School associates (SA's), or cooperating teachers (CT's), have arguably been one of the most powerful influences on the teacher candidate's (TC) pre-service experience. For this reason, most studies about the practicum have focused on this relationship. However, while observing one visual art student's practicum as her Faculty Advisor (FA) for the…

With state and national policymakers eyeing ways to improve teacher preparation, a handful of education programs are becoming more intentional about how such "cooperating" teachers--as they're known in the lingo of teacher preparation--are selected and trained. That interest could grow as programs wrestle with the finer points of how to…

Peer placements, pairing two preservice teachers with a cooperating teacher, have been shown to provide a more supportive and collaborative context for learning to teach than the traditional student-cooperating teacher, single placement model. In some cases, however, tensions existed. This qualitative study seeks to expand the extant research by…

In this essay, the author traces the progress of one English teacher (Dana) from her days as a middle school student, to her university work, to her emergence as a teacher. The journey reveals that many mentors along the way contributed to the new teacher's sense of purpose, efficacy, and confidence. It is easy to limit one's thinking about the…

Much attention has been given to the impact of cooperative teachers on the pedagogical behaviour of student teachers. In many cases, however, cooperating teachers gain as much from the student teacher as the student teacher acquires from them. This study was designed to elicit answers to the following two questions: (1) What are the perspectives…

This study investigates a group of pre-service physics teachers' perceptions about the causes of problems in school experience through the attribution theory. The participants were thirteen pre-service physics teachers from a public university in Turkey. Data were collected through the interviews by requesting the participants to reflect their own…

Socialization is the process of gathering knowledge and constructing it in a social context. This gathering of knowledge is often acquired formally through an educational process or informally by interaction with other people (Capel, 2007). A physical education teacher goes through a socialization process where beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, and…

"Adaptive Mentorship"© (AM) is a mentoring model the authors have developed over a 21-year period. Mentor-protégé pairs originally applied it in teacher-education internship programs; however, the authors have subsequently witnessed its adoption by other mentorship/coaching practitioners/researchers across the professions. In this…

Many school districts across the United States now offer online K-12 education, and the proportion of all students in higher education taking at least one online course is at an all-time high of 32% (Allen & Seaman, 2013). With the evolution of online teaching and learning, teacher preparation programs must establish and offer online student…

Effective teachers produce effective learning environments for their students. To produce effective teachers, education programs must, in part, use assessments that can predict the ability of its teacher candidates teach in powerful ways. This dissertation was a case study of the pilot of the Teacher Performance Assessment (TPA) in two teacher…

This study aims to define the roles of cooperating teachers as mentors in the context of distance-learning teacher education. The participants included 358 cooperating teachers who mentored 4th-year student teachers in a Distance English Language Teacher Training Program in Turkey. To determine the roles that were perceived as mentoring roles by…

Cooperating teachers can help student teachers make the most of their student teaching experience. The author has served as an on-site supervisor for many practicum students and interns. She has also worked on the university side, supervising pre-student teachers and school psychology practicum students. Having served in all three of these…

A university's seminar model suggests the design of a collaborative structure that promotes team sharing and problem solving. The mentoring that occurs in the seminar comes mainly from the student teachers sharing their experiences with each other and working together to make sense of their classrooms in the context of the theories they have…

How preservice teachers (PSTs) learn and deliver Sport Education ("SE") (Siedentop, 1994) is an area researchers believe warrants further investigation (Stran & Curtner-Smith, 2009a). This study explores one PST's experiences delivering SE during a school teaching placement after undertaking a practical "SE" module in his…

While there is considerable research concerning co-teaching among special educators and regular classroom teachers, little work has been published regarding co-teaching that involves teacher candidates and their cooperating teachers. During the last three years, two middle level education faculty members involved in their University's Professional…