New conceptions of literacies and the practices associated with them call for new approaches to preparing teachers to engage students in literacy as a situated social phenomenon. This article describes two teacher educators' engagement in collaborative self-study as we implemented "The New Literacies Project" to help pre-service teachers expand…

In order to prepare undergraduate students better for the realities of school life, instructors of some methods courses have started to use case studies for teaching. These cases are used to highlight the complexity and variability of the educational environment. This method of teaching, which has its roots in business, law, and medicine, has…

The exploration into cultural practices occurring in households has become more fluid and transparent process thanks to the presence of mobile technologies that allow members of a group to capture daily occurrences. This case study explored ways in which three Latino preservice teachers used mobile devices to discover connections between…

Through a mixed-methods study, teacher education faculty members investigated the implementation of a new block of courses and an associated secondary clinical experience designed to prepare preservice secondary special educators. Seventy-three preservice candidates (a) completed then-and-now surveys assessing their confidence implementing 25…

Background: Elementary schoolteachers are an important vehicle for teaching students health skills that will carry them through life and reduce their future risk of disease linked to health behaviors. Purpose: To determine whether university classroom instruction resulted in increased self-efficacy and intent to teach a skill-based health…

This study focuses on the learning of a small group of pre-service teachers in a literacy methods course and their instructor, Cindy, a literacy methods professor. The pre-service teachers in Cindy's literacy methods courses conduct literacy practicum experiences at a local city school that is populated by children from non-dominant backgrounds.…

With the realities of standards-based accountability, it is imperative to model and demonstrate for students how subject areas and teaching methods transcend across traditional boundaries. In an effort to prepare future social studies educators to teach for global awareness and to meaningfully integrate critical literacy skills into their…

The two research questions that guided this study were: (1) How do preservice teachers develop mathematical knowledge for teaching during a coordinated math methods course and field experience? and (2) What types of portfolio tasks lend themselves to documenting mathematical knowledge in teaching? Six, female, elementary (K-8) teacher candidates…

Recent advances in technology and ideology have unlocked entirely new directions for education research. Mounting pressure from increasing tuition costs and free, online course offerings are opening discussion and catalyzing change in the physical classroom. The flipped classroom is at the center of this discussion. The flipped classroom is a new…

Teacher education programs across the United States must prepare teachers who have the content area knowledge, pedagogical expertise, and cultural competence needed to teach an increasingly diverse student population. One consistent suggestion for programs committed to preparing culturally responsive teachers is to incorporate investigations of…

This study investigates the impact of teacher characteristics and instructional strategies on the mathematics achievement of students in kindergarten and first grade and tackles the question of how best to use longitudinal survey data to elicit causal inference in the face of potential threats to validity due to nonrandom assignment to treatment.…

The author describes the use of literature circles in a social studies methods course for elementary preservice teachers and analyzes their effectiveness in teaching powerful social studies ideas. Literature circles encourage students to take more of a leadership role in the classroom, expect their active involvement, and challenge them to think…

Most future teachers are familiar with number patterns that represent an arithmetic sequence, and most are able to determine the general representation of the "n"th number in the pattern. However, when they are given a visual representation instead of the numbers in the pattern, it is not always easy for them to make the connection between the…

Teaching BSW and MSW students beginning interviewing and relationship-building skills is essential in order to prepare them for practice with clients. In social work methods courses, role plays are commonly-used instructional strategies for helping foundation-level students acquire these initial practice skills. Despite the popularity of this…

This article encourages elementary teachers to offer opportunities for their students to critically analyze maps as part of powerful geography instruction in order to help them become well-informed and civic-minded citizens. The article reviews challenges to powerful geography instruction, including traditional geography textbooks and pedagogy and…