During their studies, education students are required to engage practice-based experience in a collaborative model: Professional Development School (PDS), where there are many options for building professional and personal development processes. Through this experience, students formulate professional identity and perceptions about teaching. This…

Our study is focused on the field-experience of a unique ideological group. The prospective teachers are community activists who are dedicated to meeting the social needs of communities through education, mainly in the periphery and in weakened populations. Their vision is to become "community teachers." We focused on a new mentoring…

The Professional Development School (PDS) can serve as a catalyst for the professional development of mathematics pre-service as well as in-service teachers. In the present research, we describe lower-secondary in-service mathematics teachers' development of ICT integration in their teaching. This is done through the Innovation Diffusion Model of…

The context of the present paper is a school of professional development for teacher educators. One of the school's unique features is the employment of tutors/mentors, who are colleagues of their tutees in different study programmes. It has been established that many teacher educators enter the profession "accidentally," whether from…

The article discusses the role and importance of the steering committee in professional development schools in advancing the partnership between the teacher education college and schools. Content analysis of the minutes of steering committee meetings held over a period of 10 years was carried out. The findings reveal the potential of the steering…

A new program of teacher training in a dialogical spirit in order to prepare them towards working in the field of philosophy with children combines cultivating creativity and self-reflective thinking had been operated as a part of cooperation between the academia and the education system in Israel. This article describes the program that is a part…

Apprenticeship and professional development schools (PDSs) are two models for teacher education. The mentors that are the focus for this research completed their initial teacher training through one of these models and now mentor in PDSs. The paper reports on how the way in which they were trained as student teachers influenced their role…

Mentoring student-teachers and novice teachers constitutes a critical factor in teacher-education programmes and yet, little emphasis has been placed on the mentors themselves, particularly in relation to their own professional development (PD) and the construction of their identities. Does it really matter? This study investigates two groups of…

Models of collaboration between teacher training institutions and Professional Development Schools have become commonplace in general teacher education. These partnerships are less well documented when it comes to special education teacher training, and are particularly scarce with regard to models of collaboration with special education schools.…

Professional Development Schools (PDSs) are collaborative ventures between schools and teacher training institutions. We identify the characteristics of a school that lead to successful PDS collaboration, relating them to Teitel's model (2003) that merges the principal standards of collaboration with the stages necessary for developing a PDS. We…

This study focuses on similarities and differences in expectations of cooperating teachers and student teachers in the initial stage of the mentor relationship in the context of an Israeli practicum program for pre-service student teachers. These expectations, particularly when they conflict, can serve as major obstacles to the formation of…

This paper discusses the reluctance of Israeli inservice teachers to assume the role of mentor to student teachers in their classrooms, proposing an alternative Professional Development School (PDS) model as a starting point for rethinking ways to recruit teachers into this role. In this model, two student teachers assume full responsibility for 1…

This study explored the perceptions of mentor teachers about the impact of mentoring on them. The study involved cross-cultural collaborative research between an American and an Israeli teacher education program and a collaboration within each country between the teacher education program and its elementary professional development school (PDS).…

Explored mentor teachers' perceptions about the impact of mentoring on them, focusing on American and Israeli teacher-education programs and professional-development schools. Data from surveys, observations, and reflection sessions with mentors indicated that the mentors benefitted from their mentoring when they had access to serious training and…

This study describes a school-university collaboration involving a number of professional development schools in Israel and examines the efficacy of such collaborations. A government agency requested that a university researcher plan and implement collaborative programs. The program determined to include a heterogeneous group of schools, selected…