This study investigated a professional development model designed to improve teachers' inquiry teaching efficacy as well as the quality of their inquiry instruction through engaging teachers in practice-teaching and reflection sessions. The programme began with a two-week summer Institute focused on both inquiry pedagogy and science content and…

Globally, teacher dispositions along with knowledge and skills continue to be the focal point of teacher education programs. Teachers influence children's development and therefore dispositions are a universal concern. For the past 20 years in the United States, teacher education programs have assessed dispositions. We, however, must now also use…

Whether or not "instruction" appears in their job titles, librarians are often in the position of educating their users, colleagues, and peers to successfully locate and evaluate information. Because MLIS education tends to offer less-than-comprehensive preparation in pedagogy and instructional design, this much-needed book tackles the challenge…

Children have laser-like attention for everything teachers do and say. They are skillful social scientists, learning about themselves, relationships, and the world by carefully observing the people around them. As keen observers, children notice the smallest details of a teacher's body language, tone of voice, and movements. Teachers' interactions…

Teachers who engage in reflective practices are better able to recognize the complexity of teaching, use judgment to choose appropriate strategies for teaching and learning in their specific contexts, and experience improved self-confidence. For these reasons, many teacher education programs emphasize self-reflective practice. Self-reflective…

Most programmes of adult Christian learning today expect students to engage in theological reflection. The theoretical underpinning for this is often drawn from secular models of reflective practice, made "theological" by the subject matter for reflection. This article aims to establish an explicitly theological basis for the use of the metaphor…

Professor Whitty has endorsed the consensus that research into education is empirical social science, distinguishing "educational research" which seeks directly to influence practice, and "education research" that has substantive value but no necessary practical application. The status of the science here is problematic. The positivist approach is…

State and national standards have shifted what science learning should be from "plug and chug" formulas, to deep understanding of natural phenomena, competence developing ideas through the inquiry process, and even communicating scientific ideas among their communities (NRC 2007). By inquiring into his own teaching endeavors, the author continues…

Disciplinary models of learning such as ethnography (cultural anthropology) and market competition (economics) have received little attention in the burgeoning literature on "how teacher thinking shapes education". To mobilize the pedagogical potential of these disciplinary idioms, the authors draw from the path-breaking works of Palmer and…

Pre-service teacher education is a spatialised enterprise. It operates across a number of spaces that may or may not be linked ideologically and/or physically. These spaces can include daily practices, locations, infrastructure, relationships and representations of power and ideology. The interrelationships between and within these (sometimes…

Reflective practice is used in different fields such as education and mental health. The educational form of reflective practice has been around since the 1930s (Dewey, as cited in Pedro, 2006); it is a problem-solving process that facilitates examination of behavior and responses to behavior. It takes into consideration multiple factors,…

In this article the authors compare two phases of an ongoing, annual online peer observation project at the Open University. Adopting a non-managerialist approach, the project aims to give teachers a renewed sense of collegiality, allowing them to take responsibility for aspects of their professional development and share practice points. While…

Unlike the observed trends in general teacher education, the use of videos as a reflective tool with preservice English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers remains underexplored in MATESOL (Master of Arts in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) programs. The present qualitative study examined how 5 nonnative- speaking preservice…

SMK and PCK are crucial for effective science teaching, yet the amount of subject matter covered in elementary teacher education programs is limited. This exploratory study of ten elementary school teachers focuses on how teachers learned science content from their teaching practice (including preparing to teach, classroom instruction, and…

In this action research work, I analyze the theory-practice integration in teacher preparation within the context of a science and technology (S&T) education teaching methodology course aimed at future elementary teachers. The course was designed, developed and evaluated taking into account this relationship as one of its axes. The results…