ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Teacher Education
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1640545
This article is part of the Research TopicUse(fullness) of educational sciences in teacher education – what it is and what it is for?View all 3 articles
Supporting Experts to Develop Experts: Identifying Critical Components of Mental Simulations as a Tool for Teacher Professional Learning
Provisionally accepted
- University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, United States
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Supporting teachers to develop adaptive expertise is a key goal for advancing ambitious, "student-centered" instruction in primary and secondary school classrooms. Engaging teachers' pedagogical reasoning in practice-based reflection is a central practice for building teachers' knowledge and skill for student-centered pedagogies. However, research to characterize how professional learning facilitators can elicit and scaffold teachers' pedagogical reasoning in ways that support developing adaptive teaching expertise often lacks sufficient detail to support high-quality enactment. This article presents an illustrative case study of one empirically supported routine, Mental Simulations for Teacher Reflection (MSTR), for facilitating this learning in a practice-based reflection context. This article specifically addresses three aims: 1) provide a detailed description of the theoretical basis for MSTR components; 2) identify the finer-grain subcomponents involved in an expert-facilitated MSTR routine; and 3) show how MSTR components and subcomponents are orchestrated and sequenced using an illustrative vignette of a video-based reflective conversation between a teacher and an instructional coach. Such efforts to reveal and unpack robust applications of theoretical frameworks for effective teacher learning are essential for advancing more consistent and high-quality teacher professional learning.
Keywords: Practice-based pedagogies, Adaptive Teaching Expertise, Instructional coaching, Teacher learning and professional development, Teacher cognition, mental simulation
Received: 12 Jun 2025; Accepted: 19 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Walsh, Matsumura, Schunn and Zook-Howell. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Marguerite Walsh, m.walsh@pitt.edu
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