Background: The need for effective teachers to reflect on their students' thinking is now generally recognized. Moreover, the study of students' conceptions of learning and their impact on learning outcomes has become a popular area of research. But are teachers aware of their students' conceptions and do they reflect on them when planning their…

The purpose of this study was to analyze science education searches and hiring practices for faculty positions listed in The Chronicle of Higher Education for an academic year. Chairs of searches completed a survey about successful and unsuccessful searches. Over 70% of searches were successful in hiring new science education faculty with 33%…

This article is both a sequel and a companion to the account by Gill Hatch, published in "MT196," of her experience in her first teaching post--as a College of Education Assistant Lecturer. A chance remark by Gill in 2001 made the author aware that their careers as mathematics teachers had begun in similar environments. They set about compiling a…

This article argues that issues surrounding adolescent literacies problematize the relationship between the acquisition of core skills, the need to connect with a more expansive repertoire of literate practices, and a middle school reform initiative that encourages greater connectedness to the world of the adolescent. The terms "public literacy"…

According to Hanes and Schiller (1994), "The student teacher experience is the traditional transition from theories of the university to practical realities of public schools. It is in this experience that critical changes occur and determine the manner of practice that preservice teachers tend to adopt for their future classrooms" (p. 218). The…

Twenty years ago, John Goodlad (1984) produced a troubling image of the social studies classroom. The primary activities for students in those classes included "listening, reading textbooks, completing workbooks and worksheets, and taking quizzes" (213). Despite many endeavors over the years to uplift the teaching of history, including the writing…

In his article in the second volume of "Tradition Renewed: A History of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America," Jonathan Sarna argues that the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) has always had two incompatible visions of its role. On the one hand, there were (and are) those who see it as "a centre of Jewish 'Wissenschaft' pure and simple",…

This study deals with the problem concerning the lack of students in teacher education. Researchers investigated students of color who are already enrolled in teacher education programs. The central question to this study is: What draws students of color to teaching? In order to answer this particular question, other guiding questions are also…

Inquiry-based teacher education promotes an exploration of concrete particulars as the route to wise practice. The case study presented illustrates one teacher candidate's struggle to let go of a conception of knowledge as generalizable formulae that can be readily applied in practice and to become more open to practice itself as a site of…

Few issues in second language teaching have generated as much controversy as that of error correction. In fact, one of the most discouraging experiences of L2 teachers is correcting errors especially those that recur in their students' production. A possible explanation may be the mismatch between what teachers and students consider to be…

In this article, the author shares his experiences as a first-year teacher. He discusses many challenges that he faced, including dealing with an aggressive student, the fear of losing control of the classroom, criticisms from parents, and balancing school life with his private life. The author offers advice to first-year teachers including the…

This paper is a discussion of a team-taught interdisciplinary course that was designed to provide cohesion between the 12 departments that participate in the environmental studies major at Salisbury University. This course provides a model for addressing several positive and negative tendencies at work in interdisciplinary programs, and provides…

How can teaching and living abroad impact our teaching in North America? This article explores how what I do teaching religion and ethics to undergraduates at Texas Christian University has been influenced by twelve years of teaching in the two-thirds world. It is structured in terms of three insights that correlate with what I call the past,…

In recent years a number of writers have expressed concern that teachers fail to engage with published educational research, and that this failure rests in part with the research producers' disconnection from their users. In the context of these criticisms, this article considers how our knowledge of teachers' life cycles, from their early days in…

Effective coaching is a mixture of pedagogy and principles of sciences, e.g., motor skill acquisition, sociology, and physiology, often referred to as the science of coaching. Instinctive or intuitive coaching has often been incorrectly viewed as the art of coaching. More important should be how coaches develop knowledge, how they access that…