This article reviews the deep-rooted nature of marginalization and disadvantage and provides examples of leadership initiatives that offer the possibility of a more equitable public schooling. It provides a conceptual orientation to a pedagogy of social justice and argues that it requires development of a critical consciousness within teachers and…

Reports on the procedure and results of the trial of support materials that were developed for primary teacher mentors to help trainee teachers improve their medium-term and individual lesson plans. Concludes that trainees' practice in science improved in subsequent unmentored lessons, but good practice was not transferred to other subjects.…

Proposes three problems that must be solved in order to best prepare teachers who both know content and can make use of it to help all students learn, including: identifying the content knowledge that matters for teaching; understanding how such knowledge needs to be held; and determining what it takes to learn to use such knowledge in practice.…

Explores the potential of science teaching cases to deepen teachers' content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge. While many teachers began discussions without a clear understanding of certain key concepts, after a two-hour case discussion and brief hands-on activities, they collaboratively developed a deeper understanding of the content.…

The purpose of this article is to describe a middle school mathematics teacher's model of his students' responses to algebraic tasks involving equivalent expressions and the distributive property. The teacher engaged in two model-eliciting activities designed for teachers by creating a library of his students' work and an accompanying "Ways…

In recent years, increasing emphasis has come to be placed, both by researchers and by policy-makers, on the adequacy of primary teachers' subject knowledge of science. Within research, this emphasis has been linked to the rise of constructivist ideas about the significance of establishing children's prior conceptions of scientific concepts for…

The study inquired into the effect of research-based video-cases on pre-service teachers conceptualizing their understanding of contemporary mathematics teaching. The 43 participants enrolled in a Mathematics Method Course viewed and discussed 5 video-cases of primary teachers teaching. Journal entries, lesson plans, and microteaching observations…

A case is made that professional development activities in science, when designed as generic programs, can limit pathways individual teachers may take or even select to meet their specific professional development needs. Teacher professional development programs in science have consistently been designed to address system wide needs. These needs…

This paper engages with poststructural ideas for a discussion on what it means to engage in pedagogical work in the context of elementary/primary school mathematics classrooms. Central to the analysis are the pre-service student and the part that the teaching practicum plays in the "making" of a teacher. Drawing on insights from the work of…

Current reform-driven mathematics documents stress the need for teachers to provide learning environments in which students will be challenged to engage with mathematics concepts and extend their understandings in meaningful ways (e.g., National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 2000, "Curriculum and evaluation standards for school…

In this study we investigate a strategy for engaging high school mathematics teachers in an "initial" examination of their teaching in a way that is nonthreatening and at the same time effectively supports the development of teachers' pedagogical content knowledge [Shulman (1986). "Educational Researcher," 15(2), 4-14]. Based on the work…

The "raison d'etre" for traditional schools of education has radically shifted in recent years. Research demonstrates that schools have been remarkably unsuccessful at reducing the unacceptable achievement gap between black and Latino students, on the one hand, and white students, on the other, and some have laid the blame at the feet of…

Many researchers have called for a broadening of the theoretical base of language teacher development programs to include gathering information not only on what teachers do in the classroom, but also on what they know, and how this knowledge is transferred to their teaching behavior, especially as they gain more experience in the classroom.…

In the past, evaluation of teacher performance often focused on generic behaviors related to common instructional strategies (Medley, Coker, & Soar, 1984). More recently, educational researchers and test developers have focused more on teachers' subject matter knowledge as tested through tools like the Praxis and California's Single Subject…

The present study investigated the effects of a pre-service teaching program on changes in student teachers' pedagogical knowledge. Twelve student teachers drew a concept map on "effective teaching" on four separate occasions at two designated points each before and after field teaching during a period of eight months. Five in-service teachers…