Many reforms in past decades have come and gone without having the desired impact on teaching practices. Two shared ideals that reforms have had are offering challenging content by using whole tasks and tailoring student guidance to what students need for effective learning. In this article, we aim to bridge the reform-practice gap by taking a…

The relationship between theory and practice in teacher training has been discussed extensively in the world of education. Both theoretical and practical knowledge are fundamental to teachers' engagement in educational activities. However, the question of where this knowledge comes from and how it develops over time has yet to be answered. As…

Research in developing teacher and learner thinking highlights the challenges in translating theoretical constructs into changed practice. One Australian study tracked teacher thinking across school contexts over the proposed three-year timeframe of one professional learning programme. The programme framed a shift in learner and teacher thinking…

This study aims to unveil the complexity of introducing and sustaining instructional improvement at a school site by documenting successes and challenges encountered by a research-practice partnership among university researchers, school and district leaders, and a mathematics coordinator from the county office of education. The study answers two…

This article attends to student teachers' 'stuck moments,' or emotional moments of crisis, in a social justice-oriented teacher education program (SJTE). It seeks to problematise the familiar tendency of viewing student teachers' stuck moments as symptomatic of the theory-practice gap. By troubling both the representational logic that undergirds…

Much of the formal professional development teachers experience consists of short-term workshops that maintain -- rather than disrupt -- the systems of power that reproduce educational inequities. In response, some scholars have advocated critical professional development (PD) as a means of supporting teachers' interrogation of these inequities…

The current study is a collective self-study on how we as 15 teacher educators at a university in Norway tried to improve our teaching through working with cases with the aim of better supporting student teachers in making links between theory and practice. We wanted to address the common criticism in teacher education concerning a perceived gap…

There is a need to strengthen the theory-practice connection, particularly for early-career mathematics teachers, through effective professional development (PD) programs that integrate theory and research with the implementation of classroom practices. The current study investigates the effect of the online coaching component a hybrid…

This article addresses the need for 'coherent, holistic frameworks offering insightful understandings as well as viable, connected and synergistic solutions to schools'. We describe a model which emerged from a research study developed in the context of a professional development course attended by more than 150 teachers from primary and secondary…