Methods courses provide a rich opportunity to unpack what it means to "learn history by doing history." To help explain what "doing history" means, the author has created history labs to walk teacher candidates through the historical process. Each lab poses a historical problem, requires analysis of primary and secondary…

Although the number of emergent bilinguals (EBs), also known as English language learners (ELLs) in U.S. K-12 schools is growing at an increasing rate, K-12 mainstream teachers remain predominantly white and monolingual and receive little training for working with such learners. In addition, many states mandate "English-only" policies…

While the literature emphasizes the importance of teaching political science students methods skills, there currently exists little guidance for how to assess student learning over the course of their time in the major. To address this gap, we develop a model set of assessment tools that may be adopted and adapted by political science departments…

Approximately 20% of students experience reading failure each year. One of the difficulties associated with this large percentage is that it has been documented that pre-service teachers may not be receiving the most appropriate training regarding reading acquisition. The present study sought to determine if pre-service teachers were proficient in…

Teacher education programmes (TEPs) are left with limited research on how the coursework they provide influences the perceptions teachers have about their ability to teach young children how to read--especially over the long term. The purpose of this study was to compare how teacher candidates rate their ability to teach reading at the conclusion…

In this paper, we investigate the in-service teachers "sense of agency" after their participation in a research master course. A semi-structured interview was administrated to nine in-service science teachers, coming from three different African countries: Zimbabwe, Lesotho, and Burkina Faso. All of them attended a European master course…

The Next-Generation Science Standards (NGSS) call for a different approach to learning science. They promote three-dimensional (3D) learning that blends disciplinary core ideas, crosscutting concepts and scientific practices. In this study, we examined explanations constructed by secondary science teacher candidates (TCs) as a scientific practice…

The current study empirically tested the effectiveness of a modular approach to integrating professional development across an undergraduate psychology curriculum. Researchers conducted a two-group, between-subjects experiment on 269 undergraduate psychology students assessing perceptions of professional preparedness and learning. Analysis…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to describe a pedagogical innovation -- a matrix construction exercise -- intended to help pre-service teachers (PTs) navigate the multiple and oftentimes competing discourses that shape the school subject English Language Arts (ELA). Design/methodology/approach: To explore the various ways the PTs drew on the…

This study examined the challenges that pre-service teachers faced when implementing inquiry and their perspective on how to overcome them. The data sample was 55 pre-service teachers (PSTs) enrolled into two sections of a science methods course in a private university in North Texas. The data sources consisted of inquiry-based lesson plans, PST…

Attuning to the acoustic ecologies of multicultural education, this critical qualitative project interrogated how elementary prospective teachers (PST) used digital media to write community through and with sound. Examining PST produced soundscapes and the practice of sonic cartography, this study inquired how "hearing" difference and…

Engaging students in valuable undergraduate research can be an arduous task to craft outside of the regular schedule of both staff and students. This paper describes a successful research experience that was part of an ongoing methods class for undergraduate pre-service education students. Participants simultaneously engaged in community service…

This article documents a collaborative project involving preservice early childhood education students' development of inquiry-based learning experiences alongside kindergarten students within a science methods course. To document this project, I utilized a multiple methods approach and data included classroom observations, transcripts from lesson…

This study describes preservice teachers' (PTs) dispositions toward diversity education in a remote small town university. The purpose of the study is to find out whether PTs in an undergraduate elementary literacy methods class in this locale are willing to accept and adopt multicultural children's and youth literature as pedagogical tools and…

We analyze a particular pedagogy for learning to interact productively with students and subject matter, which we call “rehearsal.” Our goal is to specify a way in which teacher educators (TEs) and novice teachers (NTs) can interact around teaching that is both embedded in practice and amenable to analysis. We address two main research questions:…