This column highlights websites that the author thinks are interesting, well designed, and useful to classroom teachers, college-level methods instructors, and other social studies professionals. When reviewing these websites mostly the author tries to look at them through the eyes of a classroom teacher. Does it have relevant, accurate…

Parker Palmer is correct in his claims that good teaching depends more on the capacity for connectedness than on technique and that helping teacher candidates cultivate a strong sense of personal identity is crucial. However, to what extent are Palmer's claims compatible with the various constructivist models of learning that are now prevalent in…

Teacher candidates in secondary social studies education come to their methods course eager to share their passion for the subject. Enthusiasm often turns to confusion and frustration when they are confronted with unforeseen decisions about the content they will teach before they determine the instructional strategies for teaching that material.…

A teacher educator and student of Duckworth's critical exploration approach to teaching shares three episodes taken from science methods courses she teaches for preservice teachers in graduate and undergraduate programs in elementary education. The episodes reveal the pedagogy of critical exploration to be particularly well suited to the…

In this study, a group of teacher educators converse about their teaching practice in light of a new provincial K-12 program of social studies. The most noteworthy feature of this new program is its explicit call for teachers to include Aboriginal and Francophone perspectives as they teach to the program's two central themes of…

This paper discusses research on a Partner Classroom pilot program that was implemented over a two-year period to provide "high quality," "targeted" field experiences in a senior-level elementary literacy methods course. The aim was to shift the focus from passive watching and engagement in routine classroom tasks to emphasize guided observations,…

This article presents data from a group of secondary pre-service teachers who used vee diagrams to illustrate their conceptual and methodological analyses of a problem, as part of a required mathematics methods course assignment. The individually constructed vee diagrams were analysed in terms of the extent to which they displayed principles and…

One hundred fifty six participants enrolled in a mathematics methods course were involved in the study which specifically examined Mathematics Teacher Efficacy and Mathematics Anxiety in Elementary Pre-service Teachers. Data collection involved findings from the Mathematics Teaching Efficacy Beliefs Instruments (MTEBI), Mathematics Anxiety Rating…

One of the challenges of teacher education is to train preservice teachers to deliver a wide range of literacy skills to a diverse population. This article describes a mixed methods research study into preservice undergraduate literacy methods courses. This research examined how online, asynchronously conducted discussions influenced and impacted…

Sixty four preservice teachers taking a mathematics methods class for middle schools were given 3 math problems: multiply a three digit number by a two digit number; divide a whole number by a fraction; and compare the volume of two cylinders made in different ways from the same rectangular sheet. They were to a) solve them, explaining their…

In this paper, the author discusses the major components of a junior level pedagogy course for elementary education majors learning to teach mathematics. The course reviews content and knowledge of the teacher candidates and introduces methods and materials for teaching elementary mathematics using the Standards or benchmarks from the National…

Teachers' self-efficacy develops based on their appraisal of their experience with a task or similar tasks. Elementary science education should provide opportunities for students to experience science learning opportunities in authentic settings. This retrospective study describes one example of preservice teachers teaching elementary school…

This article presents a study exploring preservice teachers' experiences with multigenre writing in a secondary English methods course. In multigenre writing (Romano, 2000), students write about their research in a variety of genres as an alternative to the traditional research paper, presenting exposition in narrative forms. Preservice teachers…

As a social studies program coordinator at a regional-sized institution, the author typically has between 20-25 preservice candidates enrolled in his annual undergraduate methods course. However, he usually has only one to two in-service candidates each year who require an advance methods course focused on such items as the historical influences,…

We developed a rubric to assess several of our department's undergraduate student learning outcomes (SLOs). Target SLOs include applications of principles of research methodology, using appropriate statistics, adherence to the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, and written communication skills. We randomly sampled 20…