If the practicum is the most valued element of a teacher education program, how good is each teacher candidate's learning and how well is it supported by the university supervisor? While most self-studies of teacher education practices focus on practices in the university classroom, this article reports an analysis of a supervisor's practices,…

This article reviews 65 studies presented at the 10th international self-study of teacher education practices conference in 2014 to determine whether emerging self-study research incorporates the five major characteristics of self-study: self-initiated inquiry that is situated and improvement-aimed; undertaken collaboratively; uses multiple…

This self-study of activities as a practicum supervisor in several secondary schools focuses on the supervisor's contribution to the quality of a teacher candidate's professional learning in the context of a familiar tension between on-campus courses and in-school practicum experiences. Data from both formal and informal supervisory experiences…

We explore the possibility of understanding teaching as a discipline in its own right, rather than as a domain that is ancillary to the many academic disciplines. While teaching looks easy and is widely regarded as easy, the image of teaching as transmission and the perspective of technical rationality mask the many ways in which challenging and…

The notion of critical friendship is central to self-study. A critical friend acts as a sounding board, asks challenging questions, supports reframing of events, and joins in the professional learning experience. In this paper, we share our experiences of acting as critical friends for each other in two separate self-studies of practice. We…

Presents one educator's efforts to renew himself as a professor of education by returning to the secondary physics classroom, taking his student teachers with him. The experience made him examine new perspectives on physics students, preservice physics teachers, school science teachers, experienced teachers turned graduate students, and teacher…

This paper reports the results of a deliberate effort to help preservice science teachers improve their ability to learn from experience and take charge of their own professional development as teachers. The study was conducted by a teacher educator who simultaneously taught a physics methods course and a 12th-grade physics class and thereby…

Highlights the importance of teacher education that places preservice teachers in the classroom for extended time periods before they engage in education courses, demonstrating how a teaching approach that acknowledges and builds upon early experiences can have positive results when preservice teachers take ownership of their own professional…