Sexuality,schooling, and teacher identity formation: A critical pedagogy for teacher education

Offering an alternative to normative teacher education that excludes meaningful sexuality and gender education from its curriculum, this article presents a critical teacher education multicultural curriculum based in the United States that included an autoethnographic narrative assignment as reflective space for teacher candidates to consider their identities as shaped by lived experiences with gender and sexuality. Using a categorical analysis of a cohort of 38 teacher candidate autoethnographies, discussed are insights revealed about their lived histories. Patterns included gender identification, heteronormativity, patriarchy, sex education, schooling experiences, teacher complicity, and teacher identity effects and sense of agency along with implications for educating future teachers.     

Teacher efficacy and teacher competency ratings

This cross-validation study investigated the relationships among teacher sense of efficacy, superintendents' ratings of teacher competency, and selected demographic and background variables. One hundred fifty-five teachers from 15 districts in a Southeastern state participated in the study. Multiple regression indicated variables significantly related to efficacy scores were: competency rating by superintendent, birth order, and whether the teacher would again choose teaching as a career. Using discriminant analysis, superior and average competency teachers could be differentiated from low competency teachers on the basis of four significant variables, one of which was efficacy scores. This analysis placed 80.52% of the teachers in the appropriate group, and accounted for 29% of the variance in groups. Analyses also indicated some support for the consistency of superintendents' ratings of teachers across districts.     

Instructional television and student attitudes toward teacher,course, and medium

Summary and conclusions Semantic Differential data were obtained from 234 ninth graders who had just completed an algebra course which included a televised lecture presenting a new approach to the subject matter, and from 269 pupils who had had algebra taught in the usual way.     

Student teacher letters of reference: A critical analysis

Letters of reference are commonly used in acquiring a job in education. Despite serious issues of validity and reliability in writing and evaluating letters, there is a dearth of research that systematically examines the evaluation process and defines the constructs that define high quality letters. The current study used NVivo to examine 160 letters of reference to determine component constructs and relate these components to overall letter quality. Results suggest that testimonials are most predictive of overall letter quality. Implications and limitations of this study are also discussed.     

Computer conferencing,critical reflection,and teacher development

The development of critical reflection in teachers is an issue of concern to teacher educators. Finding ways to foster that development becomes increasingly important as the schools continue to change with unprecedented rapidity. This paper reports the results of study that looked at whether computer conferencing could be used to help students of teaching become more aware of taken-for-granted assumptions — a crucial aspect of critical reflection. The following two questions guided our study. First, do conferencing activities generate opportunities for the identification and discussion of taken-for-granted assumptions and, if so, what types of assumptions? Second, do conferencing activities provide insight into the relationship between student development and the ability to identify and clarify taken-for-granted assumptions?     

Theories for teacher selection: Objective, subjective, and critical contact

Decisions made by applicants for teaching positions have generally been ignored by most teacher selection research. The purpose of this study is to obtain additional information about the teacher as a decision-maker. Contents of recruitment interviews were varied via video tape to reflect the salient factors associated with the objective, subjective, and critical contact theories. The reactions of teachers to these manipulations were assessed in a laboratory study. Teachers were more positive when the recruitment interview stressed nonpecuniary aspects of the work environment (subjective theory) than when the recruitment interview stressed either economic incentives offered by a local school district (objective theory) or specific information about the work itself (critical contact theory).     

A review of critical literacies in preservice teacher education: pedagogies,shifts, and barriers

In literacy teacher education, a small but important group of studies have addressed how teachers can be prepared for enacting critical literacies pedagogies in K-12 classrooms. In this review, we argue that, more than ever, these efforts have a place in the field of teacher preparation. After providing a brief review of how critical literacies are conceptualized in the field, we review the approaches of teacher educators across the reviewed work. We identify approaches in coursework, including text-based and non text-based approaches as well as approaches to preparing teachers through experiences with students. We also identify the barriers that teacher educators face when preparing teachers for critical literacies pedagogy, and finally, provide recommendations for future studies.     

Transformational practice: critical teacher research in pre-service teacher education

This article traces the experiences of three pre-service teachers as they engaged in teacher research as part of their teacher education program and considers how teacher research might disrupt dominant paradigms that aim to de-contextualize teaching and offer one-size-fits-all solutions to address inequities. In particular, the article examines: the role of the teacher’s personal and academic history in the design of their teacher research projects; how their research worked to disrupt and complicate classroom cultures and practices; and the ways in which the pre-service teachers interpreted their research in light of new contexts during their first year of teaching. This work has critical implications in an era when teacher education programs are under attack, including: the value of drawing on pre-service teachers' lived experiences as an entry point into inquiry; creating highly localized inquiries; and positioning novice teachers as knowledgeable practitioners who are able to share research with colleagues.     

美国基础教育阶段的教材评价——以佛罗里达州为例

为了更好地改进我国的教材评价,本文通过对佛罗里达州教材评价的介绍和分析,提出了教材评价在过程、评价指标体系和评价人员任用方面应该注意的问题。     

Integrating Information Technology: competency recommendations by teachers for teacher training

ABSTRACT

A challenge for teacher training education lies in keeping courses up to date. This paper provides a view of the top ten IT competencies required of pre‐service teachers, as perceived by practising teachers in USA schools. This paper reports findings from 215 teachers in Colorado public schools. A complimentary view of reasons that teachers have for not using new media in instruction indicates that convenient access to hardware and software are significant issues and recommends re‐examination of traditional teacher training and practise.     

Selection and rejection in teacher education: qualities of character crucial in selecting and developing teacher education students

The focus of recent Australian political and media reports on the selection of candidates for initial teacher education programs has focused on the Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR) score as one of the key indicators of worth. This narrative study conducted in an Australian regional university focuses on the life stories of twelve pre-service teachers (PSTs) who received lower ATAR scores and who may well have been rejected by other universities. The PSTs’ narratives highlight that low achievement levels in the final years of schooling did not prevent them from being able to succeed in teacher education programs. We argue that high stakes tests as gatekeeping devices are simplistic measures that fail to recognise important qualities of character crucial to effective teaching. We suggest that qualities of character such as these are hard to quantify but are central to both selecting entrants to, and developing PSTs during, their teacher education programs.     

Measuring Chinese teacher professional competence: adapting and validating a German framework in China

ABSTRACT

The study presented in the paper has the following goals. The first is to review and compare teacher competence frameworks developed in Eastern (Chinese) and Western (German) contexts, exemplified for the domain of mathematics. Major similarities of the two contexts could be reconstructed in the conceptualization of teacher competence as a multidimensional construct comprising knowledge, teaching-related skills and beliefs. Distinct differences could be identified as well, with the Chinese frameworks including a wider range of teacher-competence facets and emphasizing more teaching-related competencies than the Western (German) frameworks. The second purpose is to adapt and validate a German framework of the measurement of mathematics teacher competence in a Chinese context. This adaptation and validation uses exemplarily mathematics teacher, in detail follow-up-studies of the international Teacher Education and Development Study: Learning to Teach Mathematics (TEDS-M). With the integration of a qualitative approach (e.g. elemental validity) and a quantitative approach (e.g. construct validity) to validate the framework, the results of both approaches suggest a satisfactory validity for the adaptation. Overall, the results point out that the examined teacher competence framework and its instruments can be used for comparative analyses in Germany and China.