Section archive - Instruction in Teacher Training

The purpose of this study is to describe and understand prospective science teachers’ knowledge development. This is a longitudinal, multiple case study of four prospective biology teachers’ PCK development during a post-baccalaureate teacher education program. The authors learned that as prospective teachers gained more knowledge and experience, the interaction that develops between teachers’ knowledge of learners and their knowledge of instructional sequences becomes more integrated. In addition, the findings demonstrate a strong relationship exists between science teaching orientations and knowledge of learners and instructional sequences.

The purpose of this article is to describe the results of a teacher–teacher educator collaboration focused on adapting the Center for Research on Education, Diversity, and Excellence (CREDE) standards for Effective Pedagogy for use in early childhood (EC) settings. The CREDE standards are instructional strategies that developed from research on K–12 diverse learners. Participants included 13 preschool teachers and 2 administrators serving 2- to 5-years-olds at a university-based EC center. The authors made changes to criteria for the standards so as to make them more developmentally appropriate, with considerations of language development, a focus on goals that included self management and social skills, and children’s tendencies to be more egocentric and less self-aware. However, the educators generally felt that the CREDE strategies were appropriate for early childhood instruction.

This article addresses the current gap in understanding of what is entailed in the roles of facilitators, and how those roles might vary by context (i.e., face-to-face or asynchronous online). Qualitative analysis revealed that although professional development facilitators attended to similar issues irrespective of the context, the actions they engaged in to attend to these issues varied by context. Further exploration and synthesis of the findings suggests that shifting from traditional face-to-face to online professional development presents several design and instructional tensions that can impact how facilitators carry out their roles to support teacher learning.

This case study was conducted to explore the development of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) through a school practicum course. The case study also examined how observation of number pattern lessons in schools and discussions of these observation contribute to prospective teachers’ PCK. The participants of the study were three female prospective elementary mathematics teachers, who enrolled in a 4-year teacher training programme in a university in I˙zmir, Turkey. With regard to the issue of effectiveness of the activities in the SP course, it can be concluded that observations in real classroom settings and discussions of these observations in the SP course resulted in an improvement of the prospective teachers’ PCK.