In response to national and state trends promoting inquiry-based social studies over the last decade, social studies teacher educators at the University of Kentucky revamped their pre-service program to create alignment around the key inquiry concepts of questions, tasks, and sources. Part of the program revision involved the creation of a new…

Technology is changing the landscape of higher education. As the editors of this special issue have noted, technology has been particularly useful when trying to solve problems. At Texas Christian University (TCU), we employed technology to create a tool that would help standardize the evaluation of teaching while still offering enough flexibility…

This article develops an expanded, collaborative and structured view of the process of critiquing observed lesson fragments and shows how this process can be used as a model for developing students' understanding and thinking about teaching and learning processes. The authors introduce Carter's (2007) notion of a meta-genre, "[a] way of doing…

In situations where it is not possible for trainees to practice teaching in local schools, teaching short lessons to their peers--called microteaching--can provide beneficial experience and feedback to teachers-in-training. The article includes guidelines for presenters, observers, and teacher trainers as well as a sample practicum class schedule…