Early childhood educators respect children's need to construct their own knowledge by supporting curricula that allow children to make choices and to be active learners. However, what everyone appears to want for students--a wide array of learning opportunities that engage students in experiencing, creating, and solving real problems, using their…

The teaching observation process in a higher education context can be underpinned by an intention to enhance learning and teaching or used as a managerial tool to ensure standards are met or maintained. In this article we examine the perceptions of observees using a model that engages educational developers as observers. We seek to examine whether…

Tim O'Keefe, Rise Reinier and Kevin Gallagher, Bruce Morgan, Julia Lopez-Robertson, Donna Santman, JoAnn Wong-Kam, Sharon Hill, and Linda Christensen provide short essays describing their personal visions of possibility about literacy and how they maintain that passion and vision. Across a range of contexts, they reflect on the ways in which their…

This book follows master educator Elizabeth (Betty) Jones as she teaches an introductory course in early childhood education. She actively engages the students, encouraging them to make decisions, ask questions, and engage in collaborative problem solving--herself modeling the behaviors that should be practiced by adults working with young…

This research is an examination of how gender is constructed through the pedagogical practices of the teacher in one secondary English/literacy classroom. It is evident from the classroom data that the teacher talks to the male students and the female students very differently and in this way constructs gender in different and inequitable ways.…

Guidance and verbal directions, usually received in a face-to-face (F2F) classroom, are often conspicuously absent from online courses. Like their peers in traditional classroom settings, students in online classes need clear, concise instructions (Cramer, Collins, Snider, & Fawcett, 2006). Screen capture and recording technologies, such as…

Words Work! and Community Action Head Start have been working together for seven years to provide training, consultation, mentoring, and resources to teachers in pilot classrooms as they learned to implement effective early literacy strategies. In its work with teachers, Words Work! developed a culture "where ongoing assessment, reflective…

The powerful role of prior experiences and cultural schemata in guiding novice teachers' conceptions of how to teach is hardly contested. We report on a "reflective practicum" at the very beginning of a pre-service teacher education course that interconnects prior beliefs, reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action and that, in principle,…

This study chronicles a 2-year school wide portfolio initiative in a British elementary school, teacher resistance to the initiative, and factors that contributed to acceptance of the portfolio initiative. Critical components to teacher engagement in this context included teacher ownership of the process and product, a child-centred focus to the…

This paper comments on strengths and weaknesses of the papers on communities of practice in this special issue of "Technology, Pedagogy and Education." First it discusses the character of communities of practice and the question of whether schools are environments that are conducive to the development of teacher communities of practice. It then…

In spite of the relatively long history of formalized music teacher preparation in the United States, surprisingly little research has focused on the question of how teachers learn to teach music. The authors of this article have proposed a theory of situated learning, building on the idea of apprenticeship. Several models of music teacher…

This study, part of a larger study focusing on studying a human tutor to design a computer simulation of expert tutoring (i.e., a self-improving intelligent tutoring system), conducted a detailed analysis of one expert tutor's (Nancy Mack) tutorial actions as she attempted to help students learn fractions with understanding. As Mack tutored…

The purpose of this paper is to identify practices and trends in elementary and secondary education literature applicable to early childhood student teacher supervision. The paper begins by reviewing the relevant literature on both historical and current perspectives on early childhood teacher education programs. Then, the goals of student…

Based on a longer report with the same title, this digest summarizes current efforts to increase the quality of college teaching. The report uses a model that views strategies for improving instruction as helping motivate individual faculty members to improve their teaching by actively changing (and maintaining) certain of their instructional…

In this book, seven teachers analyze their own efforts to integrate social, moral, and political issues into the public school classroom. The volume weighs the possibilities for making classrooms more responsive to the need for social justice, critical consciousness, and democratic values. Through their personal narratives, these teachers reveal…