Core practices are ‘identifiable components of teaching that teachers enact to support learning. These components include instructional strategies and the subcomponents of routines and moves’ (Grossman, 2018, p.184). Core practices are central to a teacher’s daily work of teaching and supporting student learning. They can also support teachers’ learning about their students and their teaching (Grossman et al., 2009). Core practices be both content general (e.g., orchestrating whole class discussion) and content specific (e.g., identifying inquiry-worthy ideas in science investigations). They are of varying grain size (e.g., eliciting student content-specific thinking versus leading sense-making discussion).

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Core practices are not a checklist of rote procedures or strategies and techniques that are divorced from understanding of theories and principles. Practice ‘involves the orchestration of understanding, skill, relationship, and identity to accomplish particular activities with others in specific environments’ (Grossman et al., 2009, p. 2059). In the field of science education, Windschitl et al. (2012) proposed four instructional practices related to the model-based inquiry approach: (1) constructing the big idea, (2) eliciting students’ ideas to adapt instruction, (3) helping students make sense of material activity and (4) pressing students for evidence-based explanations.