China has a long history of education, which can be traced back to the Shang Dynasty (1523 B.C. to 1027 B.C.). During this long history changes occurred as the needs of society changed. During the Warring States Period (770 B.C. to 221 B.C.), the philosophies of Daoism and Confucianism were developed. These philosophies became the cornerstone of…

Working for the chair of the foreign language and methodology in Volgograd State Academy of Advanced Training and Retraining of Education Workers for about 4 years, the author has noticed that on the one hand, teachers of English have a reluctance to speak English in front of their colleagues (peers) while harboring an unwillingness to have any…

The National Curriculum Statement for Grades R-9 (NCS) (Department of Education, 2002) asks that Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) be valued in South African schools and classrooms. Teachers are urged to use context-specific and context-relevant forms of IK to teach content; and to incorporate IK methodologies into their teaching methods. Little…

The study examined the effect of a secondary school teacher training and coaching program on student achievement. Eighty-eight teachers were randomly assigned to either the My Teaching Partner-Secondary (MTP-S) group or the control group. Of these teachers, 76 participated in the study during the intervention year (when they received coaching) and…

This is a study of a 20 minute video recorded narrative of a participant-teacher at an inservice teacher education seminar in South India. My analysis involves the close observation of oral and visual elements of this narrative. I employ and deploy this as a telling case to study the conduct and consequences of teaching and educational relations…

In this paper, the author argues that sustained, discipline-specific professional development provides the key to transferring research knowledge base to the classroom, where it can lead to significant improvements in the quality of history instruction. To be successful, such professional development must--like good classroom instruction--begin…

In this article, we introduce Bakhtin's (1981) idea of revoicing and situate our data drawn from a graduate literacy methods course for in-service teachers in the United States in this framework. This study is exploratory in nature. We use data from a single literacy methods class to explore and shed light on the "how-to" of teacher…

Education policies, and in particular those related to teacher education, are central to the construction of Europe as a knowledge society and for facing the social and economic challenges that European countries must respond to in this millennium. This article presents an analysis of studies on the evaluation of in-service teacher education…

The importance of teachers' and children's collaborative engagement in shared learning activities has a strong evidence base in sociocultural research and is promoted as an effective pedagogy in New Zealand's national curriculum. However, what this means for teachers' practice is unclear. Teachers can engage in practices thought to be…

Modern economics has placed lifelong learning (LLL) at the center of an intensive ongoing political debate. Evidenced-based interventions are needed, not only in continuing education courses for teachers, but also in schools. This paper introduces evaluation results of TALK, a teacher education program for professional teachers with the objective…

Few, if any, studies have examined the impact of nature of science (NOS) instruction on science teachers' practices 2 or more years after completing a science teacher education program. Extant studies on preservice and first-year teachers' NOS teaching practices have had disappointing results, with few teachers valuing NOS as a cognitive objective…

The purpose of this study was to explore the experiences of in-service music teachers who chose to pursue a master's degree in music education through distance learning. In this study, I examined the motivations of in-service music teachers for choosing to pursue a master's degree in music education through distance learning; the benefits teachers…

Examines relationships among the levels of pre-service and inservice teacher preparation in various topic areas within environmental education (EE) and the levels of implementation of those topic areas in public high school science and social studies classrooms in Illinois. Measures teacher attitudes toward EE. Findings indicate that teachers who…

The purpose of this study is to introduce a problem-based learning (PBL) scenario that elementary school science teachers in middle school (5th-8th grades) can use in their in-service training. The scenario treats the subjects of heat, temperature and thermal expansion within the scope of the 5th and 6th grade science course syllabi and has been…

Under current Western neoliberal philosophy, promotion of efficiency and resolution of issues are typically expected to result from effective management. The education sector, too, has responded well to these expectations. Amongst such expectations, engagement in professional development activities (PDAs) by teachers of English as an additional…