Analysis of our own experiences teaching in preservice teacher education programs leads us to a range of insights, issues, and questions associated with the potential of seeing teaching as a discipline. We begin with the reality that teaching and teacher education appear to students as easy activities, while those who actually do them see them as…

This article calls for renewed emphasis on the use of on-campus microteaching to facilitate simultaneously preservice teachers' performance of effective teaching skills and their capability to reflect meaningfully on their emergent teaching actions. In making a case for greater focus on the implementation of microteaching in preservice teacher…

Social work literature provides analysis and strategies about teaching social work practice and its interrelationship with a diverse society. In this paper, we present a framework to aid instructors' understanding of and response to conflict in the classroom, which is unavoidable. We propose the "reflective practitioner paradigm" along with the…

Cultural activities such as teaching and learning are highly complex systems that are deeply embedded in a wider culture and these factors impede change. Despite feeling directly the effect of the recent drive towards mass participation in higher education, most lecturers have not accounted for these changes in their teaching methods. Unless…

This article presents one educator's philosophic answer to the question "Why am I teaching?" During the course of this article, principles of servant teachership are presented. In addition, some teaching approaches used by the author are presented.

Mentoring has become an important part of teacher education, as an element in both the enhancement of reflective practice and the professional development of schools. Yet the concept remains confused. Problematic issues such as the elements of power and control, and the danger of dependence and intimacy are seldom heard when mentoring is…

Reflective teaching practice has become a central theme in professional growth at the pre-service teacher education level almost everywhere. English language teaching (ELT) teacher trainers, like any other teacher trainers, have a powerful role to play in fostering reflection in their student teachers through the approaches and strategies they…

This paper reports on the effectiveness of a professional partnership approach to preparing pre-service primary teachers to teach science. The study involved final year BEd pre-service primary teachers at the University of Tasmania, each working in the class of a volunteer colleague teacher. The programme provided an authentic science teaching…

This study reports on an investigation on the use of electronic journals to support beginning teachers in developing reflection on teaching within peer support networks. The study takes place within the context of the ongoing Pilot Project on Teacher Induction in post-primary schools in Ireland. A pilot study using web logs (blogs) was initiated…

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 this study is to understand how selected insurance practitioners learn and developed in their practices setting. The selected insurance practitioners (collectively customer service representatives, insurance agents, and risk managers) are responsible for the counseling and placement of insurance products and the implementation of…

The article suggests that though narrative inquiry as a research methodology entails free conversations and personal stories, yet it should not be totally free and fictional as it has to conform to some recognized standards used for conducting educational research. Hence, a qualitative study conducted by Russ (1999) was explored as an exemplar…

The main purpose of the study was to ascertain the benefits of employing a hybrid evaluation approach to assessing a teacher education programme's objectives or intended outcomes. The benefits of employing the hybrid evaluation approach enacted through its evaluation survey component was seen in the fact that it acts as a guide for participants'…

Lorenza Lara, Secondary Literacy Coordinator for the Denver (CO) Public Schools, specializes in secondary English Learner (EL) education. According to Lorenza, EL research has shown that educators often confuse youths' regular development in a second language with literacy difficulties. This research also has demonstrated the individuality of…

While there is a resurge of interests and writings on the differentiated instructional process (DIP), and reflection in teaching is important and perennial, there is no known writing which explicitly displays the role of reflection in the DIP. Using a synergistic review of literature, the author contributes to filling this literary gap and clearly…