This report provides a literature review of the evidence on the quality of early childhood education and care for children under three. It considers the implications for policy and practice, particularly for the Government's programme of free early years provision for disadvantaged two year-olds. The review of the research evidence identified four…

Until recently, states focused on ensuring the presence of a "highly qualified teacher" in every classroom. Under the 2001 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB), this title described a teacher holding at least a bachelor's degree and the appropriate state license and…

Certain common elements can be identified regarding teacher education development in advanced knowledge-based economies. One of these is the attempt, up until relatively recently, to develop a solid foundation of scientific professional knowledge for what Basil Bernstein called the teacher education "Trivium": roughly speaking,…

Teachers are the single most important school-related factor in students' learning, and improving student learning is the single most important goal at Achievement First (AF), a fast-growing public charter school network in the Northeast. To achieve this goal, the AF team has worked to establish a common understanding of effective instructional…

This research examined the knowledge of the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America possessed by teachers in two secondary high schools in East Tennessee. Additionally, an attempt to evaluate the relationship between church attendance in protestant evangelical churches and the teacher's ability to address church/state…

A vast gulf in academic achievement separates public schools in Washington, D.C.'s poorest neighborhoods from those in its most affluent. Achievement Prep, which serves 4th-8th graders in D.C.'s impoverished 8th Ward, is an outlier. Yet in 2011, 60% of Achievement Prep's "scholars" scored proficient or advanced in reading on the DC-CAS…

This dissertation explores the lived experiences of educators who teach in flex model blended learning settings using online, vendor-provided courseware. The tradition of hermeneutic phenomenology grounds this inquiry (Heidegger, 1927/2008). Phenomenological research activities designed by van Manen (1990, 2002) provide the methodological…

Enabling preservice physical education teachers to critically consider questionable and taken-for-granted practices is an important component of a physical education teacher education (PETE) program. In an effort to offer a teaching and learning context in which to introduce such critical consciousness, the authors have included a staged physical…

The school environment is a very dynamic sphere. Changes continually take place in educational policy, curriculum and in a school's physical and social environment. A teacher who wants to be effective in such an environment has to adapt to these changes. Continuous professional development of teachers is essential to addressing the gaps in…

Online instructional ratings are taken by many with a grain of salt. This study analyzes the ability of said ratings to estimate the official (university-administered) instructional ratings of the same respective university instructors. Given self-selection among raters, we further test whether more online ratings of instructors lead to better…

A major criticism of student evaluations of teaching is that they do not reflect student perspectives. Using critical incidents job analysis, students identified nine teaching effectiveness competencies: communication, availability, creativity, individual consideration, social awareness, feedback, professionalism, conscientiousness and…

Using systems theory as a lens, instructor misbehaviors were examined in the context of the college classroom to determine if student-to-student connectedness mediated the relationships between instructor misbehaviors and student involvement and affective learning. Student-to-student connectedness mediated the relationships between instructor…

This paper is an account of the early career narrative of a young Emirati teacher, Amal, against the backdrop of the radical reformation of state schooling underway in the United Arab Emirates. Amal's decision to become a teacher was influenced by negative school experiences in her own childhood, thus fuelling her desire to "have a hand in…

Formative evaluation and its associated methodology of reflection on practice are used extensively in academic staff development. In reflecting on formative evaluation processes in both more traditional and newer programmes conducted at a university of technology, a number of variables reported in the literature were observed to have influenced…

This qualitative study explores reasons that experienced teachers of students with emotional and/or behavioral disorders give for remaining in their field. Previous research, usually conducted among the wider population of special education teachers, has focused on the relationship of employment and demographic factors to attrition and has…