This commentary argues that the sociocultural learning theory underpinning practice-centered teacher preparation programs necessitates social foundations coursework. Thus, the issue of social foundations in practice-centered programs is not if social foundations is necessary; rather, the issue is what foundations will look like in our teacher preparation programs.
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Have the tragic events in Newtown, CT changed our priorities for schools?
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Alternative teacher certification programs have surfaced as a popular remedy to alleviate anxieties about the quality of teachers in hard-to-staff schools and in such high needs areas as mathematics. Despite the growth in the number and influence of alternative route programs their particulars remain largely unexamined. This study addresses this situation by investigating the preparation of mathematics teachers in the New York City Teaching Fellows (NYCTF) program, an alternative route program of national prominence. It draws on analyses of survey, interview, policy, and program data to examine the preparation of mathematics candidates in NYCTF program and the state and district policies that shaped it. We find that these policies, NYCTF preparation, and program participants tend to endorse “the new professionalism” (Zeichner, 2010), a perspective that views teaching as technical and teacher preparation as being primarily concerned with enabling new teachers to successfully manage classrooms and implement the scripted plans of others.
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Many attempts to reform teaching fail to be enacted in most classrooms. The purpose of this paper is to present a bridging methodology for connecting pedagogical innovations to the practical demands of teaching.
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Statewide longitudinal databases are becoming sources for decision-making by policymakers, administrators, and teachers. These databases are tracking children and teachers, reducing the performance of children and the work of teachers to numbers. We call for an end to the obsession with the quantitative and hope for a rethinking of assessment and teaching practices that trust children and teachers as capable and critical to learning, teaching, and assessment.
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This article proposes explicitly braiding equity and technology scholarship to address a central challenge for education research today: figuring out how and when low-cost and commonplace technologies, in combination with face-to-face talk and paper, can support necessary communications between the range of supporters who share students, schools, a district and a diverse community. The article calls such work improving the communication infrastructure of public education, and proposes that researchers join educators, youth and families in the design task.
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This study uses an experimental design to determine that early college high schools have a positive impact on indicators and facilitators of engagement. The report uses qualitative data to suggest that these schools create an environment that essentially requires students’ active participation in school.
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In this article, we explore the legacy of the National Writing Project, a thirty-seven-year-old professional development network dedicated to improving the teaching of writing, focusing on the broader orientations (Friedrichsen, VanDriel, & Abell, 2011) developed within that network rather than solely on the transmission of specific teaching strategies.
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Teacher education faculty face increasing pressure to simultaneously strengthen and reform teacher education programs while maintaining research productivity. The demands placed on teacher education programs to increase relevancy by strengthening clinical components of teacher preparation has once again reached the fore. The energy for this reform often rests on the shoulders of tenure earning faculty who have developed as engaged scholars during their doctoral preparation and wish to continue this work as they enter the professoriate. This qualitative study describes six challenges faced by new faculty who assume leadership in clinically rich teacher education reform and identifies faculty identity and micropolitical concerns as central to navigating challenges. A most important implication drawn from this study is that doctoral programs are now preparing new faculty who embrace clinically rich teacher preparation but do not receive adequate support as they enter academia. In the end, our newest faculty are quickly socialized away from clinical aspects of teacher education. After reviewing each of these persisting challenges, we discuss two assertions that must be resolved by university, college, and department leadership as well as tenured colleagues if we wish to support new faculty involvement in developing clinically rich teacher education reform.
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