Much of the attention given to literacy, of late, has focused on ensuring that students can read, without consideration to what they are given to read. Kristin Conradi Smith & Elfrieda H. Hiebert discuss four general aspects of the texts used in elementary classrooms -- text complexity, text type (narrative versus informational), text format…

Appraisal Centers provide authentic experienced-based communities of practice for preservice teachers (PSTs) to show application of theory into practice at critical gateways throughout their elementary education program while fulfilling School of Education dispositions, course objectives, and state standards. A goal is to provide formative…

This paper reports on what two teacher candidates and their instructor learned from an action research project into the use of inquiry to teach mathematics. We use a model of the relation between theory and practice in teacher education to interpret what we learned about inquiry. This model describes three modes for teacher candidates to learn…

In recent years, teacher education has been charged with reforming programs to better align curriculum, clinical practice, and accountability. The sense of urgency for reform has been heightened by competition from alternative routes to teaching that jump straight to practice, often criticized for foregoing essential knowledge and theory. This…

In the context of an arts-integration course in an elementary education program, preservice teachers used tableaux (i.e. frozen scenes) to portray field experience moments in two ways: (1) as remembered events, and (2) as projected possibilities. Using video and photographs of the tableaux, we traced the students' enactment of activist stances and…

Shortly after taking power following the May 2010 UK general election, the Conservative/Liberal Democrat government published its education white paper, "The Importance of Teaching". In this, certain features for primary school pedagogy can be discerned. Using the lens of the "position call", this article examines the…

In this article we offer an extended reading of an action research model in the context of mentored learning in preservice education in Israel. Our reading attends both to how a particular form of action research plays out in participants' constructions of the practice of mentoring and mentored learning and how such constructions can be understood…

Many teachers use their own work as the basis for research and this can be a complex and confronting task. It demands merging the roles of teacher, researcher and research participant. These roles may not speak with one voice. Some voices are faint, mere echoes; other voices convey a more confident sense of the different roles. This paper draws on…

While there are obvious benefits of summer school for students and faculty alike, summer teaching/learning poses some unique challenges. Summer class meeting periods often have fewer contact hours but are longer and more frequent than sessions during the regular academic year. Thus, there are shorter periods between formative and summative…

The question as to how action research (AR) is related to cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) is not answerable in categorical terms. Both CHAT and AR have been variously interpreted and much depends on the individual biographies of those who pronounce on their relationship. The aim of this paper is to show how action research, conducted…

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to describe a large research project, which has integrated curricula and is currently emerging as a publicly funded K-7 place-based, imaginative, and ecological learning centre in Maple Ridge, British Columbia; second, to spend some time exploring more deeply the theoretical implications of the project…

In the past, if a question is asked of a student, and that student needed a few minutes to think, that student's thinking would be interrupted by somebody else who'd be shouting out. Now, teachers at St. Johnsbury School in Vermont are really focusing on think time for students and really working with other students in the classroom to be…

In her role with the School Administrators of Iowa leading Iowa's leadership grant from The Wallace Foundation, the author works with a coalition of individuals and groups striving to implement a cohesive leadership system for school leaders. Efforts to create a cohesive leadership system in Iowa for the past nine years have resulted in many…

The Preservice Teacher Institute (PTI) is a budding learning community designed to provide mentoring and support for senior elementary education undergraduate candidates. This program is an effective paradigm for mentoring and inducting new teachers into the profession. PTI is a two-semester program. The first semester is restricted to candidates…

In this article we present a model for evidence-based school counseling practice that involves using data to specify problems that need addressing, using multidisciplinary teams to identify and implement research-based interventions, and evaluating interventions and programs to demonstrate effects. Potential benefits of this approach for…