Section archive - Instruction in Teacher Training

The current study examined the perspective of a cohort of 60 Chinese EFL pre-service teachers with regards to microteaching. The results show that microteaching was a useful tool for the pre-service teachers’ professional development; however, the experience was not without flaws. The most commonly perceived deficiency was artificiality, which appeared to have to some extent limited the student teachers’ development of real-life classroom teaching competence.

In this article, the author examines a preservice teacher’s use of the Inquiry-Application Instructional Model (I-AIM) to plan and enact an instructional sequence about photosynthesis. The author concludes that Leslie’s case illustrates some of the mediators that may shape preservice teachers’ uses of an instructional model, including their approach to teaching science, the curriculum materials they have available, and the meanings they make of the key constructs underlying the model.

In this study, the authors examined whether a classroom intervention would improve the ability of prospective elementary teachers to identify and evaluate evidence of student understanding of a mathematical lesson. The participants in this study were 192 prospective elementary teachers who enrolled in the first mathematics content course at a Mid-Atlantic University. The prospective teachers completed pre- and posttests individually outside of regular class times, and the interventions were implemented by each of six course instructors during regular course meetings. The results indicate that the intervention was successful in improving at least some of PTs’ analysis skills.

In this article, the authors were interested to explore how teachers can effectively facilitate classroom discussions in the ways that elicit negotiation of meaning and maximize the potential of mathematical inquiry activities. In the neriage stage, Japanese teachers encourage students to listen to other students’ ideas carefully and consider the strengths and weaknesses of different problem-solving strategies. Then the teachers facilitate discussions to co-determine which strategy is the most reasonable and efficient one. This article introduces a video-based lesson study that explored how a group of U.S. teachers could successfully implement consensus building discussions (or neriage) in their mathematics classrooms.