This resource presents the findings of a two-year study on preservice teachers who struggle in practicum. This study, funded by the Alberta Advisory Committee for Educational Studies, sought the tips and advice of ten in-service teachers and five school-based leaders who work extensively with preservice teachers and who have had at least one…

Student teachers make errors in their practicum. Then, they learn and fix those errors. This is the standard arc within a successful practicum. Some students make errors that they do not fix and then make more errors that again remain unfixed. This downward spiral increases in pace until the classroom becomes chaos. These students at the…

The purpose of this study was to determine if peer observation (PO) in an ELT practicum for graduate students led to reflective teaching. The 15 students in the practicum taught EFL at two universities in rural Thailand in eight-week intensive courses. Five questions were investigated: (1) Did PO help the students engage in reflective teaching?…

Portfolio assessment of teaching practice was first introduced into the University of Botswana's Faculty of Education in May 2010. This study sought to investigate the impact of this innovative new professional development/assessment system on the professional growth and development of in-service teachers. The findings of the study suggest that…

The purpose of the original study was to investigate practicum student teachers' reflectivity. This paper describes the use of a revised version of the Reflective Pedagogical Thinking Scale (Sparks-Langer, et al., 1990) to measure reflectivity. The original scale was used by the developers to assess reflectivity through a structured interview. The…

A major reason for the use of cases in teacher education is based on the assumption that preservice teachers, via discussion of cases, will reflect on how educational theory can inform practice and when these students enter the classroom they will be better prepared for the realities of the classroom and will critically analyze their practices to…

For the last five years I have asked students of the Diploma of Teaching and Graduate Diploma of Education to write "an individual science autobiography". They were asked to include their recollections of any science lesson that either encouraged them to do science or nearly put them off altogether. They were also asked if the content of the…

This study was designed to explore the ways in which preservice teachers' reflective judgment levels influenced their perceptions of and decisions about complex and ill-defined dilemmas they encountered in their field placement classrooms. Participants were ten traditional-aged juniors in a college teacher preparation program who were completing a…