Facilitating decomposition and recomposition in practice-based teacher education: The power of modularity

•The shift towards practice-based teacher education reveals unresolved tensions.•The relationship between decomposition and recomposition in learning a practice.•The relative importance of skill versus will in learning to teach.•The relation between developing routines and developing adaptive expertise.•Hierarchical modularity research helps us to reconcile these unresolved tensions.

The turn towards practice-based teacher education has marked a growing consensus around the need to focus professional preparation more directly on the enactment of teaching practice. However, the shift towards practice has also revealed some unresolved tensions among complementary but competing components of learning to teach: the relationship between decomposition and recomposition in learning a practice; the relative importance of skill versus will in learning to teach; and the relation between developing routines of practice and developing adaptive expertise. This paper explores the promise of research on hierarchical modularity as one way of understanding and reconciling these tensions.