Effective teachers consider interrelationships among aspects of teaching including learners, subject matter knowledge, assessment, and instruction. The 70 journal entries of 25 preservice elementary teachers are analyzed to characterize the teachers' written reflection. One focus of the analysis is on how the preservice teachers integrate ideas…

In each of three consecutive years, 16 teachers were admitted to a program in which they participated in a study group to reform their teaching practices in mathematics. The 48 (total) elementary school teachers in this program were selected to ensure diversity of setting--urban and suburban, as well as public and parochial. Teachers routinely met…

Many researchers have identified a process they call "deskilling", which they use to describe the daily experience of teachers who have been gradually losing control of their own labour within "low-trust" workplaces. Conversely, other scholars have found that under similar conditions, some teachers have their own ways of…

This article draws upon writings by social studies educators and historians to articulate a new approach to training history teachers. We argue that the divide between advocates of historical thinking and of historical content can be overcome through a better understanding of what it means to know history. By examining the nature of the historical…

As part of a major review of teachers' professional conditions of service in Scotland the "Chartered Teacher Programme" has been introduced offering experienced teachers the option of a substantial salary enhancement, not by promotion to a school management role, but by staying in the classroom and engaging in a programme of professional…

In this article, the author offers suggestions, based on the insightful article "The Three Rs of Professionalism" by Patricia H. Phelps ("Record" Winter 2006), for beginning teachers as they prepare for successful secondary classroom careers. As a professor of general secondary methods, the author emphasizes and has modeled the…

The following study evaluated the knowledge, experience and attitudes, that faculty at a private four-year institution have towards students with disabilities. The 208 participants responded to a survey questionnaire. The findings of the study indicated that many of the faculty had little or no contact with this particular student population. Many…

Recently, investigators have begun to pay increasing attention to the role of teachers' domain-specific knowledge in the area of reading, and its implications for both classroom practice and student learning. The aims of the present study were to assess kindergarten to third grade teachers' actual and perceived reading related subject matter…

The purpose of this article is to present the conclusions of a Deweyan-oriented constructivist educator concerning what I believe to be a number of crucial dysfunctional elements embedded in the very structure of the traditional teacher education program. My experience as a teacher educator has led me to conclude that certain time-honored aspects…

Teachers take pride in their autonomy, but there is a downside to the tradition of working independently. If the teaching profession is to advance, Burney suggests, practitioners will need to share their individual craft knowledge with one another, and districts will need to create the conditions that make this possible. In the ongoing effort to…

This study examined teacher education students' knowledge about word structure and improvements in their knowledge as a result of instruction, using three tasks: graphophonemic segmentation, classification of pseudowords by syllable type, and classification of real words as phonetically regular or irregular. Conclusions support the need for…

Examined the practice of experienced teacher induction leaders and mentor-new teacher pairs to determine what mentors needed to know and be able to do to sharpen new teachers' focus on individual student learning and growth. Results found that mentors were able to focus new teachers on individual student learning, particularly among…

This paper describes a professional development model with promise for supporting meaningful shifts in practice. We begin by introducing the theoretical principles underlying our professional development model, with a focus on explicating the interface between collaborative inquiry in a learning community (Lave, 1991, In L.B. Resnick, J.M. Levine,…

In this article we report a study of a teacher, Jimmy, making the transition from his university teacher education program to his first job. We explore what we characterize as tensions between traditions in his effort to develop a conception to inform his teaching of high school English. These tensions are rooted in conceptions of teaching that…

This article sketches out a comprehensive approach for preparing history teachers. It argues that grounding in historical content knowledge is necessary for success in the classroom, but such grounding is not enough to ensure that success. For beginning teachers, the problem is not merely acquiring content knowledge but acquiring it in ways that…