In recent decades, teachers of second languages in many countries, including Australia, have been encouraged to use an approach known as communicative language teaching (CLT). This approach advocates the development of communicative competence as a primary goal through the extensive use of the second language as a means of communication during…

We describe an urban school initiative aimed at teachers' professional development with the goal of increasing their mathematics content knowledge and helping them improve their practice. In the lowest performing schools, mathematics specialists were employed to teach only mathematics in upper-elementary grades (ages 9-12). One aspect of this…

Curriculum materials for Grades K-12 that are intended to promote teacher learning in addition to student learning have come to be called "educative curriculum materials." How can K-12 curriculum materials be designed to best promote teacher learning? What might teacher learning with educative curriculum materials look like? The authors…

The proliferation of the study of Jewish texts in settings of teachers' professional development poses a challenge for teacher educators. What is the study of these texts to provide for teachers? What would be ways for these texts to be studied in order to contribute to the education of teachers? This paper presents four conceptual approaches of…

This article discusses how principals and other educators can stay in pace with the future of technology in schools. Although principals cannot predict the future of technology, they can prepare for future technologies by joining "trend-watching" groups and being aware of the latest technology and equity issues. With awareness, information, and…

This paper reports on an international experience designed, within a sociocultural frame, for teacher education students to examine theoretical knowledge and make visible local knowledge on diversity issues, and the interrelatedness and complexity of language, literacy and culture and its impact on educational practices. It examines the context of…

This article explores middle school teachers' mathematical knowledge for teaching and the relationship between such knowledge and teachers' subject matter preparation, certification type, teaching experience, and their students' poverty status. The author administered multiple-choice measures to a nationally representative sample of teachers and…

This article reviews didactical and psychologically based research on teachers' work and teacher thinking, narrative educational inquiry and studies of change in teachers' work and places them in the context of sociological theory about expert work and symbolic capital. The work of Abbott on the structure of expert work and knowledge, and Bourdieu…

In the U.K., a current government health strategy indicates that school nurses should be key contributors to sexual health education because they have access to the school-age population. However, there appears to be little research that investigates whether school nurses are the most appropriate health care professionals or indeed have sufficient…

This paper recounts the experiences of eighteen student teachers who used graphics calculators to teach mathematics in secondary schools. As part of their formal assessment, they submitted twenty accounts, listing the problems and benefits they had encountered in the course of using this technology. These accounts are analysed in terms of the…

In this article, the author explores seven "unanswered questions" concerning the preparation of future teacher educator-researchers. She considers five questions concerning the substance of doctoral preparation: what the new generation of teacher-researchers would need to know about teacher education, relevant disciplines, research methodologies,…

This study investigates what teachers learn from a graduate-level course that prepares them to pursue an advanced form of professional teaching certification based on the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS). The study draws from Habermas's (1972, 1974) three knowledge constitutive interests--the technical, the practical, and…

This paper addresses the question of how to develop prospective teachers' pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) in science teacher education. The main focus is on the knowledge transformation process and on the cognitive strategies used to shift prospective teachers' explanations within the domain of modelling thermal physical phenomena. This study…

The purpose of this longitudinal study was to learn how beginning elementary teachers understood and used curriculum materials for teaching reading, and how, in turn, these materials shaped teachers' instruction. We followed 4 teachers who worked in markedly different school situations and were provided a variety of curriculum materials, ranging…

This paper suggests that curriculum history should not be circumscribed by narrow, sometimes arbitrary, definitions that tend to be limiting. Curriculum history considers what societies value enough to pass on to younger generations through its schools. The foremost question which has not changed throughout the years is "What should schools…