This longitudinal comparative analysis examines the experiences of two candidates--one enrolled in an urban residency program and one enrolled in the residency's partner, university-based program--to consider the role that context plays in teacher preparation. Drawing from complexity theory and critical realism, we consider how the interplay of…

This article addresses a major and continuing problem in teacher education in the United States and internationally: the ability of programs to prepare teachers to teach successfully and stay over time in historically marginalized communities. After discussion of the factors that have led to the failure of programs to accomplish this goal, several…

In this article, the authors--university faculty members working across college and school contexts in the United States--detail how teacher educators might address two challenges facing the teacher education field: (a) the long-standing critique of traditional teacher preparation in the United States as an isolated, questionably relevant ivory…

The current study is part of a larger case study of faculty and staff methods at a teacher residency program. Teacher residencies, which were founded in the early 2000s, have an explicit mission of serving historically marginalized populations. However, more research is needed to better understand how these programs implement social justice…

While Grow Your Own (GYO) programs have sought for decades to remedy teacher shortages across the United States, myriad factors, including the demographic shifts in public school populations, have in recent years exacerbated the need to recruit and retain teachers of color and of bilingual backgrounds. Amid models of precollegiate and…

English learners (ELs) make up 10% of the U.S. student population and are increasingly enrolling in school districts that have little experience with educating these students. A majority of states report shortages in teachers prepared to work with ELs, particularly in the area of bilingual education. Grow Your Own (GYO) programs that recruit and…

Grow Your Own programs, with their focus on preparing and placing community teachers, are increasingly being identified as a viable solution for addressing ethnoracial diversity and teacher shortages in schools. Given the heightened interest in these programs, the focus of this article is to consider various "projects," or rather,…

Teacher preparation in the United States, both university based and alternative, has been strongly critiqued as ineffective when it comes to preparing new teachers. Although many criticisms have been directed at alternative teacher education, this article focuses on university-based teacher education because approximately 70% of our nation's…

Student-teaching field placements play an important role in preparing teacher candidates, many of whom rate the practice as the most authentic and relevant learning experience associated with their teacher-education programs. As a part of these field experiences, teacher candidates have opportunities to learn instructional and class management…

In this article we present two case studies of first-year, secondary science teachers who participated in an urban teacher residency. We adopt a situated analysis approach, framed by rhizomatics, a non-linear theory of social activity, to investigate the ways they attempted to enact practices consistent with the inquiry-based, social justice focus…

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) emphasize disciplinary literacy by making literacy instruction every teacher's responsibility (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010). The CCSS require content area teachers to adapt curriculum and pedagogy to support disciplinary literacy…

School reform policies and school administrators are increasingly positioning teacher leaders (TLs) with the responsibility to facilitate professional learning for their colleagues. Although ample evidence exists to suggest the need for facilitators to be highly skilled for teachers' learning to be optimized, there is a dearth of research…

Urban teacher residency (UTR) programs have been widely endorsed (National Education Association, 2014; Thorpe, 2014), yet the body of literature on these programs has not definitively identified the benefits of UTRs over and above traditional teacher education programs--if any exist. The current study explored how faculty and staff working in one…

The promise of university-public school partnerships as contexts for mutually beneficial learning, or "simultaneous renewal," has been well established (Goodlad, 1994, 1999). However, difficulties in creating and sustaining these kinds of collaborative contexts for teacher education are also well known, including practical challenges…

Action research, also called classroom or teacher research, has been defined as "systematic, intentional inquiry by teachers". Action research encourages school personnel to systematically develop a question, gather data, and then analyze that data to improve their practice. Over the last 15 years, the complexities of using action…