As developmental education practitioners in the midst of North Carolina's Developmental Reading and English Redesign, we are interested in researching best practices for instructional design and application. We discovered that the principles of reflective practice pervade much of the literature on program planning and practice, so we began to…

In this article I examine the ways in which Black and Latina/o urban high school youth pressed me to reflexively examine my positionality and that of my research tools during a year-long ethnographic study documenting their communicative repertoires. I reflect on youth comments on my researcher tools, as well as myself, in order to wrestle with…

Reflective practice has potentially positive effects on an organization's capacity to focus on student learning and teaching practices. In an effort to comply with policy and provide teachers with opportunities to reflect on their practice, districts, schools, and teachers have turned to various models that feature collaborative experiences. One…

The purpose of this paper is to critically reflect on two graduate international comparative education courses I taught at a mid-sized public university. Using a variety of readings and multimedia focusing on voices of international educators telling their own stories of struggle for a democratic education, these courses represent my effort to…

This pilot project investigated the benefits derived from teacher education candidates' sharing videos of their teaching for interactive review through web-based technology. Results indicate that candidates were able to move beyond the initial discomfort of watching themselves teach to reflecting on ways they could improve their practice. [Paper…

Practitioner research, as Ravitch (2014) writes in the previous issue of "Perspectives on Urban Education," holds the unique possibility of "generating local, practice-based knowledge that is deeply contextualized and meaningfully embedded in a specific milieu" while spurring a "counter-hegemonic way of thinking about and…

Student disengagement can be a major impediment to effective student learning. When parents and educators cannot provide adequate reasoning to explain the value of what is taught at home and in school, students can lose their motivation to learn and be engaged in classroom activities. In this article, the authors explain the importance of teacher…

Research shows American teachers are leaving their professions at an alarming rate due to the overwhelming responsibilities they encounter in their classrooms. The training they receive in higher education institutions should fit their needs through challenging, innovative, and resourceful exercises. This dissertation examines the status of…

Our revised secondary teacher education professional development plan (PDP) project required preservice teachers to identify their teaching beliefs, use these beliefs to analyze practice, and create an action plan centered on a research question from this analysis. We predicted these plans would show evidence of Dewey's (1964) reflective…

This study explores six Vietnamese, English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers' reflections on their experiences of English language learning during the early 1980s to the late 1990s. Data collected in narrative interviews with the participating teachers revealed a wide range of issues that arose during their EFL learning, central to which was…

A qualitative study documented the use of examples in connection with reflection-for-action by mathematics educators. This article focuses on the use of mathematical examples that were chosen or designed by the teachers during lesson planning. The data are drawn from a 3-year project intended to make educational research in mathematics more useful…

In North American higher education settings, faculty are increasingly required to write teaching philosophy statements. In the field of English language teaching, there is a very narrow understanding of language teachers' practices of writing teaching philosophy statements and their potential benefits to individuals and to the professionalization…

The VIDEO-LM project (Viewing, Investigating and Discussing Environments of Learning Mathematics) is aimed at enhancing mathematics teachers' reflection on their professional practice, through watching and discussing videotaped lessons of unknown teachers. The discussions are guided by the use of an analytic framework, comprised of six detailed…

We present our approach to a qualitative research methods course to prepare practitioner-scholars for their dissertation and independent research. We explain how an instructor's guide provides consistency and rigor, and in-class activities to scaffold learning, and helps faculty connect the content to students' out-of-school lives. We explain how…

Research literature often addresses the problems entailed in the integration of beginning teachers within the education system. Most studies emphasize the conflicts these teachers experience, especially between the personal and professional aspects of their profession. We conducted qualitative research among participants and graduates of the…