This article traces the political, historical, and ideological roots of the Relay Graduate School of Education. Relay represents a more current iteration of alternative teacher preparation programs and emerged from the earlier partnerships between education schools and independent alternative programs (Mungal, 2012). These programs have become…

The purpose of this article is to describe a collaborative effort among five teacher preparation programs to create a conceptual tool designed to put clinical experiences at the center of our programs. The authors refer to the resulting product as a clinical curriculum. The clinical curriculum describes a developmental sequence of clinical…

In an era of standardized exams to support No Child Left Behind, the influence a teacher candidate has on a P-12 classroom can greatly impact the academic achievement of students. The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Educators (NCATE) Blue Ribbon Panel Report (2010) suggested that teacher preparation programs and school districts need…

In this article, the authors describe how one group of California teacher educators has responded to the call for high school dropout rates with new thinking and action in regard to making teacher preparation a key strategy for reducing the dropout rates, raising student academic achievement, and eliminating the pervasive inequities in learning…

Ultimately, the national goals of improving learning outcomes for all students and reducing, if not eliminating, the achievement gap require a teaching corps that brings knowledge and professional competencies to have positive impacts on diverse learners in diverse settings (Gándara & Maxwell-Jolly, 2006). As central actors in schools,…

The literature is sated with calls for more and better communication between home and school. Teachers believe that parents should be more involved, but seem at a loss as to how to make that happen, and parents often feel disconnected to their child's teacher and the school. Few would argue that it is the responsibility of classroom teachers to…

The combination of federal exigency for Highly Qualified Teachers in every classroom (No Child Left Behind, 2001) and focus on teacher accountability has created a plethora of routes to teacher certification and continuing education. This urgent situation has placed a burden on schools of education to approach teacher education in creative and…

Evidence suggests that student teaching is one of the most influential components of a teacher education program, and the cooperating teacher exerts the greatest influence on a student teacher. Therefore, it is vital to understand how the role of experienced teachers is affected by the implementation of a professional development school (PDS) as…