Recruitment and retention challenges are once again leading to teacher shortages across the nation. Especially in urban and rural school districts, low salaries and poor working conditions often contribute to the difficulties of recruiting and keeping teachers, as can the challenges of the work itself. As a consequence, in many schools--especially…

Over 10 years, five state colleges and universities in a Midwestern state offered blended early childhood education training programs. A total of 242 teachers with unified ECE teaching endorsements in this state completed an online survey exploring their preparedness for work in inclusive settings with children birth to grade 3. Results describe…

Real-time classroom simulations like TeachME, a University of Central Florida project, offer promise for a host of teacher-training applications. Through them, candidates could learn to work with different groups of students, or practice a discrete skill such as classroom management. Most of all, such simulations give teachers in training the…

This study examined the significance of place, a Title One elementary school, on the preservice teachers' (PSTs) abilities to make theory to practice connections using culturally responsive teaching. I investigated how PSTs used theoretical knowledge of culture taught in coursework and emerging knowledge of community context to plan and execute…

New accreditation standards for teacher preparation programs call for more seamless and effective connections between methods courses, clinical experiences, and school-based mentoring. Intentional clinical experiences and intermediate instructional strategies can foster collaboration between teacher preparation programs and teacher leaders in K-12…

What is the relationship between student teachers' studio art practice and pedagogy during the student teaching experience? What are the benefits of reflecting on connections between art teaching and artmaking after the student teaching experience? In developing one's art practice, art educators build conceptual frameworks for curriculum with…

The purpose of this study was to determine the differences in mentoring across three different clinical settings: student teaching, early field experiences, and entry year teachers. Eighteen teachers with mentoring experience in all three clinical settings were selected and interviewed. The teachers' expectations for teacher development,…

The paper focuses on the experiences and perceptions of student internees in the College of Education under the University of Rwanda. The primary aim of the study was to reveal how internees perceive the internship program that was newly introduced. Findings reveal that where as internees consider the internship program as being beneficial in…

The field of teacher preparation is falling short of its most important responsibility: ensuring that the teachers we train are ready to do the job. For more than a decade,TNTP preparation programs produced teachers who were no more or less effective than teachers from any other program-- some were great, some were poor, most were about average.…

The placement of final-year undergraduate students into schools and colleges is becoming increasingly common in higher education as part of outreach, employability and community-building initiatives. This article describes one such initiative at the School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds, its successes, its challenges and why schools…

Using Kegan's (1982, 1994) theory of constructive developmentalism, this study focused on the way in which the teacher candidates defined success in student teaching. The candidates differed in their personal epistemologies or what Kegan (1982) called orders of consciousness, which referred to the different ways an individual made meaning of…

This research investigates a model for developing meta-cognitive tools to be used by pre-service teachers during apprenticeship (student teaching) experience to operationalise the epistemological model of Cook and Brown (2009). Meta-cognitive tools have proven to be effective for increasing performance and retention of undergraduate students.…

Research on the student teaching practicum indicates that it is a time of enormous stress. The purpose of this study was to gather information from student teachers regarding their perceptions of stress while in the midst of their practicum. The questions were designed to gather information that could be used to create a less stressful practicum.…

Opportunities for teacher candidates to investigate and enact the work of teaching in settings of reduced complexity--what are called "approximations of practice"--offer a promising path toward preparing more ambitious and equitable mathematics teachers. However, these approaches face the risk of not preparing individuals to continue…

There is a continuing emphasis in the United States on improving students' mathematical abilities, and one approach is to better prepare teachers. To investigate the potential usefulness of Lesson Study to better prepare teachers, one author set out to conduct action research on his classroom practice. Specifically, he sought to determine whether…