Search results for: USA

This article describes a case study about how teacher education might better prepare rural teacher candidates for rural schools. The author concludes that participants emphasized the importance of personal relationships, relationships both within the school and the relationship between the school and community. However, it was found that the participants in this study also perceived school and community as a site of ambiguity and ambivalence, a site of strategy, negotiation, and resistance. The authors suggests that teacher candidates should be prepared to learn about rural communities in ways that do not reinstate deficit perspectives and increase the likelihood that they will choose rural teaching appointments.

This article aims to examine the field of teacher preparation in the current era of accountability and testing. The authors claim that policymakers try finding ways to improve teacher preparation, hence they use assessment tests. This article shows an evidence that teacher preparation is in the forefront in its use of outcome measures to gauge the effectiveness of its work. The authors suggest that nuanced use of these assessment measures, in ways that don’t over assume their validity, should be the approach taken as this innovation evolves.

This study aimed to explore the experiences of administrative interns and mentors at the completion of their experience. The authors were interested to examine the interns' types of activities, and interactions with mentors with a particular focus on the degree to which these were passive or active. The authors argue that the findings reveal that ongoing dialogue is critical among the research team, but also among stakeholders such as the intern, site-based mentor, university supervisor, and instructors about what constitutes active involvement and what specific activities and experiences will most effectively prepare aspiring leaders for contemporary school leadership positions. The authors conclude that many interns reported a sense of completing the internship with compliance and were focused on simply completing time logs and getting in the hours. Hence, they suggest that teacher education programs must move internships from compliance-based activities to meaningful and authentic learning experiences.

This study aimed to investigate teacher educators’ in-action mental model (IAMM) regarding student teachers’ minds and learning. The authors investigated the same teacher educators in two teaching contexts: (1) teaching an academic course about pedagogy in college; and (2) in the post-lesson feedback sessions that took place while they were supervising student teachers in elementary schools. The authors found that when the teacher educators taught an academic course, they had the same IAMM of the mind and learning as teachers who teach children in elementary and high school. The authors argue that this finding indicates the generality of the IAMM. The authors also found that the general IAMM has limitations. The findings in this study point to the contextual nature of IAMM.