Once with accession to the European Union, new requirements related to education at university level must be respected and promoted. Emphasis should be put on values such as tolerance, mutual respect, acceptance of otherness, and so on. These things imply that university teachers should possess multiple skills enabling them to promote among…

To identify links among professional development, teacher knowledge, practice, and student achievement, researchers have called for study designs that allow causal inferences and that examine relationships among features of interventions and multiple outcomes. In a randomized experiment implemented in six states with over 270 elementary teachers…

Although well-meaning, some methods of training approach teaching as a one-size-fits-all approach. Yet, there are myriad techniques for teaching and no one method works for all teachers or all students. Indeed, good teachers use a variety of techniques. Unfortunately, search for objective standards by which to measure quality teaching has…

Whilst recent decades have seen significant progress in research on inclusive education, many teachers still feel that the research literature does not fully address their professional concerns about how to enact a policy of inclusion in their classrooms. To help to bridge this gap, we drew on the concept of craft knowledge to undertake a detailed…

For many prospective teachers of drama, passion for their subject is a highly motivating force. In this paper I seek to shed light on the process by which personal constructs of drama as a subject are transformed during a period of teacher education, and answer key questions about the ways in which drama student-teachers develop their pedagogical…

In this article we provide an example of how to foster an activist-oriented student community by critically examining green technology. We designed this curriculum unit to teach students about the fundamentals of electricity, green technology, and experimental design. Additionally, we viewed this activity as an opportunity for students to apply…

In this article, the author proposes ten principles through which she examines the essentials of teaching reading comprehension. Topics explored include the nature of reading comprehension and the roles of good readers and influential teachers. Related issues include motivation, comprehension strategies, explicit instruction, and vocabulary.…

Teachers need a deeper understanding of the texts being discussed, in particular the various textual and visual aspects of picturebooks themselves, including the images, written text and design elements, to support how readers made sense of these texts. As teachers become familiar with aspects of literary criticism, art history, visual grammar,…

The spontaneous nature of much early childhood teaching makes it vital to understand the range of knowledge that teachers draw on in their curricular and pedagogical decision-making. Hammersley argued that teaching practice cannot be based directly on research evidence because it needs to be filtered through teachers' experiences and…

Researchers have recently used traditional item response theory (IRT) models to measure mathematical knowledge for teaching (MKT). Some studies (e.g., Hill, 2007; Izsak, Orrill, Cohen, & Brown, 2010), however, have reported subgroups when measuring middle-grades teachers' MKT, and such groups violate a key assumption of IRT models. This study…

As literacy researchers, we are challenged to consider whether our instructional practices are sufficient to help students engage in literacy practices in our current and future society, such as reading from critical literacy perspectives. Teacher identities can be discursively constructed in different ways, given the contexts in which they work.…

There has been little critical exploration of the ethical issues that arise in professional practice common to adapted physical activity. We cannot avoid moral issues as we inevitably will act in ways that will negatively affect the well-being of others. We will make choices, which in our efforts to support others, may hurt by violating dignity or…

While families play a vital role in the early literacy skills of young English Learners, their educators often do not share the same backgrounds or cultures, and may not know how to connect with parents who are linguistically and culturally different. As part of a year-long grant funded professional development project, the authors led teams of…

In spite of the fact that public schools were established to prepare students for citizenship, the alignment of teaching practice with this goal is poor. In part, this is because the knowledge base about the efficacy of curricular and pedagogical approaches in supporting specific civic outcomes is limited, as is our knowledge about the extent to…

Through an ethnographic study of one suburban elementary school, the delivery of services to English language learners (ELLs) with disabilities was investigated. The data analysis revealed that often disability-related and English as a Second Language (ESL) services were in contention, as scheduling, teacher expertise, school culture, and ESL…