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…

The national educational initiative "Our New School" will have a direct influence on the content and technologies of pedagogical education in Russia, and is aimed at providing the system of general education with the qualified teachers who are currently needed. In this article, the author emphasizes that in connection with attributing…

Teachers' subject and pedagogical knowledge requires an understanding of the relationship between various elements, rather than thinking of them in isolation. In order to teach in a given discipline, the teacher must have knowledge of the subject, an understanding of the best teaching strategies for presenting the content, and knowledge of the…

This article examines distance education (DE) in the context to which is most frequently applied, i.e., higher education, and from the perspective of some of its most important actors, i.e., teachers. This study, of a qualitative nature, was conducted at a public university in Brazil. Data were collected by means of unstructured interviews,…

As the concept of "inclusive education" has gained currency, students who would previously have been referred to specialist forms of provision, having been judged "less able", are now believed to belong in mainstream classrooms. However, it is often argued that teachers lack the necessary knowledge and skills to work with such students in…

Background: The international science competitions show that students from different countries perform differently in subjects such as mathematics, physics and chemistry. In the literature comparative empirical studies tried to address the reasons for cross-national students' differences in performance from different perspectives such as teaching…

While teaching in New York City public schools, the author began planning collaboratively with a team of mathematics teachers. Collaborative planning enabled them to consider a range of issues that may not have emerged had they been planning independently. In this article, the author first describes their work through excerpts of conversations…

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…

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…