A core motivation for the widespread teacher evaluation reforms of the past decade was the belief that these new systems would promote teacher development through high-quality feedback. We examine this theory by studying teachers' perceptions of evaluation feedback in Boston Public Schools and evaluating the district's efforts to improve feedback…

This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork that took place in 2014 in two primary Muslim schools based in Dublin in the Republic of Ireland. Based on observations and semistructured interviews, three teachers were observed and interviewed on how the Qur'an was taught to fourth and fifth class pupils. The research findings explore the following:…

Shouldn't teachers learn how children think during their training? In this essay, the author considers why they don't and what we might do about it. Many U.S. teachers report that their education is overly theoretical and not of great utility. It's clear that they are required to learn some basic principles of psychology as part of that education,…

The life narrative is an oral genre grounded in Indigenous tradition and teaching practice. In Canadian Indigenous communities, the expertise and content transmitted by life narratives are a part of their oral heritage. Drawing from their personal and professional experiences in Indigenous school environments, as well as the results from…

Observing scientific events or objects is a complex process that occurs through the interaction between the observer's knowledge or expectations, the surrounding context, physiological features of the human senses, scientific inquiry processes, and the use of observational instruments. Scientific observation has various features specific to this…

This paper discusses the main aspects of an ethnographic approach to the Occupy Poble Sec Cinema Forum in Barcelona, Spain, and the difficulties of using participant observation, in which vision is still dominant, in this setting. The methodological challenge stemmed from the 'native' position of the researcher--a member of the Forum's organising…

Storytelling has been shown to play a key role in transferring work experience from more experienced towards novices in a number of vocational educational practices, however previous studies have not to the same extent dealt with the role of students' own storytelling practices for sensemaking of work experience. This study set out to examine…

Based on a teaching intervention with modelling activities involving experimental work in 9th grade classes, the goal of this study is to find out how students estimate the credibility a modelling task setting when it integrates a hands-on experimental approach. The theoretical background is based on the concept of authenticity and its long…

The purpose of this study is to explore the recontextualisation of Assessment for Learning (AfL) as a particular content area in the transition between a university course and a school placement course within Swedish physical education teacher education (PETE). By combining Basil Bernstein's pedagogic device and Stephen Ball's performativity…

In many countries, assessment and curriculum reforms came into being in recent decades. In Iran, an important educational assessment reform took place called Descriptive Assessment (DA). In this reform, the focus of student assessment was moved from a more summative approach of providing grades and deciding about promotion to the next grade to a…

As the field of higher education has used several methods to assess college teaching, the validation of these measures and how they relate to each other has been sparse. This study drew on data from a multi-institutional study of 587 college courses to examine the efficacy of two methods of measuring college teaching (class observation and…

This paper is based on a large study of family literacy provision in England, which was carried out between July 2013 and May 2015. It explored the impact of classes on parents' relations with the school and their children, and their ability to support their children's literacy development. The study involved 27 school-based programmes for pupils…

This quantitative study examined the frequency counts of Head Start teachers' verbalizations or teacher talk and the scores of such teachers in the Mediated Learning Rating Scale (MLERS) during interactions with diverse young learners (DYLs) of three sites in a Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. The relationships between Head Start…

Inquiry-style laboratory courses, in which students engage in open-ended projects rather than a prescribed set of experimental steps ("cookbooks"), are becoming increasingly popular at the undergraduate level. Reformed curricula require reforms in training teachers; in the case of large universities, laboratory instructors are typically…

The aim of the study was to investigate the effect of performance feedback (PF) provided to student teachers working with students with multiple disabilities and visual impairment (MDVI) on their teaching skills. The study group of the research was composed of 11 student teachers attending to the final year of the Teaching Students with Visual…