Chapter 5: The Why And How Of What We Do: Using Case Studies to Understand Adolescent Development for Teacher Education

Teachers face great challenges as they provide for the educational and mental health needs of students during and (optimistically) after the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, the political climate, racial unrest, curriculum debates, and concerns of parents create a challenging milieu for teaching. As such, it seems logical and prudent to rely on educational psychology as a valuable resource to ground and inform teachers’ instruction and decision-making practices (Anderson et al., 1995; Carter &Doyle, 1996).Yet, ironically, colleges and universities across the nation are continuing to phase out educational psychology programs, while faculty strive to establish relevance and produce evidence of the benefits of educational psychology in teacher education (Patrick et al., 2011). The crux of the debate regarding relevance seems to center on two main themes. First, there is discussion of the balance between theory and practice (Anderson et al., 1995; Chizhik &Chizhik, 2003; Crozier, 2009) and the domain that should be responsible for disseminating the knowledge to inform practice (Carter &Doyle, 1996). Second, there is the challenge to redefine the significance of educational psychology within teacher preparation programs given the fluid role of content standards (Woolfolk, 2000).