Throughout the literature, teacher education is often described as being based on a specific tradition, paradigm, or agenda. Examples of these descriptions include: behavioristic, personalistic, inquiry-oriented, social reconstructionist, academic, developmentalist, and social-efficiency. These approaches are closely linked to the "beliefs and…

Teacher retention has been the subject of much study, yet recent estimates of teachers who choose to leave the profession within the first three years to pursue other careers remains at an unacceptably high level of 33.5 percent. These figures are alarming in light of the fact that schools desperately need qualified teachers. Several authors…

Professional development schools (PDSs) are collaborative partnerships between teacher education programs and K-12 schools that provide educational opportunities for teachers and students alike. Such school-university partnerships are an important part of current educational reform. The body of empirical research examining PDS partnerships is…

Much has been written in recent decades about the importance of community in education. According to some of the literature, a solution to the lack of community in preservice education might lie in the creation of "cohort programs," in which a relatively small number of student teachers engage in their coursework and (insofar as possible) their…

Prior to 1994, the presence of minority belief systems and values in education were largely ignored in South Africa. It could be expected that after ten years of democracy students' understanding of, for instance, the values of inclusivity and diversity in a multicultural society in general and tertiary education in particular should not be in…

Program accountability is increasingly important in teacher education. Yet, program accountability often implies reporting quantitative data in an easy-to-understand visual format. Such data can lack validity when numbers are small and they may confuse issues of candidate performance with candidate understanding. In this study, four teacher…

As part of its ongoing process of formative evaluation, the Stanford Teacher Education Program (STEP) conducted a survey of four cohorts of recent graduates. The data from this survey are being used in concert with findings from other lines of inquiry to assess and improve the program. The discussion in this paper is centered on several research…

This paper will explore emerging benefits of telecollaboration and telementoring through an examination of the literature, a reflection on current practices at the University of Virginia and the University of South Florida, and a forecast proposal for potential seamless integration of technology with teacher preparation and training in schools of…

After a period of unbridled enthusiasm about economical prospects, e-learning today is linked with the expectation of increasing expenditures. We implemented an e-learning offering at low cost for the benefit of students and teachers in a course on general pedagogy. This article describes the core ideas in our planning and the empirical findings…

This article describes and reports evaluation results for five key elements of the Challenge 2000 Multimedia Project's inservice professional development program. The five elements are: (a) Technology Learning Coordinators (a mentoring system), (b) Minigrants (small local grants tied to a planning process for teachers), (c) Partnerships…

This paper describes a teaching experiment investigating the impact of using multiple teaching strategies and innovating while teaching collaboratively. The objective of this study was to examine the use of collaboration in trying a combination of face-to-face meetings, web courseware, and interactive two-way video in a graduate course. The major…

Preservice teachers come to any teacher education course with prior experiences, knowledge and beliefs about learning and teaching. Additionally, the belief systems of preservice teachers often serve as a lens through which they view the content of the teacher education program. Consequently, it is essential that teacher educators take these prior…

The necessity of faculty members to hold specific skills and abilities with regard to technology has reached our institutions of higher education. Locally, a digital portfolio initiative recently implemented by our institution in teacher education has produced an unprecedented expectation for faculty technology skill, as well as conceptual…

Teaching from an informed and culturally responsive philosophy of education is critical for teaching in the 21st century and engagement in reconceptualizing the field of early childhood. This article describes a process used with graduate preservice early childhood education students over a two-course sequence, to generate a personal philosophy…

Most developing countries have embarked upon the implementation of new models in the teaching and learning arenas, and South Africa is no exception. Because the economic empowerment of a nation depends on the success of its educational strategies, the introduction and development of outcomes-based education (OBE) at all levels of education in…