While Grow Your Own (GYO) programs have sought for decades to remedy teacher shortages across the United States, myriad factors, including the demographic shifts in public school populations, have in recent years exacerbated the need to recruit and retain teachers of color and of bilingual backgrounds. Amid models of precollegiate and…

This article reports results from a study of teacher beliefs among a panel of English and language arts teachers at three universities as the pre-service teachers entered methodological coursework and internships. Using a new assessment tool, the Developmental Instruction Assessment Battery (DIAB), along with a discrete choice task and one-on-one…

Teacher education programs that focus on preparing urban elementary school educators face a daunting task. In a relatively short time, roughly four semesters of coursework, students are prepared to be transformed into teachers who are certified to meet the challenges of urban schools. This transformation occurs from the outside in as they learn…

Teacher knowledge, the sources of that knowledge, and the day-to-day use of that knowledge have become focal points of contemporary research on teacher education. As this body of research has found, a teacher's knowledge base and her subsequent practice is a composite of her beliefs and identities (Britzman, 2003), experiences (Lortie, 1975),…

As middle and secondary classrooms become increasingly inclusive, some special educators may not be prepared to teach content, and some general educators may not be prepared to address diverse learning needs. This mismatch between the reality of today's schools and traditional teacher preparation has led to the development of new models for…

This study took place at the University of Wyoming, located in the rural mountain West. The University of Wyoming, with approximately 13,000 students, is the only four-year university in the state. The teacher education population of the College of Education is about 600, and demographically, this population is about 90% White, predominately…

The authors examine the limitations of critical pedagogy, as commonly conceptualized in U.S. multicultural and social foundations fields. What the authors have concluded is that there is a definite need to re-invent critical pedagogy for its implementation in the more privileged spaces of U.S. teacher education programs. In order for critical…

If classroom teachers are among the greatest determinant of student learning, then teacher preparation programs have a role to play improving educational outcomes for struggling learners. There are currently three established teacher preparation program models: (1) "discrete"; (2) "integrated"; and (3) "merged." In the "discrete" model, which is…

This article explores how 12 classroom teachers, enrolled in one of the author's graduate social studies methods course, used service-learning as an instructional tool to help students practice active participation in their community and beyond, while also recognizing the relevance of academic coursework as they applied their knowledge and skills…

The purpose of this manuscript is twofold: First, the authors explore the nature of the learning in which their students engaged during a service-learning experience in efforts to understand the meanings of teaching and learning they constructed, and how the context of this experience interacted with their candidates' previously constructed…

As a social studies program coordinator at a regional-sized institution, the author typically has between 20-25 preservice candidates enrolled in his annual undergraduate methods course. However, he usually has only one to two in-service candidates each year who require an advance methods course focused on such items as the historical influences,…

Teacher educators need tools to help them think about teacher learning, to design activities and programs that foster it, and to assess the results of their work with preservice and in-service teachers. In this article, in order to improve the conceptual tools available for the design and study of teacher education, the author teases apart…

This study examined how one teacher education program is attempting to meet the needs of the field by ensuring that graduates have the knowledge, skills, and competencies to teach students with disabilities in inclusive classroom settings. As such, faculty assessed how instruction in their teacher licensure courses assists in the development and…

Little research has been conducted to directly compare the effectiveness of different models of field-based learning experiences and little has been reported on the use of the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC) standards in establishing a formative assessment for teacher candidates (TCs). The current study used the…

Training and investing teachers at all career levels in student-centered practices is widely recognized as a significant challenge. Various studies document the failure of student-centered teaching practices to take hold in K-12 mathematics classrooms in significant ways, including collaborative work; problems that are cognitively demanding or…