This book considers education policy throughout the 1990s. It outlines curriculum innovation, teacher professionalism and school improvement. Whitty evaluates Labour education policy in terms of its fostering of social justice and inclusion. Though challenging, this is an interesting book for those working in education who are seeking a political…

High stakes testing presents a significant problem for the design of effective professional development. The absurdity of asking teachers and administrators to raise test scores constantly encourages teachers to teach to the test without regard for the intellectual development of students. This case study from Texas describes the reflective…

The paper is based upon a case-study of mentoring in teacher education in Norway. It describes the practice of the cooperating teacher and how mentoring in the practice-field contributes to student teachers learning. The main focus is how student teachers develop pedagogical content knowledge in mathematics through reflections with the mentor…

The goal of this study was to understand how preservice biology teachers progress in an open-inquiry research program on the ecological physiology of a tree frog. The project involved students (N=10) in a spring semester and summer workshop. Multiple data sources were established including classroom discussion, group meetings, weekly reflection…

This study explores the nature and meaning of various epistemological and affective issues that shape elementary teachers' work, such as ways of knowing, beliefs about the nature of science, values, emotions, and teachers' images of themselves as knowers. Through analyses of two teachers' narratives, classroom observations, and instructional…

This paper is a narrative account of a critical classroom episode in the life of a beginning secondary science teacher. Emphasis is placed on a beginning science teacher's prior knowledge of effective science instruction and is used to guide on-going classroom practices to facilitate student learning. The story is created from classroom…

To help educators better understand how to prepare reflective teachers, this study examined four preservice elementary teachers' theories regarding how elementary children learn and what instruction should look like. Participants designed and implemented learning activities for elementary students. Each activity was videotaped, observed, and…

This study, part of a graduate level social studies methods course at a large midwestern university, investigated beginning teachers' ideas about teaching and learning social studies before and after their participation in a set of open-ended interviews with children in the elementary grades. The interviews were designed to give new teachers…

The lessons learned by this book's authors, who observed literacy events in third- and fourth-grade classrooms, altered their vision of teaching and learning. The book shares their observations of how students engage in literacy events and construct meaning within these events, focusing on three factors that significantly influence the…

A research study conducted by a classroom teacher explored the question of to what extent increased parent involvement through increased parent-teacher communication will act as a motivating factor for students in a seventh-grade reading classroom and whether this will relate positively to student success in reading. Parents and children took…

This paper highlights a project aimed at devising an appropriate training scheme for foreign language teaching assistants in Britain and encouraging as many universities as possible to adapt the scheme to their own institutional settings. The scheme entitled DOPLA (Development of Postgraduate and Language Assistants) originated at the University…

This paper examines the role of developmental psychology in reflective practice, using examples from the Department of Psychology at the University of Turin, Italy, and from a regional institute that deals with continuous teacher training. After introducing the topic and discussing the need for continuous teacher training, the paper presents…

This is a continuation study of the use of the achieving styles framework as an instigator for self-reflection among education students. The purpose of the research was to find whether the personal results of taking an achieving styles inventory could provide a means of promoting self-reflection (in this case, for undergraduate teacher education…

A substantial body of research elaborates and documents how practicing teachers support the writing development of young children (Atwell, 1987; Avery, 1993; Calkins, 1986, 1994; Graves, 1981; Lensmire, 1994; Routman, 2000). Yet, there is limited research about how preservice teachers learn about children's writing (Dahl and Farnan, 1998) or about…

This digest describes the implementation of a successful district-wide elementary school foreign language (FLES) program that resulted from the superintendent's vision to have all students in the district study a common foreign language throughout their schooling. This vision was based on the superintendent's belief that American secondary school…