Teacher questioning has a central role in guiding pupils to learn to make scientific observations and inferences. We asked 110 primary student teachers to write down what kind of questions they would ask their pupils about a demonstration. Almost half of the student teachers posed questions that were either inappropriate or presupposed that the…

Content and language integrated learning (CLIL) has received significant interest in recent years as a practical means of creating a plurilingual European community. A key feature of CLIL is the non-native speaking teacher responsible for developing learners' content and language knowledge in a foreign language mediated environment. Teachers often…

This study explores the beliefs and attitudes that university students enrolled in teacher education programmes in Spain, England and the US (Texas) hold about individuals who differ. A beliefs and attitudes toward difference scale (BATD) was constructed using nine dimensions of diversity; culture, language, socioeconomic status/social class,…

This article is concerned first with identifying teacher characteristics connected with excellence. It then analyses the results of a survey conducted among primary school teachers in one local authority area in Scotland. Teachers responded to a questionnaire which asked them to rate in importance 44 characteristics of excellence. The findings…

Learning to teach is a difficult and challenging process for beginning teachers in the national curriculum contexts due to several pressures that the centralised system presents for school and classroom contexts. This study investigated the difficulties beginning middle school mathematics teachers faced in the Turkish national curriculum context…

This paper reports on a case study investigating learning outcomes at the individual and organisational level of a cross-institutional innovation project based on the SOAP approach. SOAP integrates "S"chooling of teachers, "O"rganisational development of schools, "A"ction- and development-oriented research, and "P"rofessional development of…

This paper reports on a study of the experiences of teacher educators in the introduction and development of e-portfolios over an eight-year period from 2002 to 2009 at a Swedish university. The study was conducted with 67 teacher educators in order to investigate how e-portfolios have been discussed, designed, used and disseminated during this…

This study examined the relationship between prospective teachers' concerns about their teaching and their beliefs about their sense of efficacy. Three hundred and thirty-nine prospective teachers participated in this study. Two instruments, the "Teaching Concerns Checklist" and the "Teachers' Sense of Efficacy Beliefs Scale", were used to elicit…

Sweden has no tradition of mentors participating in the formal summative assessment of newly qualified teachers. However, an Inquiry Committee Report proposed that mentors should have some involvement in this process. This article reports on the results of an examination of 108 official responses to the Inquiry Report submitted to the Ministry of…

In the last two years, English language teaching at the level of basic education in China has been changing very fast due to the new Standard Curriculum. The paper takes a school in the northwest of China as an example, illustrating the process of implementing the Curriculum, summarizing the work the school has done, the problems encountered and…

This paper outlines the increasing cultural diversity of Australia's education settings and explicates the global education movement and the new Australian Early Years Learning Framework. It discusses the implication of these factors for early childhood education practice and early childhood teacher education. The key research question considered…

This study examines student teachers' perceptions of teacher education and its contribution to their professional life, when they become novice teachers during their internship period. The sample comprised 97 student teachers in their fourth year of studies for a BEd degree. Data were collected through questionnaires which included both a…

In line with the principles of the Bologna Process, teacher education systems across Europe are converging along a common path. Taking the Republic of Ireland (Ireland) as a case study, this paper examines the European agenda in relation to teacher education and asks how individual nation states are coping with the demands of greater comparability…

This paper investigates current research into the role of education in combating social injustice, assembles this research to indicate key features of a teacher education programme that would assist education for social justice, and links these features to one innovative university teacher education programme to ascertain some of the practical…

Teacher education at the university has to relate both to the school and to academia. Since these two worlds have values that to some extent diverge, teacher education is placed in a field of tension between the requirement to adapt to academic standards, norms, and values and the requirement to maintain a close professional relationship with the…