In this study, community service learning is incorporated into a graduate-level English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) teacher preparation course. Focusing on a writing project participants completed with English Learners (ELs) as part of the service-learning project, we explored the impact of the project on: (1) teachers' understanding of ESL…

The notion of reflection has become an object of attention in education, but the research on this topic is often reduced to mere reflective practice. A relevant part of educational literature portrays reflection as a wholly beneficial practice for practitioners, but also for researchers. In the nursing field, in particular, reflection is largely…

Teachers play a key role in realizing successful changes in education. Among them are real "change agents" at both classroom and school level. To obtain insights into what characterizes these teachers, an exploratory study has been conducted by interviewing external experts, principals, and teachers (n = 20). An analysis of data resulted…

In a rapidly changing world, the mission of education deserves some reflection. Mutual understanding and assessment between trainers and trainees offers a way to promote discussion concerning goals, values, and strategies that should be promoted at schools. This study offers the views of 153 pre-service teachers and their respective trainers…

Meeting the challenge of program accountability is a goal for teacher education programs across the USA. In this context, achieving effective assessment practices that provide concrete evidence of program participants' knowledge and skills has become both an increasingly significant issue and a challenge to teacher education programs seeking to…

This article focuses on the impact of a specific formative assessment procedure, negotiated assessment, on teacher professional learning. Negotiations between the assessor and the teacher as assessee seem to be especially promising for this teacher learning. However, there is no empirical evidence yet that has confirmed this. We explored teachers'…

This paper sets out to explore science teachers' classroom assessment practices and outlines some of the tensions and synergies in changing assessment practices. It describes episodes from a collaborative action research project with science teachers designed to support the strengthening of classroom assessment practices--the King's Researching…

The National Board of Professional Teaching Standards offers a voluntary advanced certification for K-12 teachers. The majority of teachers who pursue this professional development program live in the USA, although there are National Board Certified teachers across the globe. This study examined National Board Certified Physical Education…

The person of the teacher is an essential element in what constitutes professional teaching and therefore needs careful conceptualisation. In this article the author argues for this central thesis, presenting a wrap up of his theoretical and empirical work on the issue over the past decade. These studies have been inspired--both conceptually and…

If teaching is a complex act, it is additionally complex for first-year teachers', who enter with the same responsibilities as veteran teachers yet encounter specific difficulties as beginning teachers. This paper uses existing research on beginning English teachers major concerns to frame the exploration of concerns faced by four beginning…

The article shows the experience of professional development over the course of a decade of one teacher's career nested against the backdrop of one reforming middle-school context in the USA. Through the use of four fine-grained narrative exemplars, the campus professional development trajectory is examined from the vantage point of Daryl Wilson,…

In the phenomenological study from which this theoretical article derives, 18 middle school teachers were asked--during an unstructured interview or by writing a lived-experience description--to describe moments when they "recognized and responded to a student who did not understand something during an instructional activity." Based on my analysis…

This article explores teacher training by the alternation of classroom work and work analysis using an approach based on a social conception of meaning and action. The advantage of this approach is that it allows the development of professional activity in preservice teachers (PTs) to be assessed by tracking how the reflective tools acquired in…

This paper is designed to raise issues around how we view teaching and some of the implication that has for thinking about teaching as a discipline. The paper is built around the concept of "noticing" from some of my earlier work and aims to push ideas about teaching in ways that are intended to provoke readers into thinking more deeply about how…

Based on the writing and oral reports of a group of 15 students in a graduate course focused on autobiographic writing and professional development, I address the question of how graduate study in education might sustain teachers in their work. For the course in question, the students studied recent research on teacher learning and devoted time to…