While attention has long been a concern in western philosophy and eastern spirituality, technologies (e.g., social media, gaming) and pathologies (e.g., attention deficit disorders) have recently foregrounded the issue specifically in education. Issues of "student" absorption and diversion have been widely discussed; comparatively less…

By assessing student engagement with learning tasks along with students' understanding of subject matter before and during teaching, teachers are able to shift their teaching approaches through improvisational pedagogical reasoning in real time. However, if a teacher does not know how to respond to students' cues, their capacity to effectively…

This article explores how teachers in Finland, Norway, and the United States reflect on their professional space for decision-making when planning. Various planning activities are at the core of teaching practice, and contextual factors are also at play. Teachers' reflections on decision-making when planning might therefore be expected to vary.…

This article addresses educational supervision as a platform for promoting the principles and foundations of social justice in K-12 schools in the United States. Fraser's components of recognition, redistribution, and representation served as the foundation to examine socially-just supervision as a socio-culturally, politically, and economically…

There is increasing evidence to show that teachers' epistemic cognition is related to how they conceive of and engage in teaching; therefore it is important that teachers develop adaptive epistemic cognition. This article provides an overview of the different ways of theorizing and investigating changes in epistemic cognition for teaching and…

Two different strands of evidence coalesce to give rise to the issue of concern in this paper. Firstly, proposals for educational reform assert that teacher-agency is necessary for "effective" reform. Indeed it is argued that it is agency which drives the construction/reconstruction of professional knowledge, to influence and transform…

This conceptual essay explores the role a teaching philosophy plays in the experiences of K-12 classroom teachers who are firmly established in a school context. We draw on our experiences as in-service teacher educators and K-12 teachers to examine the extent to which teachers make decisions that are grounded in a well-thought out and clearly…

Teachers' decisions about pedagogy are informed by a range of educational discourses. These discourses constitute particular kinds of teaching practices and teacher-student relationships in ways that are not immediately obvious. When a particular pedagogy becomes accepted as best practice and it produces desired learning outcomes for the majority…

In this paper, I analyse the history of teacher education in Australia from 1974 to the current policy moment in which questions are increasingly being asked about the quality of teaching and teacher education. Teacher education is, and has been, a highly scrutinised domain in Australia. Since the 1970s, we have seen more than 100 reviews of…

A characteristic of expert educators is their ability to interpret classroom activities critically, to identify and solve problems regarding their teaching practice, and to make thoughtful or reflective instructional and classroom management decisions that are conducive to learning. For educators to be efficacious, they should be active…

We explore the potential of dilemma analysis as an assessment tool to reveal student teachers' thinking and concerns about their practice. For this purpose we analyze the dilemma analyses completed by 22 student teachers enrolled in our science teacher preparation program over a period of four semesters. Student teachers' dilemmas fall into two…

The purpose of this paper is to report on the elementary and secondary school experiences of first year classroom teachers who participated in the Northern State University Teacher Induction Program during the 2007-2008 school year. Most of the participants were primarily employed as classroom teachers in large and small schools across South…

Four lines of thought in philosophy that support the use of case studies and narratives to promote reflective teaching at the college level are examined. The four concepts include reflective practice or reflection in action; practical wisdom (contrasted with abstract wisdom); use of concrete cases for rational, practical decision making; and a…