This article shares innovative practices from a workshop series called Teach and Thrive Learning Circles (TTLCs) offered to pre-service and recent graduates from the Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) program at Colorado College (CC). TTLCs aim to proactively prime pre-service and early career teachers to navigate the pressures that can contribute…

As teacher shortages increase across the United States, educator preparation programs are tasked with preparing a new generation of teachers equipped to succeed in an increasingly challenging landscape. Along with ensuring that candidates develop deep content knowledge and effective pedagogical skills, national accreditation bodies also require…

Abrupt changes to teaching and learning because of the COVID-19 pandemic pushed teacher educators to incorporate new technologies and pedagogies while teaching unfamiliar course designs (i.e., online, blended, flipped, hybrid, HyFlex). This study examined elementary teacher candidates' experiences with tech tools in college courses and the tools…

Through a collaborative self-study of course redesign, we examined the process of restructuring our courses within a sociocultural context of teaching. Specifically, we explored the shifts we made in course transformation as we reconsidered dominant frameworks while reflecting on our practices, an exploration that allowed to us to reconfigure our…

This paper explores how a teacher preparation program in a liberal arts institution built upon the foundations of dialogic, relational pedagogy utilizes strong alumni connections to improve teacher education curriculum and support preservice, inservice, and teacher educators as they work to teach against the grain. Best visualized as an infinity…

A theoretical framework is introduced that articulates the complex nature of what liberal arts teacher educators do, what teacher candidates learn, and the enduring tension inherent in that work. The researcher surveyed liberal arts teacher educators (n = 64) regarding beliefs about seven enduring tensions in education-content…

The edTPA Teacher Performance Assessment was recently implemented at a regional public university to replace the previous paper-and-pencil evaluation of candidates' teaching effectiveness. To determine the teacher educators' professional beliefs toward using the edTPA as an assessment of readiness to teach, semi-structured interviews were…

This paper describes several innovations to an early field experience emerging from a community, school, and university partnership focused on a middle school serving diverse students from low-income neighborhoods. With the primary goal of utilizing teaching candidates to provide direct academic, social, and instructional support to the middle…

This article describes an alternative venue clinical experience that provides advanced literacy specialist candidates and preservice teacher candidates at a small liberal arts university context for advancing their roles and understanding of effective teaching. The article situates our conceptual and pedagogical understandings of teaching and…

The author reflects on challenges faced by teacher educators when Kentucky's Educational Professional Standards Board mandated a new Co-Teaching model for all of the state's student teachers in 2013. This article analyzes the overwhelmingly positive responses of cooperating teachers and the experiences of teacher candidates (student teachers) with…

The needs of urban schools are the focus of educators. Of primary concern is the lack of qualified teachers who are prepared to meet the needs of learners in U.S. classrooms. One factor of policymakers' concern is the mismatch between the experiences and backgrounds of many teachers versus those of students they will teach. Preservice teachers…

It is widely recognized by state and national teacher accrediting agencies that there is the need for preservice teachers to have dynamic experiences in working with diverse student populations (i.e., English Language Learners, varying socioeconomic statuses, exceptionalities, different family structures) in order to appropriately address the…

As pedagogy experts, teacher educators should lead the charge for improved teaching and learning, but are under-utilized pedagogy resources in liberal arts universities. In this paper, the collaborators, one a teacher education assistant professor and the other an associate professor of art history, identify critical friendship group approaches…

Religious, moral and/or ethical beliefs often drive the mission of independent colleges, and independent colleges educate students from racial and ethnic minorities almost the same as at four-year state institutions. The proportion of low- and middle-income students at private colleges and universities is almost the same as at four-year state…

A study group from the Quality Teacher Network in Reading (QTN/R) reviewed the achievement gap data between Black and White fourth-grade readers in Minnesota. From the results of the review, the study group developed a professional development series. The investigation helped the study group determine from a professional development standpoint how…