Teacher apprenticeship can take many different forms, but at its core it means pairing a beginner teacher with an experienced “master teacher” who can both demonstrate effective teaching techniques—a good transition between a lesson and independent practice, for example—and then help the beginner adopt these techniques, reflect on them, and eventually forge his or her own unique style.

Will’s master’s degree classes at Penn are often interesting discussions on pedagogical theory, but they rarely relate to his teaching practice. Even his classes on math education focus only on the theory of teaching math to a broad range of ages, which doesn’t help Will with tomorrow’s lesson plan. These meditative sessions would benefit a veteran teacher far more than they do a novice one.

Though both Penn and Teach for America rightly stress coaching teachers in the classroom, neither Penn’s observer (who came six times in the first year) nor Teach for America’s (who comes once a month) has an intricate-enough knowledge of the nuances of Will’s classroom to be effective. They know, for example, that targeting questions is important, but don’t know the individual students’ needs (or even names) well enough to suggest which students to target. Though well intentioned and supportive, their feedback tends to center on abstractions like “vision” or policy issues like “the achievement gap.”

Virtually all beginner teachers, in our experience, meanwhile, agree that what they need more than abstract social and pedagogical lectures are tangible techniques and granular-level coaching. They need Band-Aids, not meditations on hematology.

Fortunately for Will, he teaches at a charter school that does something innovative and different. At Will’s school, the top master teachers are given an additional free period to observe and train new teachers—not in pedagogical theory, but in tools such as how to support individual students (“Elijah’s parents are responsive”); content-specific tricks (“here’s a way to explain how to derive the distance formula from the Pythagorean theorem”); or school-specific techniques (“this is how our school manages half-days”).

New teachers at Will’s school are required to observe master teachers as well. Each shares a room with a master teacher, observing him or her teaching each lesson and replicating that lesson the next day under the master teacher’s close watch. After the lesson, the two reflect on what went well, why certain choices were made in content and delivery, and prep for the next day. Over time, the beginner teacher grows increasingly able to take the reins on lesson planning and begins to cultivate his or her unique style.

That kind of interaction is the essence of well-structured teacher apprenticeship: nuanced feedback aimed at specific situations. You said “length” as opposed to “distance” in that lesson—why? Could you have integrated parts from a lesson on fractions three months ago into today’s? Are you including the right special education material? In order to ask such targeted questions, the coach must have experience at the same school with similar content. And the feedback must be inscribed within a reflective dialogue—as Katherine Merseth, senior lecturer and director of Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Teacher Education Program, puts it: “You want the observer to have the awareness that [the master teacher] chose A instead of B, C, D, and E, and to understand why. Because the next time, when I’m all by myself and I haven’t seen the lesson taught before, and I have A, B, C, D, E—how do I know which one to do?”