If the middle school is to adequately meet the needs of the particular age group it serves, a new teacher education coalition of school districts, colleges or universities, teacher organizations, and state and federal agencies is needed. Each member of the coalition would have its own role: teacher organizations to assist with recruitment,…

During the second year of a projected three-year pilot program developed to help future teachers learn how to infuse career education into their future teaching experiences, twenty-nine students participated in a three-course, nine-semester-hour program offered by Eastern Connecticut State College, which included two supervised seven-week…

A two-year career education exemplary project conducted in the middle schools and grade nine in Meridian, Connecticut, was evaluated. Objectives of the program had included providing hands-on experience in various job clusters to the students, expanding the work of guidance counselors in career education, providing teacher inservice training, and…

The Experience-Based Career Education (EBCE) model being developed and tested in four regions of the United States, under the sponsorship of the National Institute of Education, reflects a nationwide interest in discovering new ways to help adolescents handle the psychological, social, and economic complexities of modern life. This paper reports…

To determine the effects of educational experiences on the knowledge of and attitudes toward mental retardation, 279 newly admitted graduate students and 288 graduating students in seven schools of social work completed a personal data sheet, semantic differential rating scales, a knowledge inventory, and a client preference rank order scale.…

This article focuses on open schools or schools without walls, those experiments within the public school system involving a reconceptualization of the role of the school in the educational process. A brief review of the free school movement (those experiments outside public schools) is also included. The stated goal of the open school is to help…

This book gathers the comments of 27 contributors who are organizers, coordinators, participants, students and staff on a University of Michigan sociology praxis course, which combines community service with seminar-related opportunities for reflection, relevant readings, discussion questions and activities, journal assignments and meaningful,…

This book presents 25 essays and studies that explore the interplay of a variety of factors that provide the fuel for individual and collaborative explorations into the nature of literacy. Essays and studies in the book are "Patterns of Response: Struggling Readers Respond to a Real Book during Transactional Literature Discussion" (JoAnn Rubino…

The Center of Excellence for Rural Special Education at Clemson University (South Carolina) has developed a field-based undergraduate preservice teacher training program. During the fall and spring semesters of their senior year, preservice teachers are matched with a mentor special education teacher for 2 weeks in a rural school district of the…

A team of four high school juniors conducted a field study to determine the value that college admissions directors place on school-to-work (STW) experiences, which were defined not as traditional vocational education but rather as field study designed to give students an appreciation for and practice in exercising the skills and competencies…

Three components of excellent middle grades teacher preparation programs include foundations (a broad liberal education and the knowledge base upon which the teaching profession rests), teaching fields (depth beyond the basics in some areas of academic inquiry), and middle grades specialization (experiences specific to learning to function…

This study of British primary and secondary teachers and higher education faculty examined teachers' and administrators' responses to government reforms in preservice teacher education. Results indicated that predictions of collapse and major disruption have not materialized, but that systemic instability and fragility raise questions about…

As preservice teachers anticipate student teaching, they often experience excitement, for they realize they will soon be finished with their course work and out in a school all day, every day, for a semester. This excitement may be mixed with anxiety, however, especially if they have just completed an intensive field experience where they have…

Mentoring is often assumed to be done by experienced teachers with new teachers in one-on-one settings and designed to help the mentee be successful with the tasks of teaching. In the context of preservice teacher education, mentoring usually takes place during field experiences, particularly student teaching when the mentor is the host classroom…

This project is an exploration of the benefits of a field-based pre-student teaching semester in which elementary education students work with college professors and practicing elementary teachers in a more holistic way than is possible with traditional campus-based courses. A group of twenty-six college students met four days each week, seven…