Michael Bird has a longstanding interest in the power of classroom dialogue, not only as a means of eliciting students' prior knowledge or checking their understanding of new ideas and information, but also as a powerful tool for generating new knowledge through a collective process of meaning-making. In this article, he first uses two extracts of…

This paper report on first-year student teachers' reflections on the difficulty levels of mathematics concepts in the senior phase baseline assessments. This paper emanated after first year student teachers completed the baseline assessments for each of the three grades in the senior phase, Grades 7, 8, and 9. One hundred and sixteen (116) first…

Planning a mathematics lesson plan is a complex process. Its quality contributes to the effectiveness of mathematics instruction. Given this significance, improving prospective mathematics teachers' lesson planning ability is essential for teacher preparation programs to produce effective teachers. This study examines how a lesson study within a…

The dramaturgical method has been used to analyse teaching and didactic contexts, but the method is not adequately described or established in such contexts. In this article we use dramaturgy as a lens for describing and analysing teaching. The teaching examples are taken from a professional workshop where student teachers and their instructors…

This study explores how public-school teachers who host student teachers in urban, grade 7-12 classrooms (referred to as cooperating teachers or classroom mentors in this study) define their role in preparing pre-service teachers. This study is particularly interested in yielding insight into how participants describe the "practice" of…

Preservice teachers (PSTs) frequently face challenges with classroom management, a key aspect of effective teaching. Reflective practice is crucial for PSTs to enhance their skills, but their reflections tend to be superficial. This mixed-methods study explores whether integrating 360-degree video and virtual reality (VR) technology with a…

The STEMITL project is an interdisciplinary collaboration between a Southeastern University's middle grades education department and local PDS partner school districts incorporating six full-day immersive projects for seventh-grade students. During the 2016-2017 academic year, seventh-grade students were brought to the university's newly…

The rising percentage of nonwhite students in the U.S. public school system accompanied by persistent educational debt and racial inequities presents an opportunity gap for many marginalized students. Scholars suggest that teaching ethnic studies curriculum with critical race pedagogy can help address the opportunity gap. Ethnic Studies centers on…

We use a novel database of the preservice apprenticeships ("student teaching placements") of teachers in Washington State to investigate the relationship between mentor effectiveness (as measured by value added) and the future effectiveness of their mentees. We find a strong, positive relationship between the effectiveness of a teacher's…

This article is a contribution to the discussion of learning processes in religious education (RE) classrooms. Sociocultural theories of learning, understood here as tool-mediated processes, are used in an analysis of three RE classroom conversations. The analysis focuses on the language tools that are used in conversations; how the tools mediate;…

Traditional measures of teachers' competency have been widely criticized for their lack of authenticity and predictive validity. There is little evidence regarding the technical soundness of traditional teacher licensure tests and little research documenting the validity of such tests for identifying competent teachers or effective teaching.…

In this article, the author argues that critical work in teacher education should begin with teacher educators turning a critical eye on their own practices. The author uses Lesko's conception of contingent, recursive growth and change to analyze a lesson he observed as part of a phenomenological study aimed at understanding more about what it is…

We offer this piece as an essay, a dialogic, many-voiced attempt to represent the tensions and contradictions in our work and the work that goes on in London schools. Locating our work within a polyphonic, narrative-based tradition of inquiry into practice (Burgess & Hardcastle, 1991; Doecke & McClenaghan, 2011; Parr, 2010; van de Ven…

Much has been written about the value of teacher research for inservice teachers. Despite the existence of several studies affirming these words, studies that richly describe how student teachers learn to do teacher research and then investigate the impact of inquiry on student teachers and teacher educators, particularly in culturally and…