The advent of a democratically-elected government in South Africa in 1994 disrupted the erstwhile synchrony between the schooling system, teacher education system, curriculum and pedagogy. Yet many South African teachers continue to express their teacher identities much like they did prior to 1994. The explanations posited for why this is the case…

Designing field embedded experiences for teacher candidates poses a unique challenge for large teacher education programs. Field experiences must include working with students, enhanced pedagogical coaching, and interaction within a professional community. Coursework coupled with field work should engage teacher candidates in a process of…

The adoption of engineering design-based science teaching requires elementary teachers to modify their current science pedagogy, often resulting in tensions or hard choices they must make in their teaching practice. The purpose of this study is to identify, compare, and characterize the tensions faced by 45 grade 3 and grade 4 elementary teachers…

This study investigated a highly accomplished third-grade teacher's noticing of students' mathematical thinking as she taught multiplication and division. Through an innovative method, which allowed for documenting in-the-moment teacher noticing, the author was able to explore teacher noticing and reflective practices in the context of classroom…

The American legislation of No Child Left Behind resulted in a boom in scripted, prepackaged curricula for improving student outcomes. At the same time, greater attention to the needs of diverse populations also took prominence, resulting in a new area of study, culturally relevant/responsive pedagogy. The current view is that scripted curriculum…

Approached as an epistemology, implementing a constructivist workshop approach to literacy can challenge the traditional paradigm of teacher-focused instruction and transform to one where students construct knowledge together and learn through active engagement in authentic reading and writing. This study illustrated how two third-grade teachers…

Researchers frequently suggest that effective teachers adapt their teaching to navigate the complexity of classroom literacy instruction. However, little research has examined how teachers adapt their instruction, teachers' reflections on their adaptations, or the instructional conditions in which they adapt. To address this gap in the research…

This paper discusses preservice teachers' use of action research in a Professional Development School setting. Preservice teachers were placed in a PDS site that focuses on internationalizing education and on teaching languages. The teacher candidates were in charge of planning, teaching, and assessing language instruction in their classrooms. The…

This collaborative research was carried out among 197 elementary school students, in the context of a rural Canadian school of the Quebec province. Several students of the school presented learning difficulties, mostly in writing. The teachers and the learning specialist decided to differentiate the groups in special subgroups of needs that met…

The field of teacher research is increasingly including self-study as a valid and reliable method with which teachers can study and improve practice. In this self-study, I develop knowledge of myself as a nonfiction reader and use it to inform my instruction. Guided by the work of Schoenbach, Greenleaf, Cziko, and Hurwitz (1999), I use…

This article illustrates the effects of embedding a common language derived from research, conducted through Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, into teachers' documentations of classroom experiences. It suggests that documentation can be enhanced by using shared professional vocabularies that describe categories important in…

This article explores the case of a Vietnamese teacher whose conception of teaching changed greatly following a short but intensive series of lessons based on the Japanese experiences with atomic bombs. The following three issues are considered: 1) what types of efforts teachers should make to increase the depth of their lessons, on the basis of…

"Practitioner research" is an ongoing, reflective process in which inservice teachers (i.e., practitioners) ask questions about their day-to-day teaching practice, develop plans of action to investigate these questions, draw conclusions supported by evidence as they gather, and use what is learned to facilitate changes in their pedagogy.…

FirstSchool is a school reform approach to early schooling for children 3 to 8 years old. It was developed over the past five years through a collaborative partnership among families, schools, communities, and institutions of higher education. The approach responds to the needs of all young children--especially in African American or Latino…

Despite the long history of the study of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), two facts remain obvious. First, there are almost as many conceptions regarding the definition of PCK as there are researchers interested in it. Second, it is largely unclear which methods enable teacher educators to best prepare teacher candidates to use PCK. Recently,…