Authentic Role-playing as Situated Learning: Reframing teacher education methodology for higher-order thinking

This article draws from situated learning theory, teacher education research, and the authors’ collaborative self-study to propose a teacher education pedagogy that may help to bridge the theory-into-practice gap for preservice teachers. First, we review the Interstate Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium standards to confirm the call for higher-order critical thinking skills as an essential habit for future classroom teachers. We also review literature of teacher education methodology and situated learning. Our self-study concerns the use of authentic role-playing as situated learning (ARSL), a situated learning methodology that allows our preservice teachers to pause the interaction during classroom role-playing in order to gain access to and demystify the complex, critical thinking used by expert teachers in their moment-to-moment practice. We describe two instances of ARSL in which we engaged preservice teachers in a fifth-grade mathematics lesson using tiered instruction. Implications for teacher education are discussed as we explore and analyze the problems we encountered in our attempts to improve our teacher education practices.