Suzan Kobashigawa is a teacher educator working with pre-service teachers in higher education. She teaches courses in intercultural communication, culturally responsive teaching, and learning theories, along with TESOL courses. Suzan has been in the field of English language teaching for over 30 years, and has taught in Japan, Mexico and the United States. Suzan holds a Ph.D. in Composition and TESOL, and an MA in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages.
The Tension Between Theory and Practice
In teacher education programs, a persistent tension exists between developing instructional techniques and understanding the theory behind them. Teacher candidates (TCs) may focus too much on either mastering classroom moves or absorbing research, without a clear path for integrating the two. This creates a gap between teaching skills and knowledge of how students learn.
This article explores that gap and offers a way to bridge it through a reflective practice tradition that has evolved in English language teacher education. We begin by looking at Practice-Based Teacher Education (PBTE), which emphasizes core teaching practices, and then show how a structured reflection process—DIGPA—can connect these practices to findings from the Science of Learning (SL).
Practice-Based Teacher Education (PBTE)
PBTE, advanced by scholars such as Deborah Ball, Francesca Forzani, and Pam Grossman, aims to professionalize teaching by identifying “high-leverage practices” essential for effective instruction. In PBTE, these practices are modeled (“representation”), analyzed (“decomposition”), and rehearsed in scaffolded ways (“approximation”) so TCs can receive feedback and build skills (1).
Critics such as Ken Zeichner (2) caution that too much focus on core practices risks reducing teachers to technicians who perform routines without understanding the principles behind them. PBTE leaders counter that decomposition should include not only steps of a practice but also the decision-making and learning theories that guide it (3). Still, many programs struggle to explicitly connect classroom routines with findings from the SL, which spans a century of research on what helps and hinders learning (4).
Efforts to Connect Teachers to Research
In recent years, books, podcasts, videos, and websites—including the Learning Scientists—have made SL insights more accessible. Yet a gap persists: teacher education often doesn’t help candidates explicitly link classroom techniques to research, and at the same time, teachers often learn theories in the abstract but struggle to implement them in practice.
