Practices incorporating students' cultures and communities are foundational to effective teaching. However, teacher candidates often do not effectively incorporate culturally based practices into their instruction. This article describes the perceptions of English education instructors as they reconceptualized their curriculum to cultivate…

Teacher education programs typically teach novices about one part of teaching at a time. We might offer courses on different topics--cultural foundations, learning theory, or classroom management--or we may parse teaching practice itself into a set of discrete techniques, such as core teaching practices, that can be taught individually. Missing…

This article presents responses from four College of Education deans to a series of questions posed by the Penn State University "Journal of Teacher Education" (JTE) editorial team.

Within the current federal, state, and local contexts of educational reform, teachers must be recognized as central actors in policy work, but rarely do we explicitly consider preparing teachers to become policy actors. Understanding these implications for teacher education, we investigate teacher candidates' learning of the complexity and…

Currently, the field of teacher education is undergoing a major shift--a turn away from a predominant focus on specifying the necessary knowledge for teaching toward specifying teaching practices that entail knowledge and doing. In this article, the authors suggest that current work on K-12 core teaching practices has the potential to shift…

There is growing interest in the professional development of teacher educators as the demands, expectations, and requirements of teacher education increasingly come under scrutiny. The manner in which teacher educators learn to traverse their world of work in the development of their knowledge, skills, and ability is important. This article…

Current work to identify the core teaching practices that should be included in teacher education curriculum is a part of a long-standing tradition of reform in American teacher education. This article situates the proposals of Hiebert and Morris and the contemporary work to which it is linked within this historical tradition and identifies…

The purpose of this study is to explore the knowledge demands of teacher educators as they teach disciplinary content to preservice elementary teachers, specifically in mathematics, and to understand how such knowledge is different from that used by K-12 teachers. Drawing from a database including teaching and learning artifacts from five…

Several concepts that are important for inclusion in any teacher education curriculum regarding diversity studies are elucidated in this article. The framing question of the discussion is: What are some relevant conceptions regarding issues of diversity that every teacher education program should consider including in its curriculum? The author…

Given students' preconceptions of history as fixed information, cultivating students' interpretive and evidence-based thinking is foundational to advancing their disciplinary understanding. This study examines the ways in which preservice history teachers construct tasks that demand students' interpretive and evidence-based thinking and attend to…

This article presents findings from a qualitative study of first-year elementary teachers who assessed the strengths and weaknesses of their preservice student teaching experiences vis-a-vis their inservice realities. Specifically, the study explores opportunities to learn across student teaching placements and analyzes the degree to which…

This article examines a variety of work currently going on across the country in newly created hybrid spaces to more closely connect campus courses and field experiences in university-based preservice teacher education. It is argued that the old paradigm of university-based teacher education where academic knowledge is viewed as the authoritative…

The imposition of the audit culture on schooling has severely limited teachers' freedom and dignity, exacerbating traditions of teacher education and employment that are infantilizing. If teachers are to participate in the politics that determine curriculum and pedagogy, education programs must provide differentiated credentials that welcome…

Arguing that teacher education has become rule bound, even in the use of teaching narratives and cases, and for the need to challenge beginning teachers' conceptions of teaching and learning, the author suggests parables as promising means for enlivening teacher education and for stretching understanding. After defining parable, the author…

Parker Palmer is correct in his claims that good teaching depends more on the capacity for connectedness than on technique and that helping teacher candidates cultivate a strong sense of personal identity is crucial. However, to what extent are Palmer's claims compatible with the various constructivist models of learning that are now prevalent in…