Over the past decade, many states have increased their investment in prekindergarten (pre-K) school programs that serve 3- and 4-year-old children. This increase has raised questions about what constitutes a well-qualified early childhood teacher. Similar questions were raised in the late part of the nineteenth century when states began investing…

The requirement in the USA of the No Child Left Behind Act (2002) that every classroom has a highly qualified teacher, coupled with the current high-stakes testing environment, creates the need for all principals to be knowledgeable about quality staff development systems. One aspect of effective staff development is whether teachers adopt the…

This article explores the restructuring of education in England and Spain. Against a presumably homogeneous global streamlining of educational systems according to competition-driven goals, the comparison of teachers' work-lives and professional knowledge evidences a variety of experiences under-represented in discourses on global restructuring.…

Questions abound in the U.S. based teacher education literature about the kind of knowledge teachers should possess about learning and academic achievement that will enable them to provide all students with an equitable, effective schooling experience. This article examines how a group of preservice teachers--enrolled in a teacher education…

When he arrived in Oxford in the early 1970s, Harry Judge and this author were already good friends. They had spent a lot of time talking about their respective concerns--the author on how "mind" should be conceived, and Judge on how and by whom "mind" should be cultivated in the educational process. The author believed then that schools should…

The aim of this study is to investigate teachers' perceptions of their practice of values education, and to explore their degree of professionalism in this matter. Qualitative interviews with 13 teachers have been conducted and analysed by a comparative analysis. According to their view, values education is (a) most often reactive and unplanned,…

Scaffolding provides content-area teachers (CATs) with an effective means to integrate language instruction into content-area instruction for English language learners (ELLs). Data for this study were derived from 33 CAT discussions while they were pursuing professional development in an American university classroom over 32 weeks. The discussions…

Psychoactive substance use by students is common in many countries, obliging schools to deliver drug education. However, some jurisdictions do not prepare teachers for engaging their students in honest, knowledge-based education. This article looks at the history and queries the purposes of contemporary drug education. It compares current…

Whenever there is a discussion on closing or bridging the achievement gap in education, one accurately reasons that the "gap" in question is among groups of students from various cultural and/or socioeconomic backgrounds. Stakeholders throughout academia, then, frantically search for solution(s)" to poor student achievement in…

Ensuring that teachers are rich in data, rich in information, and rich in the skills that enable them to improve student achievement requires focused attention from leaders at all levels, including federal policymakers. For federal policy to best support teachers' use of data to prepare all students for college and careers, there must be a…

Although teachers may strive to create inclusive, multi-cultural classrooms, they may lack the requisite knowledge and skills to successfully accomplish the task. Drawing on case study research that illuminates challenges encountered by White teachers of multicultural literature, I propose a comprehensive diversity component for teacher education.…

As co-editors of this theme issue of this journal, the authors have accepted that knowledge systems and teacher education programs are deeply interconnected. Further, they claim that teacher education programs must incorporate in theory and practice the fact that knowledge systems are a determining factor in the effectiveness of a teacher…

This paper explores an aspect of the knowledge of teaching required by teacher educators and how that knowledge might be developed if teaching (about teaching) is to be conceptualised as a distinct and important field in its own right--with its own forms of knowledge, ways of working and perspectives on the world. The paper focuses on…

In this study the relationship between pre-service chemistry teachers' beliefs about teaching and their pedagogical content knowledge were investigated. The sample of the study consists of 99 pre-service chemistry teachers attending Hacettepe University, Faculty of Education. As data collection tools the adapted form of "Beliefs About…

Building on the claim that teachers need to know how innovative instructional approaches work to be able to adapt them to their own classrooms, design research is presented as a research method that aims to offer exactly that kind of information. We elaborate design research that aims to develop a local instruction theory--a theory about the…