This article provides an introduction to The Health Practitioners Competency Assurance Act (HPCAA) which took effect on 18 September 2004. The Act was introduced to provide consistent accountability across health professions and make it easier for the New Zealand public to understand what health service each registered professional provides. To…

The scholarship of teaching has its roots in reflective teaching practice. Every time a teacher is taken by surprise at something that has occurred in a course, whether he or she prefers that it not be repeated, or that it take place regularly, an opportunity exists for the scholarship of teaching to begin. In this essay, the author's intent is to…

The main objective of this article is to describe and evaluate one of the activities, the "cultural portfolio", that I use in my teacher education classroom to help my disproportionately White student teachers reflect on the public cultural scripts--ways of thinking, feeling, believing, and acting--that shape their practices. First, I frame the…

Teacher education programs employ various strategies aimed at providing teachers with the knowledge, habits of mind, and practices necessary to work with increasingly racially and ethnically diverse students. Often, these efforts have centered on the addition of a multicultural foundations course. Research on multicultural foundations courses…

Six years ago, the Division of Education at Indiana University East began the process of developing a performance-based program consistent with its division's conceptual framework, the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC) principles, and Indiana state standards. One component of the state mandate is that all teachers…

A recent study has provided some indication of the types of teaching strategies that Learning Assistance Teachers and Regular Teachers in Brunei Darussalam are likely to use. This paper will describe, briefly, the background, policy and teacher education initiatives towards inclusive education, as well as some relevant aspects of the study,…

Findings from this six-year study point to the challenge of providing substantive and on-going feedback to students in a non-traditional leadership preparation program. More importantly, this paper describes, from an inside-out perspective, the struggles encountered as faculty attempted to remedy inconsistencies in the program and reconcile…

In recent years, there has been growing interest in the use of multimedia cases for the purposes of preservice teacher preparation. Case-based learning typically involves an analysis of a teaching scenario followed by a discussion of issues that emerge. While this kind of activity is consistent with theories of situated learning and social…

Over the last few decades, inclusive educational practice has developed into a guiding political vision in Norway, as it has in several other western countries. This article, and the larger study it is part of, takes a narrative approach to the study of how one particular Norwegian primary school teacher deals with realizing the ideology of…

This article describes findings from a classroom-based action research project conducted by two in-school teachers, a literacy coach and a 4th grade teacher, implementing a new integrated literacy and social studies curriculum and the changes they made in curricular practices and beliefs over a three-year period of time. A university professor…

This study is based on personal experiences. It adopts an auto ethnographic approach and action research perspective in an attempt to describe and reflect on my experience as a teacher in a University where I have worked for just over a year; the study also examines factors that have helped me in my role as a teacher to effect change in my praxis.…

Throughout the literature, teacher education is often described as being based on a specific tradition, paradigm, or agenda. Examples of these descriptions include: behavioristic, personalistic, inquiry-oriented, social reconstructionist, academic, developmentalist, and social-efficiency. These approaches are closely linked to the "beliefs and…

Teacher retention has been the subject of much study, yet recent estimates of teachers who choose to leave the profession within the first three years to pursue other careers remains at an unacceptably high level of 33.5 percent. These figures are alarming in light of the fact that schools desperately need qualified teachers. Several authors…

Inquiry-based classroom activities require students to solve problems and answer questions that have more than one possible resolution. These types of activities stimulate critical thinking skills and dispositions in students. PreK-12 art classrooms are rich with opportunity for inquiry-based activities for children and adolescents. This article…

This article reports the results of a survey on K-8 teachers' inquiry beliefs and practices. The survey in this study was part of the National Science Foundation-supported, five-year, in-depth longitudinal case studies aimed at elucidating K-8 classroom teachers' motivations, goals, and purposes for carrying out inquiry in diverse, low SES…