This qualitative study examines how authority was negotiated in an undergraduate teacher education course. As the teacher of the course, I involved students in on-going processes of collaborative dialogue and deliberation about issues of importance to those involved through cultivating a classroom community of inquiry. The findings suggest that…

The positioning of eleven teachers towards an innovation was studied in the light of ownership, sense-making and agency. Semi-structured and video-stimulated interviews were used for data collection. The findings show that these three concepts are useful for describing similarities and differences between teachers in terms of their positioning…

This article employs a narrative approach in examining the intertwining of the personal and professional in teacher-student relationships. A total of 141 Finnish people of various ages wrote about their teachers; specifically, the article focuses on memories related to their teachers' personal lives. Such memories illustrate the inevitable…

In this article we employ Sizers' (1999) school- and classroom-based lenses for observation and apply them to the events and interactions that teacher education students see during school-based field experiences. Our data include online reflections and discussions among 33 students enrolled in a teacher education program at a large, public…

Data from a year-long narrative inquiry, involving six American women elementary school teachers, suggests that teachers' conceptions of caring are primarily shaped by their biographies. Despite teachers' claims that they knew their students well, their conceptions of caring were relatively fixed across contexts rather than malleable to differing…

The present study depicts an ecological portrait of the work lives of 16 ELL high school teachers in an urban context in the United States. Results suggest that their work lives take place within a complex school ecology which affects the kinds of activities they engage in and the opportunities they have to support their students. In this context…

Research studies in teacher education have focussed on the outcomes of preparatory programmes. Less attention has been paid to the processes through which professional learning is acquired. This article argues that the study of attitudes and persuasion is very important in teacher education. The elaboration likelihood model (ELM) of persuasion…

This article presents an in-depth case study of a complex community of inquiry. In this community, teachers worked collaboratively to build from situated assessments of students' "learning through reading" to refine and monitor practices designed to enhance student learning in their subject-area classrooms. In this report, we present evidence to…

This study explores the transfer of critical thinking skills and dispositions from pre-service teacher training to classroom practice and student achievement in the cases of two graduates from a course on critical thinking-integrated instruction. Two 7th and two 8th grade classes were randomly assigned as experimental (CT-integrated instruction),…

Rural areas in the alpine regions suffer from dwindling student numbers. Differentiated instruction (DI) could help improve the teaching culture by allowing instructors to better adapt to heterogeneous student groups. At the beginning of a combined research and school improvement project, a survey of 162 teachers and 1180 students was conducted to…

There has been conjecture that completing focused coursework units on classroom management during pre-service teacher preparation might lead to increased feelings of preparedness and confidence. This study reports the preparedness in managing specific problem behaviours, familiarity, and confidence in using management strategies and models of…

Drawing from data on over 1000 prospective teachers in a large urban district including pre and post-student teaching survey data, this study investigates whether lengthening student teaching improves teachers' perceptions of instructional preparedness, efficacy, and career plans. The findings suggest that the duration of student teaching has…

This study sought to understand how teachers' discomforting emotions were manifest in a teacher education setting and how teacher educators might engage with discomfort pedagogically. A qualitative perspective was used with a group of teachers who participated in a series of peace education workshops in Cyprus. All of the workshops were audio- and…

We study the perception of acoustic contamination and its deleterious effects on students preparing to become school teachers and analyse their acoustic habits, with the aim of raising their awareness concerning this problem. We designed a number of activities, applied during a practical lesson, in which students evaluated some of their…

This study employed ethnographic methods to describe and explain changes to beginning science teachers' (n = 6) practices and beliefs during a year long internship. Teaching practices were strongly influenced by the cooperating teachers. Initially, all six interns attempted to re-enact lessons they witnessed their cooperating teachers teach,…