when assessing the strong essay but criticized more often when assessing the weak essay. Furthermore, there were no significant differences in the proportion of comments related to subcategories of emotional valence among disciplines for the strong essay. In contrast, in the weak essay, there were significant differences in the proportion of feedback that included praise comments or neutral information. Results indicated that language teacher candidates delivered a lower proportion of praise comments and a higher proportion of neutral comments compared to candidates from other disciplines ( p = .033 for praise and p = .012 for neutral subcategories). For the orientation category, past-oriented comments were the most prevalent messages among candidates from the three disciplines. However, there were no statistically significant differences between proportion of comments on orientation subcategories. Only the future-oriented suggestions subcategory yielded significant results, with candidates from the language discipline delivering more suggestions when assessing the strong essay compared to participants in other disciplines ( p = .014).

6.3 Predicting feedback comments: the role of the quality of student writing and teacher candidates’ gender and discipline

Two multiple logistic regression models, fixed and interaction effects, were conducted to examine the extent to which the cohort, gender, and academic discipline predicted the type of feedback comments provided by teacher candidates. The dependent variable was the proportion of comments in each subcategory. Models were estimated for both the total sample of comments and for each essay depending on the quality of the writing, independently. Table 7 presents descriptive information for each subcategory as a function of writing quality, and Table S 4 (Supplementary Material) shows descriptive information for the total sample of comments. On average, 16.5% of the comments focused on task performance, while 14.7% included past-oriented messages independently of the students’ writing quality. Differences in proportions by writing quality were mainly observed for emotional valence, especially in criticism ( M = .07, SD = .06 for strong essay, M = .11, SD =.07 for weak essay) and neutral comments ( M = .11, SD = .09 for strong essay, M = .07, SD = .82 for weak essay).

Furthermore, some distributions in some subcategories were highly negatively skewed. The proportion of participants who did not provide any message in the subcategory varied between .01 (task) and .57 (grammar) for the strong essay and between .03 (task) and .66 (praise) for the weak essay. Moreover, more than 50% of participants did not provide comments pertaining to grammar, praise, and future-oriented directive subcategories. For these categories, additional Zero-Inflated Poisson (ZIP) and Zero-Inflated Negative Binomial (ZINB) were estimated to control for the effect of an overabundance of zero counts in modeling.

Results of multiple logistic regression models with significant effects for each subcategory as a function of the quality of the writing are displayed in Tables 8 and 9 , while model estimation for the total sample of feedback comments is presented in Table S 5 (Supplementary Materials).

Regarding the focus of feedback, participants in 2021 were 0.73 ( β = −0.32, p < .001) times as likely to provide comments about the task relative to 2020 cohort in the strong essay. Moreover, candidates from the 2021 cohort were 1.49 ( β = 0.4, p < .012) and 1.65 ( β = 0.50, p = .001) times more likely to provide comments that referred to process in the strong and weak essays, respectively, compared to candidates from cohort 2020. For the content specificity, candidates from 2021 were 1.89 ( β = 0.64, p = .013) times as likely to write feedback comments about grammar relative to the 2020 cohort. Results also showed a significant effect of discipline on the feedback comments about grammar, suggesting that science teacher candidates were 0.42 ( β = −0.87, p < .002) times as likely to provide messages about grammar aspects compared to their language specialization counterparts.

The participants’ discipline was a statistically significant predictor of the emotional valence category. Specifically, science teacher candidates were 0.48 ( β = −0.74, p = .014) times as likely to provide praise messages when assessing the strong essay compared to language teacher candidates, whereas social science teacher candidates provided 2.18 ( β = 0.78, p =.033) times more praise when assessing the weak essay than language teacher candidates. Additionally, there was a statistically significant interaction effect between gender and discipline for neutral feedback comments when assessing the weak essay, suggesting that male science teachers provided a lower proportion of neutral comments in this essay compared to male language teachers ( β = −2.97, < .001).

Finally, participants in 2021 were 0.78 ( β = −0.25, p = .028) times as likely to provide past-oriented evaluative comments when assessing the weak essay compared to the 2020 cohort. Moreover, candidates from 2021 cohort were 1.54 ( β = 0.43, p = .018) and 1.40 ( β = 0.34, p = .013) times more likely to provide future-oriented suggestive comments in both the strong and weak essays, respectively, compared to those from the 2020 cohort. Additionally, male science teachers provided a higher proportion of future-oriented suggestive comments in the strong essay compared to male language teachers ( β = 0.870, p = .047). Tables S 6 to S 8 (Supplementary materials) display the goodness-of-fit test statistics for all models conducted. Additionally, comparison of goodness-of-fit statistics for models conducted with categories with zero-inflated indicates that the best model for adjusted data were logistic regression models with a binomial link function (Table S 9 , Supplementary Materials).

7 Discussion

Teachers often assess and deliver written feedback comments on their student writing assignments, which is critical for improving writing outcomes and developing students’ writing skills (e.g., Dempsey et al., 2009 ; Duijnhouwer et al., 2010 , 2012 ; Graham, 2018 ; Parr & Timperley, 2010 ). The extant literature suggests that providing effective feedback is a complex pedagogical skill that is difficult to master for both in-service and pre-service teachers (Ropohl & Rönnebeck, 2019 ; Ryan et al., 2021 ; Underwood & Tregidgo, 2006 ). So far, very few studies have closely examined the type of feedback that pre-service teachers deliver when assessing written assignments, which was the main goal of our study. We attempted to present a comprehensive overview of the feedback comments that pre-service high school teachers provide on two standardized essays of different quality. We also examined differences in feedback they provided depending on gender, academic discipline, and students’ quality of writing (i.e., weak vs. strong essay).

7.1 What kind of feedback messages did pre-service high school teachers provide when assessing an academic writing assignment?

Guided by existing taxonomies (e.g., Otnes & Solheim, 2019 ; Wingard & Geosits, 2014 ; Zellermayer, 1989 ), we employed four categories to classify feedback comments, i.e., focus, content specificity, emotional valence, and past and future orientation. In general, the literature indicates that teachers’ feedback should be predominantly process-focused, as this type of feedback would have a higher chance of being transferred to a new task (Hawe et al., 2008 ; Parr & Timperley, 2010 ). However, recent findings show that both in-service and pre-service teachers usually provide task-focused feedback when assessing writing assignments (Arts et al., 2016 ; Dysthe, 2011 ; Fong et al., 2013 ). Despite the fact that over three quarters of the comments analyzed in the current study focused on the students’ task performance, more than 40% of feedback messages referred to the students’ writing process (e.g., Once you consider your writing done, you should check whether there are mistakes and whether it responds to the topic in an appropriate manner ). This generally positive pattern of our results suggests that pre-service high school teachers may not only spontaneously assess the assignment outcome but also the writing process that leads students to that outcome (Fong et al., 2013 ).

When it comes to the content of comments, teacher candidates in our study mostly commented on students’ writing style and the arguments employed to defend their contentions, with relatively few comments focusing on grammar and punctuation. This finding contradicts previous findings suggesting that both in-service and pre-service teachers provided feedback on surface features (grammar, spelling or punctuation) rather than on higher order writing skills (e.g., Arts et al., 2016 ; Furneaux et al., 2007 ; Hawe et al., 2008 ). It is possible that this overall optimistic finding in our study has to do with our systematic and comprehensive design. That is, we examined 1835 comments delivered on two standardized essays, so we were able to capture a more complete pattern of pre-service teachers’ written feedback compared to previous studies.

When it comes to the emotional valence of feedback, pre-service teachers mostly delivered criticisms or provided comments in a neutral or informative tone. Such informative feedback comments that mainly state or explain what actions students should undertake are effective for enhancement of student writing (Hattie et al., 2021 ). Interestingly, very few comments included praise, which aligns with the evidence-based suggestion that praise does not enhance learning (Lipnevich & Smith, 2022 ). Teachers’ feedback that includes praise/criticism comments without further explanations may limit feedback effectiveness (Nicol & Macfarlane-Dick, 2006 ). In our study, teacher candidates provided praise and criticism along with additional information to help move students’ writing forward. This finding should be interpreted with caution. In our study, teacher candidates did not know students who had written the two essays. Hence, they may not have been emotionally invested to provide positive comments that they otherwise would have, had they had a personal relationship with the student. Furthermore, the number of critical comments could have varied, had the teachers known the authors of the two essays. These potential confounds aside, the bulk of teacher candidates’ comments in our study was neutral in tone which suggests that they are well prepared to communicate feedback in a non-emotionally charged manner.

For the past and future orientation of feedback, we found that over 70% of the comments were past-oriented, about 45% included future-oriented suggestive actions, and few comments included future-oriented directive comments. Overall, these findings indicate that pre-service teachers’ feedback included information about where students are, where they needed to go and offered suggestions on how to get there (Parr & Timperley, 2010 ). Although previous research has shown that teachers rarely delivered future-oriented comments when assessing a writing assignment (Arts et al., 2016 ), our findings revealed that about 50% of the comments offered students the tools to improve their writing, which is a key aspect of feedback design (Duijnhouwer et al., 2012 ; Pitt & Norton, 2017 ; Price et al., 2011 ). We also found that teacher candidates provided a substantial number of past-oriented evaluative comments, which may inhibit student’s engagement with feedback processing if they focus on negative aspects of the students’ performance (Pitt & Norton, 2017 ).

7.2 To what extent did pre-service teachers’ gender and academic discipline, as well as students’ quality of writing, predict the type of feedback provided?

To answer our second research question, we considered the impact of critical variables on teacher candidates’ feedback provision (i.e., strong vs. weak essay, teacher candidates’ gender, and the academic discipline). As literature suggests, considering students’ writing level is crucial to craft effective feedback (Graham, 2018 ; Ropohl & Rönnebeck, 2019 ). In our study, an interesting trend was observed for the differences in comments between the weak and the strong essay. For the weak essay, candidates mostly focused on grammar, provided critical comments, past-oriented evaluations, and future-oriented suggestions. On the other hand, the strong essay received more comments on the writing process, quality of ideas expressed, praise, neutral messages, and future-oriented directive comments. These findings indicate that pre-service high school teacher candidates can create feedback that includes actions to improve the writing and that they adapt feedback to the level of writing performance (Duijnhouwer et al., 2012 ; Hattie et al., 2021 ), with the strong essay receiving the type of feedback that facilitates future performance in a deeper way.

When considering teacher candidates’ gender, we observed interesting differences in feedback types. In general, women commented more on grammar aspects, while men commented more on the quality of the ideas and arguments employed. However, regarding the focus of feedback, its emotional valence, and its past-future orientation, no significant differences in the proportion of comments by gender were apparent. A significant interaction between gender and discipline was also found for future-oriented suggestive feedback comments on the strong essay, with male science teachers providing a higher proportion of suggestions in this essay compared to male language teachers. Another significant interaction between gender and discipline was found for neutral feedback comments on the weak essay, with male social science teachers providing a lower proportion of neutral comments in this essay compared to male language teachers.

When it comes to the teacher candidates’ academic discipline, social science and science teacher candidates referred to task performance in almost every comment when assessing the weak essay. Interestingly, teacher candidates from the three disciplines provided a similar proportion of comments about the writing process when assessing both the strong and the weak essays. Apparently, teacher candidates seem to be able to foster the composition skills of young writers, by focusing on the writing process when creating feedback. For the content specificity of the comments, we found that language teacher candidates delivered a higher proportion of comments related to grammar aspects in the weak essay compared to their counterparts from science, which means that they pay more attention to the mechanics of writing. However, science teacher candidates, in turn, were more likely to provide feedback on the quality of ideas expressed within the weak essay compared to their language teacher counterparts. Further, social science candidates provided more comments on the ideas when assessing the strong essay. As for the emotional valence of feedback, candidates from the three disciplines delivered neutral or praise comments more often when assessing the strong essay, but criticized the weak essay with higher probability. Science teacher candidates, however, delivered a lower proportion of praise comments when assessing the strong essay compared to their language counterparts. On the other hand, language teacher candidates delivered a higher proportion of neutral comments when assessing the weak essay compared to the candidates from other disciplines. Regarding the orientation of feedback, the results showed that language teacher candidates delivered more future-oriented suggestions when assessing the strong essay compared to participants from other disciplines. Again, these findings are quite encouraging in that teachers seem to tailor their comments to low- and high-quality essays, and language teacher trainees are quite prepared in helping students to improve their writing.

Since this study was conducted in two academic years, cohort was considered when predicting the type of feedback comments created. Results suggest that teacher candidates from different cohorts may deliver different feedback. For instance, candidates from 2021 cohort focused more on the writing process and offered more future-oriented suggestive comments when assessing the essays (both weak and strong) than candidates from the 2020 cohort. However, candidates from the 2021 cohort were less likely to provide feedback about students’ task performance and commented more on grammar aspects when assessing a strong essay than candidates from the 2020 cohort. When assessing the weak essay, candidates from 2021 delivered fewer past-oriented messages than candidates from the 2020 cohort. These findings indicate that specific training on building effective feedback that respond to evidence-based instructional principles need to be consistently integrated into teacher training programs so as to ensure that teachers from different cohorts generate similar (and equally effective!) feedback routines.

8 Limitations and future directions

Although in this study we presented a comprehensive picture on the type of feedback pre-service high school teachers may deliver when assessing written essays, our research reveals some areas for improvement that warrant further studies. First, teacher candidates assessed two essays from fictitious students, which may have influenced the interactive nature of feedback. Teachers often hold beliefs of their students’ competence and motivation, leading to different patterns of communication. Exploring how pre-service teachers provide feedback when assessing a writing assignment during their internship training would be of special interest to draw a more ecologically valid picture of feedback practices. At the same time, by using standardized essays, we were able to draw conclusions about differences in teacher feedback while holding the quality of essays constant.

Second, providing feedback requires teachers to activate cognitive and metacognitive processes when assessing an assignment. To the best of our knowledge, no study has examined teachers’ cognitive processing when crafting feedback. Future studies may explore these mechanisms and processes. Furthermore, in our study, teacher candidates did not receive any specific training on evidence-based instructional principles that may support feedback construction. Future research may examine the extent to which training candidates to deliver effective feedback on specific assignments (e.g., writing tasks) may improve their feedback practices (Dempsey et al., 2009 ). It may also be relevant to account for the teacher candidates’ background to assess writing, the role of their own experiences receiving feedback, and the extent to which general or discipline-based training experiences make a difference in delivering feedback.

To be effective, feedback comments have to be received, processed, and used by students. Previous studies suggest that teachers sometimes overestimate the quality of their feedback comments compared to their students’ perceptions (Orrell, 2006 ). Research also indicates that students use feedback comments to make adjustments to their assignments even when no future-oriented comments are provided (Arts et al., 2016 ). Given that our study demonstrates that teacher candidates are able to deliver future-oriented comments, we call for research that carefully examines how students take up this particular type of feedback, and whether these comments translate into enhanced engagement and task improvements. Finally, this study was conducted in a sample of teacher trainees in a single university in Spain. Replicating this study in other universities and countries could be a fruitful avenue for research.

9 Implications and conclusions

In general, our findings offer several insights regarding instructional implications for teacher training programs and for student learning. Literature suggests that feedback effectiveness depends on teachers’ abilities to deliver information in a manner that can trigger actions that facilitate learning improvements (e.g., Carless & Boud, 2018 ; Winstone et al., 2017 ). The coding scheme that we employed to classify feedback permitted us to dig deeper into the quality of the feedback comments pre-service high school teachers can provide to their students when assessing writing assignments. Contrary to previous findings (Hawe et al., 2008 ), we observed that teacher candidates treated the written products as work-in-progress rather than finished work, thus including a good number of comments on the writing process along with future-oriented messages. However, some of the candidates systematically focused on students’ task outcomes, which may mean that they paid more attention to the product and the specifics of the task, thus reducing the odds of promoting learning improvements. We also found that overall, teacher candidates were capable of delivering neutral informative comments—something that research shows could be most conducive to improvement (e.g., Lipnevich & Smith, 2009 ,  2022 ).

Taken together, our results suggest that there is a pressing need to provide structured training for teacher candidates, facilitating their ability to deliver spontaneous feedback across a spectrum of assignments, while considering its characteristics, such as focus, content, emotional tone, and orientation. Initial efforts should prioritize the identification of candidates who naturally gravitate towards assessing student products and task-specific elements, laying the groundwork for instruction on evidence-based feedback practices. Subsequently, the implementation of authentic, hands-on experiences becomes paramount, aimed at cultivating feedback strategies that prioritize the writing process, adopt a forward-looking perspective, and are conveyed in a neutral tone. Such an approach holds a potential in harnessing the power of feedback to enhance writing proficiency and foster academic improvement (Parr & Timperley, 2010 ; Pitt & Norton, 2017 ). Notably, it is important to caution teacher trainers regarding various considerations during training sessions. Factors such as candidates’ gender may influence the characteristics of feedback, with men providing more comments on the arguments and women offering more comments on the grammar aspects of student work. Similarly, disciplinary differences must be acknowledged, wherein male social science educators may provide fewer neutral comments than language candidates, whereas male science instructors may provide more future-oriented suggestions compared to language educators.

This study holds significant implications for student learning within the classroom setting. Broadly speaking, research findings suggest that the provision of high-quality and effective feedback can greatly contribute to the acquisition and enhancement of higher-order writing skills, such as managing text structure and constructing compelling arguments. However, it goes without saying that not all students receive identical types of feedback. Our research revealed that lower-performing students may receive fewer opportunities to cultivate critical writing skills compared to their higher-performing peers. Moreover, they may encounter a higher frequency of critical feedback, potentially dampening their motivation. Additionally, it is important to recognize that students may derive varying benefits from different types of feedback, influenced by the subject matter at hand. For instance, language teachers often prioritize mechanics and offer suggestions to refine the written product, whereas science instructors may focus more on evaluating the strength of arguments presented. Despite the significance of these implications, it is essential to approach our results with caution, as participants in our study did not know the students who produced the essays.

In this study, we attempted to provide a fine-grained picture of the type of written feedback that high school teacher candidates deliver when assessing written assignments, as well as to examine the extent to which the quality of the student’s essay, candidate’s gender, and academic discipline predicted the type of comments they generate. Despite the fact that some feedback comments did not align with evidence-based instructional principles, the bulk of the comments included effective and valuable information that has a great potential of enhancing students’ writing. All in all, the findings of this study are quite optimistic. Teacher candidates in our sample delivered comments of higher quality than what was predicted by the literature. There is always room for improvement, but we shall choose to remain pleased with the participating cohort of teacher educators.

Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the authors.

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Máñez, I., Lipnevich, A.A., Lopera-Oquendo, C. et al. Examining pre-service teachers’ feedback on low- and high-quality written assignments. Educ Asse Eval Acc 36 , 225–256 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11092-024-09432-x

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