The purpose of this project was to investigate stakeholders' perspectives on coursework and the role of mentors within a unique teacher education program for prospective teachers of mathematics in an alternative-route-to-licensure program. The alternative route reflects a partnership between an institution of higher education, a state office…

The adoption of team teaching (Buckley 2000) is being increasingly explored by many Victorian government secondary colleges as a beneficial approach for use with "middle years" students. Many of these programs are designed to encourage greater student engagement and opportunities for collaborative learning in purposefully designed open…

This study sought to discover the crucial elements that make beginning teachers effective and lead to their retention in the field. While previous studies have approached these questions by gathering statistics, we pursued a case study approach based on open-ended, in-depth interviews of new teachers (1-5 years of experience) identified as…

Research has shown that the underlying teaching beliefs or theories of any particular teacher have generally been considered relatively stable and static throughout his or her career. However, this study investigates how one teacher's beliefs regarding both teaching and learning were changed during a short-term study and immersion program abroad.…

Teachers' professional learning can occur in many spaces and assume a multitude of forms. Professional learning communities (PLCs) are anticipated to be effective structures to support teachers' professional learning, and there is increasing pressure to utilize online configurations for structuring PLCs. However, teachers' practices and…

This article reevaluates the latent structure of the Teacher Efficacy Scale using confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs) on a sample of preservice teachers from a public university in the U.S. Southwest. The fit of a proposed two-factor CFA model with an error correlation structure consistent with internal/ external locus of control is compared to…

To be most effective, teacher professional development needs to be designed and based on teachers' needs. This study provides information on topics that 53 middle- and secondary-level mathematics teachers believed would be beneficial in future training programs. The teachers had participated in a 2-year Teacher Quality Grant focused on…

In this article, we describe our innovative work as teacher educators to integrate coursework for alternatively certified teachers. Rather than maintain boundaries among individual courses for new elementary teachers, explicit connections support first-year teachers professional learning and aid in the immediate application to classroom practice.…

An alternative mathematics preparation program for K-8 teachers is described as an existence proof that steadily increasing effectiveness of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) preparation is possible. The program is based on treating every lesson in each of five mathematics content and methods courses as objects of study.…

With the recent interest in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math), educators have begun to rethink how these disciplines are taught. Beyond redesigning curricula and core standards, an educational culture is emerging that reexamines the purpose of STEM education and whom it serves. To ensure that all learners are inspired and prepared…

Because early childhood education sets the stage for children's academic trajectory, it is important to think carefully about how schools treat, position, and instruct young children of immigrants as well as immigrant parents and teachers. The relational and pedagogical imperatives shared in this article are meant to extend an invitation to…

The author is grateful that this journal has taken on the production of a special theme issue entitled "Immigration and Teacher Education: The Crisis and the Opportunity." In her estimation, the "crisis" is not so much that the United States may indeed continue to enroll more immigrant children and youth in its schooling system or that districts…

Children of immigrants are the fastest-growing segment of the nation's children population. According to the U.S. Census (2007), approximately 16.4 million children, more than 1 in 5, are children of immigrants, most of whom are school-age population (aged 3-17 years). This large demographic shift is fundamentally changing the nation's schools and…

The metaphor of the popular television shows "CSI: New York," "CSI: Miami," and "CSI: Las Vegas" (CSI stands for "crime scene investigation") is applicable to investigating issues of immigrant children in teacher preparation programs (TPP). One of the fundamental principles of CSI is to solve the crime by critically examining clues as evidence…

The primary goal of education is to provide meaningful instruction to all students while fostering generalization throughout the curriculum and beyond. As such, educators continuously seek out instructional methods and techniques to appropriately meet individual student needs while choosing "what" and "how" to teach. The current work provides an…