Section archive - Instruction in Teacher Training

This longitudinal action research study reflects on the ways blogging can further promote culturally relevant discussions explored in face-to-face classes. The authors found that blogs gave participants a platform to begin discussing issues of race and discrimination, which were missed opportunities for the authors to practice cultural competence as educators, and to demonstrate this for their pre-service teachers. At the same time, the blogs gave the pre-service teachers an opportunity to extend their learning, particularly with topics related to culture and race, by making connections between course content and future practice. Some students reflected well in journals, others enjoyed participating in class discussions, and others participated with great fervor on the blogs. The authors discuss themes that were apparent in their analysis of the blogs every semester, in every experimental section of the course that participated.

The goal of this study was to understand the effects of guiding teacher candidates through common video-recording and self-reflection activities during student teaching internships to determine whether such activities improve teacher candidates’ reflective abilities and instructional skills. Thirty-six teacher candidates with similar prior experience were divided into two groups. Both groups self-reported significant improvements in their teaching ability, but only the treatment group demonstrated significant growth in reflective ability and instructional skills over time.

The present study utilized an innovative methodological approach to capture the noticing of preservice teachers using wearable cameras while they were in an introspective position within the elementary classroom context. Findings indicate that differences exist in the ability for preservice teachers to mark noticing as compared to practicing teachers.

This study examined the ways in which elementary mathematics methods course activities, designed as representations, decomposition, and approximations of practice, can be used to develop prospective elementary teachers’ ability to organize a discussion. The authors found that the activities resulted in 21 prospective elementary teachers who in addition, focused their goal on extending student thinking and 12 whose goal also intended to address making connections within and between strategies. Prospective elementary teachers’ justifications for their selecting of student work revealed an interesting result. The majority of prospective elementary teachers had set a goal for the discussion of introducing strategies or having students use strategies.