Section archive - Instruction in Teacher Training

This paper presents a study of early childhood and elementary preservice teachers’ perspectives on the peer and faculty related factors that contribute to the success (and lack of success) of their partnerships. It concludes with effective strategies for teacher educators to consider in creating and supporting field-based peer partnerships.

This article aims to use collaborative self-study to analyze and describe the authors' experiences of teaching about teaching in a digital, online environment. The findings indicate that the perceived disembodiment of teaching and learning online affected how the authors fostered relationships with students and responded to problems of practice.

This study explores questions of how educators learned about mathematics through lesson study but also how they were socialized into lesson study (LS) as a collaborative, routine practice. Specifically, the author compared the participation of educators who were new to lesson study (“LS novices”) with lesson study with those who had more experience with the practice (“LS experienced practitioners”). The author discovered a few key differences illustrate possible elements in the developmental progression of lesson study. Teachers who are newer to lesson study tend to focus on learning how to teach through problem solving, and seeing the collaborative work as a way to combine efforts to teach a better lesson. LS experienced practitioners, in contrast, were comfortable with the routine and can see their role as developing problems that elicit student thinking.

This study examined how prospective teachers used physics content knowledge when analyzing the talk of elementary children during special activities in an undergraduate physics content course designed for prospective teachers. The findings reveal that prospective elementary teachers in an undergraduate physics course (1) reflected on their own learning and (2) identified and restated the science ideas in the talk of children in using scientific discourse while analyzing videos of elementary school children talking about science.