Team Experiences for Science and Social Studies Preservice Teachers

Becoming an effective literacy learner requires a bit of slowing down and appreciating the reflective nature of reading and writing. Literature circles support this instructional direction because they provide opportunities for immersing students in discussions that encourage their personal responses. When students feel their personal responses are nurtured and respected, they develop confidence to grow beyond status-quo thinking and to engage in critical perspectives on meaning making. These reflective practices from personal to critical are important ingredients for effective literacy learning.     

An Approach to Facilitative Teaching through Literature

Dealing with student behavior is often cited as one of the most frustrating aspects of teaching, yet many classroom teachers receive no pre-service training in the basics of behavior management. This article describes the process of implementing a quick behavioral analysis for the purpose of designing a basic intervention. It will provide general education teachers with the means to choose the appropriate interventions when behavioral problems occur in their classrooms.     

Becoming a Reflective Practitioner in the Age of Accountability

Drawing on Zeichner's levels of reflection (Liston and Zeichner 1996 Liston, D. and Zeichner, K. 1996. Reflective teaching: An introduction, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc..  [Google Scholar]), this study uses a fine-grain analysis of portfolio entries to describe the reflective practice of a cohort of preservice secondary education teachers as they student teach, participate in a student teaching seminar, and prepare the Vermont Licensure Portfolio. The paper raises questions about the tension between satisfying state mandates while facilitating critical reflection among preservice teachers and recommends a broader curriculum for teacher education programs to further develop preservice teachers' critical reflection.     

Human Rights,Diversity, and Citizenship Education

The 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a propitious time for educators to examine its implications for educating citizens in multicultural nation states. The author argues that students must experience democratic classrooms and schools that reflect their cultures and identities to internalize human rights values, ideals, and behaviors. Schools in nations around the world make it difficult for students to acquire human rights ideals and behaviors because they pursue assimilationist goals that do not provide students civic equality and recognition. Citizenship education needs to be reformed so that it will help students to internalize human rights ideals and behaviors.     

The Status of Civic Education: A Preservice Program Response

Civic education is an issue of growing and serious concern. There is diminished time for civics, fewer course offerings, and gaps in students’ civic knowledge, skills, and dispositions. The role of teacher education in addressing this problem is one area deserving additional focus. This article describes the project begun by the secondary education faculty at one university to provide teacher education candidates in all content areas with the ability to address civics in meaningful ways.     

Elements of Elaboration in Working Class Writing

In an attempt to define the concepts ‘elaborate’ and ‘restricted code’ by which the language of middle‐class and working‐class people has been said to be distinguishable, the authors conducted an experiment in which a small group of public school sixth‐formers and a small group of young car‐workers of similar age and poor educational record wrote essays on a variety of themes. These were closely analyzed for characteristics of verbal usage. It was found that when essays on technical topics were considered alone, the general linguistic disadvantage of the working‐class groups was wiped out. This suggests that areas of working‐class language may, after all, be ‘elaborate’ and complex rather than ‘restricted’.     

Departmental characteristics and the experience of secondary science teaching

This paper reports findings about the impact of departmental characteristics on secondary science teachers' work. It is drawn from a larger study, which also looked at ideological and material influences on practice. It focuses particularly on those aspects of the departmental environment which teachers themselves referred to frequently when discussing their work. These were: the managerial style of the department; the use made of schemes of work; the emphasis on the science disciplines as compared with 'science'; and the characteristics of pupils. It argues that such departmental characteristics are sometimes symbiotic, and that they are most subtly characterized in mainstream comprehensive schools. It also suggests that, while these influences do not necessarily lead to variation in the broad forms of pedagogy employed, they are perceived by teachers as significantly influencing their professional working environment, and the experience of teaching science.