Increased accountability demands are being placed on teacher preparation programs across the USA to demonstrate competencies of their teacher candidates. As a means of evaluating teacher candidates' instructional effectiveness and readiness for their own classrooms, some programs are using standardized teacher performance assessments, with faculty…

Training and investing teachers at all career levels in student-centered practices is widely recognized as a significant challenge. Various studies document the failure of student-centered teaching practices to take hold in K-12 mathematics classrooms in significant ways, including collaborative work; problems that are cognitively demanding or…

A 2-year school-based mathematics professional development program is described and evaluated after its first year of implementation. Included in this program as its first course was a unique methods course in elementary education involving both preservice students and inservice teachers who cooperatively studied and applied reform pedagogy. The…

Describes the development of a one-semester integrated mathematics and science methods course to introduce preservice elementary teachers to innovative mathematics and science teaching methods called for in current reform movements. Follows the evolution of the course in the areas of content and pedagogical knowledge; teachers as problem solvers;…