In education, the Rounds model provides opportunities for engaging educators as communities of learners who examine instructional issues for purposes of understanding and improving them. Over the past 10 years, Rounds have been implemented in school-based experiences in teacher preparation programs across the nation. Yet despite recent interest,…

Methods for teaching early childhood mathematics and science are often addressed in a single, dual-content course. Approaches to teaching this type of course include integrating the content and the pedagogy of both subjects, or keeping the subject areas distinct. In this article, the authors discuss and illustrate their approach to such a combined…

Childhood obesity and the decline of physical activity are real concerns for physical educators. Physical educators are in a key position to positively affect physical activity among youth at risk for obesity; however, the presence of an anti-fat bias may inhibit their ability to effectively do so. By addressing anti-fat bias, not only in physical…

There are international calls for teacher preparation programs to increase the quantity and quality of field experiences. The belief is that spending additional time in the field being mentored by inservice teachers will develop high-quality preservice teachers. However, the figured worlds of teacher education and the knowledge base of inservice…

Drawing upon discursive psychology as a theoretical and methodological framework, the author analyzes a set of five postobservation debrief conversations between novice teachers and their mentors. The author presents analysis and findings by highlighting how the interpretative repertoires of the rubric and protocol documents may be used to shape…

The edTPA, a performance assessment designed to generate reliable and valid measures of teaching practice, increasingly is used as a gatekeeping mechanism for beginning teacher licensure in various states, including New York, Washington State, Wisconsin, and Georgia. One of the edTPA's key components is the demonstration of instructional practice…

Drawing on situated learning and communities of practice, this teacher-research study examined multiple stakeholders' perspectives about the purpose, design, and inaugural implementation of the edTPA, a teacher performance assessment mandated for state certification. Participants included teacher candidates, mentor teachers, a field placement…

The public education system in the United States continues to struggle in educating children of diverse backgrounds. Many have addressed this issue by documenting how certain practices teach children particular types of knowledge and skills. This developmental focus on what should be happening to children of diverse backgrounds tends to ignore the…

This article presents a research project that challenges the skills-based approach to classroom management in teacher education, particularly in the domain of responding to student misbehaviors. In 90-minute narrative-based interviews, 16 first-year Chicago Public School (CPS) teachers were prompted for narratives of their experiences responding…

The faculty research residency (FRR) model was launched in 2010, with the goal of transforming coursework to improve the preparation of teachers for high-need schools. The FRR model leveraged school-university partnerships and situated university faculty in high-need schools to conduct research related to the university courses they taught. This…

The authors, a team of literacy teacher educators who are focused on extending our own understandings of preservice teacher (PST) learning, conducted a cross-case analysis of how PSTs learned to teach literacy in three concurrent practicum experiences. We draw on Grossman's framework of representations, decompositions, and approximations to…

Teacher inquiry holds promise in teacher education, but only if student teachers take up inquiry practices as they leave preservice and transition to teaching. As they learn to conduct inquiry during preservice, student teachers may begin to internalize dispositions that promote ongoing inquiry experiences. Through analysis of questionnaires…

This qualitative case study explored preservice teachers' (PSTs) beliefs about disciplinary literacy as they engaged in a blog project with middle-school students to discuss historical texts. Twenty-eight PSTs, enrolled in a semester-long social studies methods course and participating in the blog project as a course assignment, constituted the…

Despite widespread discourse about the need for teachers to utilize education research, little is known about how teachers learn to engage in this practice. How do preservice teachers understand the use of research to inform their teaching? Set within the context of a mathematics methods course, this study provides a detailed analysis of the…

This qualitative case study explored teaching approaches designed to develop critically reflective thinking (CRT) for preservice teachers in an urban, secondary teacher preparation program. Despite concerted use of CRT within course lessons, online discussions, and case studies, participants demonstrated varying degrees in their understanding of…