Section archive - Instruction in Teacher Training

This article reviews the corpus of research on feedback, with a focus on formative feedback—defined as information communicated to the learner that is intended to modify his or her thinking or behavior to improve learning. According to researchers, formative feedback should be nonevaluative, supportive, timely, and specific.

A study was conducted to understand how preservice teachers experience a videotaping and analysis of their instruction. The study examined the difficulties in transition from student subjectivity to teacher subjectivity within university-based teacher education.

The article explores changes in teachers' thinking and learning, following their participation in a video club. The study first investigated the changes in the teachers' talk during video segments, and then identified three paths of noticing the students' mathematical thinking: direct, cyclical and incremental. Finally, the study noted how the video club context influenced the teachers' learning.

In her book, On Teaching and Learning: Putting the Principles and Practices of Dialogue Education into Action, Jane Vella describes some of the things she learned that were important to teaching: “how to organize a lesson, how to structure a lesson plan and build a curriculum” (p. xviii). This approach is reflected in Paulo Freire’s words: “We teach the way we were taught” (p. xxi). But we are in the twenty-first century, and, with modern technology in which students click or zap and get wherever they want at high speed, this kind of teaching is not appealing anymore.