High-stakes education reforms across the United States and the globe continue to alter the landscape of teaching and teacher education. One key but understudied aspect of this reform process is the experiences of first-year teachers, particularly those who participated in these high-stakes education systems as students and as a…

As U.S. schools continue to grow more culturally and linguistically diverse, it is important for teacher-educator programs to include pedagogy that promotes engaging learning opportunities for all children. One way these learning opportunities can occur is through interactive read-alouds. Interactive read-alouds provide the teacher and child an…

Reading and reflecting upon ethnically unfamiliar literature can provide opportunities for teacher candidates to critically examine assumptions of self and other relative to racial, cultural, and linguistic identities. However, ethnically unfamiliar literatures can be difficult for readers to understand and appreciate due to the aesthetics they…

Suburban middle schools have been affected by a growing enrollment of English language learners and by the need to demonstrate that this population of students is meeting prescribed academic proficiency benchmarks. These developments necessitate cogent, English learner--focused professional learning across content areas. Using Gee's…

Through course readings, museum visits, focus group discussions, and reflections on clinical observation experiences, preservice teachers developed a fictitious educational setting (Courage High School) that incorporates critical, social justice practices and privileges the experiences and cultural backgrounds of all K-12 students. Participants…

For accreditation and programmatic decision making, education school administrators use inter-rater reliability analyses to judge credibility of student-teacher assessments. Although weak levels of agreement between university-appointed supervisors and cooperating teachers are usually interpreted to indicate that the process is not being…

In this article, the authors use an explanatory narrative of participation and transformation across two consecutive early childhood communities of practice to chronicle the evolution of a teacher leader, Michelle. This narrative illustrates how the continuity of experience spawned her development from apprentice toward an agentic teacher leader,…

Recently, interdisciplinary instruction has come back to the educational scene, specifically supported through the Common Core State Standards. As teacher educators and former middle-level teachers, the authors see this as a positive move to enhance learning for adolescents. This qualitative study sought to answer: How do secondary preservice and…

Some mathematics educators assert that P-12 students respond better to mathematics when it is taught for cultural relevance and social justice. Providing teachers with examples of how to use culturally relevant pedagogy and social justice pedagogy (SJP) is critical to enacting these strategies in mathematics classrooms. The results of this…

Although the underpreparation of teachers to work with English learners is a documented problem in teacher education, little research has addressed teacher educators' perspectives in guiding prospective teachers to educate English learners. This case study of one 13-month elementary certification program highlights teacher educators'…

The author describes how culturally relevant children's literature allowed teachers and teacher candidates to explore the lived realities of diverse students. Through the author's qualitative investigation of 23 literature discussions of undergraduate and graduate students across five academic semesters, the author found that texts…

This study examined a writing methods course for early childhood preservice teachers (PSTs). Addressing the concerns for the teaching of writing, the course sought to engage PSTs in learning designed to create cognitive shifts concerning their perceptions about writing. The goal of the study was to analyze how a writing methods course mediated…

Although proponents support portfolios' value to enhance the reflective thinking of novice teachers and imply that such thinking improves teachers' practice, few studies have confirmed these assertions by directly measuring in-depth reflection or describing conditions that develop it. In this study, reflective thinking in preservice…

In this study, the authors narrate the results of a linguistically accommodated environmental education workshop in which monolingual and bilingual preservice teachers were exposed to instruction in English and Spanish. The authors contend that environmental initiatives, such as Project Wildlife in Learning Design, can promote an understanding of…

This original pedagogical study captured three preservice teachers' experiences using visual literacy strategies as an approach to teaching English language learners (ELLs) science academic language. The following research questions guided this study: (1) What are the experiences of preservice teachers' use of visual literacy to teach…