This study investigated the impact of differing models of practicum placements on teacher candidates' (TC's) abilities to practice teaching skills and receive feedback on their teaching. Within the Professional Development School (PDS) model TCs were placed as cohorts in a single PDS site with at least one college faculty member assigned as a…

This article describes one teacher preparation program's approach to designing and implementing a mentoring program to support clinically-based teacher education. The design for the program is based on an interview study that compared the mentoring experiences of 18 teachers across three different contexts: student teaching, early field…

Researchers and mathematics educators are trying to understand which learning experiences will help pre-service secondary mathematics teachers (PSMTs) be successful in the classroom. The purpose of this article is to contribute to the understanding of educational experiences that will lead to PSMTs, learning practices for teaching secondary…

In this article, the authors focus on the concept of coherence, a relatively underexplored concept in teacher education. They investigate the relationship between students' perceptions of coherence and a number of structural features of teacher education programs to help develop a stronger definition of one important dimension of coherence--the…

A practicum course for prospective teachers of the gifted was designed, implemented, and evaluated. The 209 teachers found the practicum teaching, observations of their teaching, and papers they wrote to be effective learning experiences. Observers' ratings of the teachers indicated that a majority performed well in the practicum. (Author/JDD)

This study was designed to provide descriptions of employment histories experienced by graduates of five different student teaching programs. These field programs were regular, cluster, overseas, elementary interns, and competency based. Differences between these programs are identified and analyzed. Subjects of the survey were graduates of…

This program is based on the theory that students in education need early exposure to the classroom and is designed so that the student progresses through the professional education sequence receiving progressively more complex assignments. (JD)

The need for early field experiences in teacher education is based on four specific needs: (1) the student need to know if he or she likes teaching; (2) the university need to know if the student shows promise of becoming a good teacher; (3) the student need to practice before assuming major classroom responsibilities; and (4) the teacher…

There continues to be a great deal of debate about the role that field experiences play in teacher development and about the relative contribution of various individual and institutional factors to the socialization process. Field experiences in teacher education entail a complex set of interactions among program features, settings, and people…

At least four factors are important to consider in contemporary teacher education programs: the demand for increased accountability; the emphasis on field-based instruction; the need for responsiveness to field input; and the need for responsiveness to student input. In New York, the demand for increased accountability has been translated into a…

This study examined the perceptions of preservice teachers as they reflected upon teaching the writing process to second grade students over the course of one semester. Implications for teacher educators were identified based on the findings: Preservice teachers benefited from teaching writing on a consistent basis; preservice teachers learned and…

This paper proposes recommendations for the training of teachers for the 21st century based on a Newton (Iowa) project to improve and broaden the skills of secondary education teachers for working with special needs students in regular classrooms. The paper calls for a practical and positive approach to defining disabilities, to summing up the…