Parent involvement in preservice teacher education is an important component of that preparation. Parents' stories of their everyday experiences having an infant/toddler with disabilities can bring insights to future interventionists that no one else can provide. How do we get parents into the university classrooms? How do we help them tell their…

One way to help preservice teachers to articulate and advocate their teaching stance is by developing their knowledge, skills, and confidence in their ability to carefully, didactically, and strategically plan for instruction. The Integrative Research Project (IRP) is a planning process that enables the preservice teacher to incorporate not only…

Performance-based assessments require teacher candidates to demonstrate proficiency on specific teaching tasks and apply knowledge in authentic settings. This article describes the development and use of performance-based assessments (PBAs) for advancing the learning and evaluation of teacher candidates in an early childhood special education…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the use of action research by ten preservice teachers earning their associate's degree in early childhood education from a small university in the West. Their goal was to assess the impact of their teaching on student learning with children birth to 8 years of age. This study represents the use of…

A developmentally appropriate learning environment for young children is vital for successful learning. However, implementing developmentally appropriate practices can be a challenge for 1st-year teachers because of the pressures of standardized testing. The purpose of this study was to examine the struggles teachers encounter in implementing…

In this essay, the author describes his curricular journey in creating a course on narrative inquiry and memoir for experienced early childhood educators. The author recounts the steps he took in selecting reading texts and activities for the course, and emphasizes the value of using poetry as a form of narrative for helping early childhood…

Observation and documentation are integral to the early childhood classroom. Observation provides the information necessary for adults to build meaningful relationships with individual children. Documentation panels including photographs, teacher's notes, transcriptions, and artifacts, artfully and prominently displayed, serve as a visual archive…

The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation has increased the academic expectations for kindergarten children. Where kindergarten was once a place for children to learn to socialize through play, many kindergarten classrooms have become replicas of first grade with children sitting at desks completing worksheets, learning to sound out words, and…

It is well documented that parent and family involvement in children's education correlates with success in school. The increasing number of English Language Learners in public schools has created a need for teacher educators to prepare preservice teachers to be able to work with families who have limited English. This study examined the outcomes…

Preservice teachers are socialized by their own raced, classed, and gendered experiences to expect "caring parents" to behave and contribute in certain ways to their children's schooling. Preservice teachers who come from widely divergent backgrounds from the communities in which they serve can sometimes be skeptical of parents who are not…

In this article, the author describes a service learning experience that allowed university students to work with culturally and linguistically diverse children as a partial requirement for an introductory level course in Early Childhood Education. Data from the journals and case studies indicated that preservice teachers benefited from this…

This article describes preschool teachers' espoused mental models (EMMs) or, in other words, their naive understanding of young children's learning. Our research goal was to examine differences within the teachers' EMMs regarding the minds and learning of young children from different cultural backgrounds. The subjects included 18 preschool…

The increasing diversity of students and the pedagogical issues that such differences bring to the classroom is a challenge for early childhood teacher education programs today. In the early childhood education classroom, culturally and linguistically diverse teachers are sought after, yet these same diverse teacher candidates find it difficult to…

This study examines the effectiveness of an educational methods course for changing early childhood preservice teachers' instructional beliefs. The teaching methods course emphasized constructivist teaching principles. Seventy-eight of the early childhood education preservice teachers who were enrolled in this course filled out the Teacher Belief…

Kindergarten has undergone dramatic changes since the implementation of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2002. The literature on the challenges facing kindergarten teachers as a result of NCLB focuses primarily on curricular and instructional issues; little attention has been paid to NCLB's impact on the relational aspects of kindergarten teaching,…