Student Teaching’s Contribution to Preservice Teacher Development

Despite increasing emphasis on preparing more and better teachers and despite the near universal presence of student teaching across teacher education programs (TEPs), numerous questions about what and how student teaching experiences contribute to preservice teachers’ development remain unanswered. Indeed, much of the attention focused on student teaching in reform and policy discourses emphasizes student teaching’s structural and logistical dimensions—for example, its location, duration, and division of labor—but not its contributions to learning among preservice teachers, nor K–12 students. This article reviews empirical articles published over the past two decades to determine what and how student teaching experiences contribute to preservice teachers’ development as future teachers of students in urban and/or high-needs schools specifically. While keeping this central focus, the article also considers the implications of student teaching for the schools that play host to it and for the students who attend those schools. Anchored by sociocultural perspectives on learning and learning to teach, the review highlights a disproportionate emphasis on belief and attitude change, a relatively slim evidence base concerning the development of actual teaching practice, a tendency toward reductive views of culture and context, and a need for more longitudinal analyses that address the situated and mediated nature of preservice teachers’ learning in the field. Based on these findings, authors offer direction for future research that will extend and deepen the knowledge base.