Describes how a teacher and a teacher educator collaborated to extend their thinking regarding effective learning environments and to challenge their own uncertainties through dialog. Discusses four aspects of effective learning environments: creating authentic, meaningful, and personalized curriculum; making visible differences in language and…

As teachers progress through their careers, they must grow and transform to remain effective. The Life Cycle of the Career Teacher model, which is an application of Mezirow's transformation theory, provides the framework to ensure that all students have competent, caring, and qualified teachers, addressing six stages and transitions teachers face…

Reflective teachers look at classroom problems from many perspectives and consider others' viewpoints when they choose instructional strategies. Reflection is beginning to be treated as an essential part of a teacher's repertoire. Sidebars recount an exercise in reflection. (MLF)

Teaching nursing students to reflect on their practice is now officially considered an essential component of nursing education in a number of countries. The aim of this study was to explore nurse teachers' perceptions and experiences of using reflection with diploma nursing students in an Irish context. One of the central themes to emerge, upon…

In this article, the author poses the following questions: When was the last time you sat back and contemplated how effective your teaching is? What methods have you used to determine how students learn and apply their knowledge? and Have you investigated the effectiveness of your newly implemented curriculum based on Standards for Technological…

This paper describes and discusses the effect of service-learning on students' reflective thinking about their own knowledge in multicultural teacher education at a state university in Southern California (USA). Two versions of students' multicultural autobiographies, one at the beginning and the other at the end of the course, were examined to…

Tutoring is an important and effective means of helping young readers and writers who are experiencing difficulties. However, little is known about what kinds of relational qualities might accompany successful tutoring or how we might identify them. To address these issues, we analyzed the reflective writings of tutors in 10 tutor-student pairs…

A portfolio is a well-organized document containing critical analyses and evidence related to a coach's background, context(s) of coaching, approach to coaching, coaching accomplishments, and goals for further development. Here, the authors describe different types of coaching portfolios as well as strategies for developing a coaching portfolio.…

Promoting the acquisition of reflection skills among students in higher education has long been a goal of educators, yet, it has remained a challenging task with varying results. This article presents a study that rekindled the use of the genre of a friendly letter and implemented it as a reflection tool. Education majors' reflections, following a…

For the project, an actress created a patient character, staging a consultation among a group of 36 medical students. The consultation process was monitored by a teacher and was stopped by "timeout" at any critical incidence. Students reflected on possible strategies and, one at a time tried out their own or someone else's proposal. The project…

Mentor-novice collaborative reflection about teaching is crucial to the development of novices' professional knowledge. However, few studies examine content and forms of mentor-novice conversations and opportunities that such interactions create for developing professional knowledge. Drawing on observation data from two U.S. and two Chinese…

This article investigates the forming of student teacher identities in initial teacher education. By analysing student narratives of school experiences the article argues that although reflective, reflexive and critical discourses are helpful interrogatory tools, they presuppose a prior subjectivity which fails to acknowledge the idea that it is…

Gaps, barriers, boundaries and walls are words often used to describe the separation between educational research and practice. They account for the differences that are said to exist between the 'two cultures'; the members of which appear to occupy different worlds, have different mindsets and express themselves in different discourses. The…

This article describes the initiatives of one community college district and its individual colleges to engage faculty in the scholarship of teaching and learning. The authors also discuss how these models take the step from effective and scholarly teaching to a scholarship of teaching and learning by encouraging faculty not only to reflect on…

This study is an attempt to understand better the complex nature of tertiary teaching by identifying and investigating the attributes of a group of excellent teachers in science departments of the University. In working with this group of teachers we examined what they say about their teaching and what they do in their teaching practice. Our…