In this paper, the literature related to collaboration in teacher education programmes is reviewed. The authors discuss the benefits for teacher educators who collaboratively plan and develop team-taught coursework and monitor the impact of their collaboratively developed pedagogy. Gaps in the current knowledge and research are delineated, and…

Institutional politics and diversity of ideological positions create challenges for teaching staff with polarised beliefs about inclusive education. This paper provides a methodological justification for a longitudinal study of the experience of developing an integrated "inclusive education" curriculum in one initial teacher education programme.…

Effective teaching skills consist of high levels of student engagement based on good classroom and time management skills; the ability to scaffold learning that is adapted to students' current levels of understanding; cognitively engaging students in higher-order thinking; and encouraging and supporting success. The research reported here suggests…

It is incumbent on universities to reflect current research on effective teacher preparation and respond to the changing needs of the 21st century. These needs include the knowledge and skills to instruct diverse students; an increasing emphasis on standards and an integrated curriculum model; and the call for all educators to work together to…

Building on previous work in the areas of resistance and discursive practice, we explore their interrelations, interactions, and possibilities for advocacy of/by and for diverse disabled students within the context of two teacher-preparation programs in the United States: Teachers College, and Michigan State University. Using these two approaches…

In most western countries, the problems of effective university-controlled and largely university-based initial teacher education (ITE) have been apparent for many decades: whatever is achieved in the university, the teaching practices and attitudes that student-teachers usually learn to adopt are those currently dominant in the schools. So it is…

While differences in national contexts are associated with variations in how teachers are trained and school systems are organised, the conceptual and philosophical problems of equity and inclusion in schooling are shared concerns. This paper describes how the structure and content of an initial teacher education programme for primary and…

Appropriate professional development, including that initial teacher training, is regarded as a cornerstone of the development of inclusive education. This research is concerned with prospective teachers' conceptualisations of terms such as "disability" and "special education". Activity theory is proposed as a lens through which to consider the…

This paper examines one important dimension of inclusive education: the development of in-service teacher education courses. Using an example from Cyprus, it discusses the issue of contextualizing teacher training courses to suit teachers' prior knowledge, attitudes and beliefs about inclusion. The paper considers some of the findings of a survey…

The main purpose of this research is to examine in-service teachers' instructional beliefs about student-centered education. The inventory was designed to measure teachers' student-centered educational beliefs based on four components of the educational curriculum comprising of educational objectives, content, teaching strategies and instructional…

Beginning teachers are confronted with many issues as they begin their teaching careers, issues, such as classroom management, individual differences, behaviour problems, dealing with parents, and so on. Many beginning teachers take professional development seminars in an attempt to deal with these and other issues. Professional development…

In the student teaching triad model adopted in this study, pairs of pre-service teachers worked collaboratively with cooperating teachers during a 12-week field experience. The main objectives of the study were to document the benefits and challenges for pre-service teachers and cooperating teachers who participate in a triad model and to describe…

This qualitative constructivist research study employed a unique professional case-based pedagogy to investigate how concurrent Education undergraduate students made sense of the complex dilemmas inherent in the cases and in particular, the factors that influenced their critical thinking processes. The paper identifies three core categories that…

This study examines to what extent experienced teachers are aware of gender issues in the science classroom. It also explores how an introduction to gender theory might alter this awareness. Teachers wrote their reflections about a real classroom situation. They were then asked to analyse the same situation after having read texts that discussed…

Despite the acknowledged complexity of the expertise of teacher educators (Cochran-Smith, M. (2003). Learning and unlearning: the education of teacher educators. "Teaching and Teacher Education," 19, 5--28), there is limited research attending to what teacher educators need to know and how they develop this expertise. This self-study draws from…