This article discusses a "peer mentoring" teacher education initiative that aims at developing pre-service teachers' capacities to participate successfully in learning communities, both during their initial teacher education and throughout their teaching careers. Peer mentoring utilizes the latest conceptualization of mentoring, that of…

Through the voices of teachers and students, this piece describes an approach to professional development and classroom practice that teaches about heterosexism and homophobia as part of an inclusive process for promoting diversity education. Data from a qualitative research study that assessed the long-range effects of a professional development…

Teaching can be a lonely business. According to the 1996 report of the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, many new teachers are "isolated behind classroom doors with little feedback or help while others learn merely to cope rather than to teach well". For many neophyte teachers this isolation begins during the student teacher…

Bechtel and O'Sullivan suggest that teacher change within the context of professional development (PD) is influenced by the design and content of PD initiatives. This paper examines the influence of an initiative designed to stimulate reflection and discussion among experienced teachers. It has been argued in the physical education literature and…

Brewer Elementary is facing problems with their students' achievement in literacy and mathematics. Teachers are consistently struggling with students underperforming on state standardized tests over several years, reflecting national trends that show students of color often struggle when compared with white students (Testing: Index of Diversity,…

This interpretive case study explores an attempt to add an online component--the On-line Literacy Project--to a successful face-to-face professional development community. Participants were six members of the Literacy Project, which was carried out in the school board of a western Canadian city. The principal theoretical framework informing the…

Learning communities are a popular strategy that community colleges nationwide have embraced in support of developmental students. In a learning community, a cohort of students takes two or more courses linked by integrated themes and assignments that are developed through ongoing faculty collaboration. While the number of learning community…

Teacher preparation to deliver inclusive services to students with disabilities is increasingly important because of changes in law and policy emphasizing student access to, and achievement in, the general education curriculum. Inclusion of students with disabilities in general education environments has a long history in special education law;…

An ever-increasing focus on accountability in teacher education has augmented the importance of physical education teacher education (PETE) programs to develop procedures for assessing their candidates and completers--the student teachers (STs). Finding out what students think, know, and feel about STs' teaching ability is yet another valuable…

Eighty-two percent of public school teachers teach in classrooms that include students with disabilities. Yet some research has suggested that many teachers feel ill-prepared to implement standards-based reform in heterogeneous learning environments. In a national survey of 400 general education teachers, less than half (37%) reported that they…

Today's workforce comprises distinct generational cohorts-Veterans, Baby Boomers, Gen-Xers, and Millennials. "Generations at School" provides educators with the knowledge and tools to create and sustain true collaboration, teamwork, and consensus. Suzette Lovely and Austin G. Buffum introduce the traits and tipping points of these diverse age…

Recent changes in the structure of initial teacher education have resulted in teacher training institutions having to think again about how they address the issue of inclusion within their provision. In this article, Sue Pearson, who co-ordinates the MA (SEN) programme in the School of Education at the University of Leeds, and who contributes to…

This article describes how mathematics and science teacher educators collaborated to promote the use of high-level tasks and inquiry-based instruction in high school classrooms. Working with a colleague in the School of Arts and Sciences, education professors developed and team-taught a model inquiry-based lesson. Then teacher candidates were…

Changing teaching practices in secondary history classrooms requires teachers to first change their attitudes and views towards teaching history. This was a key finding that emerged from the analysis of changes that took place in the teachers' classrooms during the course of the Teaching American History grant project that was successful in…

Students with special needs are more likely to spend most or all of the school day in a typical classroom than they did in the past, when separate classrooms were the norm. As a result, teachers are faced with the challenge of teaching students with a wide array of learning needs. Marilyn Friend suggests that coteaching, a partnership in which a…