Feedback and teaching reflection: study with participants in initial teacher training

The article reports on how research into professional development profiling has been implemented within undergraduate secondary initial teacher education programmes in a large United Kingdom university. At the time of planning (1995) of a new secondary teacher education programme there, there was an expectation from the University that recommendations for the inclusion of professional development profiling from the Enterprise Initiative for Higher Education should feature in all new courses. Several curriculum areas in the University, including initial teacher education, took up this opportunity and were able to access some funding for development costs. The subsequent research reported upon in this article covers the first 3 years of implementing the professional development profile and relates this process to the experience of using profiles in the USA, other United Kingdom teacher education organisations and the literature of professional development. Data were obtained over a 4-year period (1995–98) by interviews with students and school mentors, from an analysis of the contents of the portfolios and by questionnaire. This period of time was one of considerable change, in that the Government established the Teacher Training Agency and required providers to move to a competency-based model, which required conformity or a risk of cuts in the funding of student places. The main findings were that constructing a professional development profile for the duration of an undergraduate course raised many problematic issues about the nature of teaching as a profession, thereby ensuring that continued reflection on this matter and the issues involved would remain on the agenda. In the process it stimulated much debate between tutors, teachers with responsibility for students in schools and the students themselves, at a time when many concerned in the process had some major reservations about the new initiatives imposed by the Government.

This study explores the perceptions and practices of multicultural education among Ethiopian secondary teacher education program officials, teacher educators and prospective teachers. To that end, data were collected from secondary teacher education program officials, teacher educators and student teachers using questionnaire and interview. The data were analyzed by employing mixed methodologies. The study revealed that while Ethiopian secondary teacher education program officials and teacher educators have awareness about multicultural education, the prospective teachers’ awareness was found to be very low. Furthermore, there are inadequate practices of multicultural education in the secondary teacher education institutions. Suggestions which may enhance the implementation of multicultural education in the secondary teacher education program of the country and beyond are discussed in the article.

I am compelled to write this thesis, called by a professional and moral obligation. This thesis is an act of love bearing witness to dominance in Australian schools where dominance is embedded and normalised in epistemologies of racism and neoliberalism. This thesis emerges from my doctoral study which began with noticing two critical incidents in my teaching career. Working autoethnographically, both critical incidents expose whiteness in my own experiences in Australian schools and neoliberalism’s stifling impact on my agency as a progressive teacher. This thesis reports on research that is underpinned by Paulo Freire’s conscientization and is performative and critical autoethnographic research. Through conscientization I recognise my integrated duality of teacher-as-researcher; I am object and subject. As teacher I submit myself to questioning, as researcher I notice and take cognizance of things, and as both teacher and researcher I intervene in praxis. I apply conscientization and aim to decolonise praxis in the field of education, enliven radical hope, and engage in acts of self, other and world transformation. Whiteness is revealed as I ask questions about my personal identity, my identity formation, and the impact of my identity on my praxis. Working outward from my praxis, I ask questions about school education in Australia that make visible the forces of dominant whiteness and neoliberalism on school pedagogy, curriculum, initial teacher education and teacher professional development. This thesis identifies an array of models of reflective practice in the field of education and I categorise these models as technical reflection, practical reflection, or critical reflection. I suggest teacher employers prefer technical models of reflection which align with purpose and procedures of neoliberalism and which typically strip both teacher voice and contextual details from data sets. Such models of reflective practice stifle the qualities of the progressive teacher that Freire lists as, inter alia, courage, humility, tolerance, and engaging in performances of armed love. I suggest technical models of reflective practice would have failed to bear witness to dominance in Australian schools, and that my doctoral research required the development of a model of critical reflective practice. This thesis reports on the model of critical reflective practice I developed which is underpinned by the purpose and methods of Freire’s conscientization, Tricia Kress’ critical praxis research, and Gillie Bolton’s through-the-mirror-writing. My application of five stages of through-the-mirror-writing generates mystories in a process involving emic and etic work. Throughout my study I was emic as I submitted myself to questioning and worked with insider knowledge of my experiences to develop performative representations of these experiences. I was etic as I returned to the performative representations, further questioning, and analysing them to develop critical understandings of dominance and resistance in schools. I performatively represent my experiences in Australian schools through mystories. The mystories crystallize deep and complex understandings of dominance and resistance. These understandings function like dendritic crystals, branching from the two critical incidents that I noticed in my teaching career and, like the process of conscientization, will contribute to a lifelong odyssey of learning. Taken singularly or as a series of texts, each mystory of dendritic crystal constructs knowledge in a non-linear, iterative, and improvisational process by rubbing against/with/through each other. This process attracts and repels, yields, and resists knowledge claims through performative representations of multiple texts written in multiple genres.

Teacher education has become the subject of increasing scrutiny and general reviews often recommend change. This article reports the author's perceptions of and reflection on an evolving secondary teacher education programme. It outlines the reasons for change, some difficulties encountered and some steps taken to address these. The case to change the secondary teacher education programme considers how general criticisms of teacher education are influencing an ostensibly successful programme. Despite its success and attractiveness, the programme appeared to have a key problem: a perceived lack of relevance according to beginning teachers, though not to current teacher education students. Specific modifications to the programme are presented which set out, primarily, to increase the relevance of the teacher education experience. The reflection on the programme change, as it occurred, reports how university culture and development of partnership between school and university present a challenge to the proposed development of the teacher education course.

Developing a pedagogy of teacher education is an enduring concern for teacher educators. Drawing on data from a small study on teacher educators teaching in a secondary teacher education programme in India, this article examines their pedagogic practices. This is a qualitative study that sought to capture the narrations of 30 teacher educators teaching in diverse teacher education classrooms. The article frames the pedagogy of teacher education as four ‘problems’: as a curriculum problem; as a relational problem; as a professional knowledge base problem; and as a learning problem. Such a formulation highlights the challenges faced by the teacher educators, including the need for teacher educators to scrutinize their own practices. Implications for developing a framework on ‘what should teacher educators know and do in the context of India’ are considered in order to guide teacher educator preparation and their continuous development.

While environmental education has been present in the field of education for decades now, only recently our particular subject areas of science and geography have started to pay more critical attention to specific concerns surrounding the intersection of environmental issues and social justice (also known as environmental justice) within the context of formal secondary education, including in secondary teacher education programmes. Drawing on scholarship, policy landscapes and socio-environmental concerns from both the global South and the global North, and on a methodological approach based on transnational collective reflection and collaborative-dialogic writing, in this article we delve into our different cultural, geographical and disciplinary contexts, views and experiences as four teacher educators from Brazil and England who have been working at this intersection between environmental justice and Science and Geography teacher education programmes for secondary formal education. Here we will argue that environmental justice needs to have a central role in such teacher education programmes if we aim to support young people and their teachers in navigating the spatially diverse and unequal impacts of environmental emergencies in global North and South communities. We also consider future directions for research and collaboration across national and disciplinary boundaries within the landscape of environmental education for environmental justice, reflecting on the future of teacher education across the global North and the global South when facing more frequent and severe environmental emergencies.

ABSTRACTThis article describes how a secondary teacher education program at a midsized university made the turn toward a practice-based program in teacher education. The authors argue that efforts to recenter the program around practices have not only improved opportunities for novice teachers, but also have provided teacher educators a programmatic framework for making substantive progress toward three attributes of quality teacher education: increased collaboration between teacher educators, greater coherence between courses and experiences, and improved legitimacy of university-based teacher education. The authors detail specific components of this program reform and explain how such efforts have resulted in valuable gains across each attribute. The authors also explain how they implemented these programmatic changes largely within existing course and field-experience structures, and without substantive new infusions of personnel or funding.

This study builds on a previous report of preservice STEM teacher development that examined how their perceptions of professional self-efficacy changed over the course of enrollment in the Master of Arts in Teaching in Secondary (MAT) Education Program. This study examined themes of transition from pre-professional to professional status for six preservice teachers enrolled in a Master of Arts in Teaching in Secondary Education Program in 2022-23. A mixed methods research design utilized qualitative methods for deriving data from pre and post essays and quantitative methods for describing the reliability and relationships among standardized measures of professional self-efficacy. Results indicated a generalized level of confidence for interns in the total experience of teaching, ability to manage a classroom, deriving personal goals, maintaining confidence in sustaining self and students’ engagement in their classrooms, and professional knowledge of instruction.

Masters degree curricula for elementary and secondary teacher education programs have been infrequent topics of educational researchers and writers. In this article the adoption of a definition of education is suggested that might be useful in guiding future M.A. curriculum research and development. Several broad areas of teacher education study are proposed from which components of degree curricula might be drawn. The teaching experience of potential M.A. program students is suggested as a degree admissions factor that might be used to differentiate M.A. curricula for different categories of students. A number of proposals are outlined that could guide the organization and sequencing of curricular events for a two year, cohort-based, experiential oriented M.A. curriculum. The focus of the proposed curriculum is on improving the ability of the degree candidate to function as a teacher within the classroom and as an empowered leader within the school.

This study examines current trends in multicultural teacher education in Korea and offers directions for improvement. Curricula of pre-service teacher education and professional development programs for multicultural education are analyzed. The results of this study are as follows: first, pre-service elementary teacher education programs mostly offer lower-level survey courses for freshmen and sophomores as electives and as part of general education courses; second, most of the courses in the secondary teacher education programs are introductory courses similar to those found in elementary teacher education; third, professional development programs focus on the children from multicultural families. Suggestions offered for the future direction of multicultural teacher education include offering more advanced courses as requirement in pre-service education focusing on majority group students in terms of multicultural citizenship education.

We report research and development work with STEP (Secondary Teacher Education Project) Web, an innovative and complex web site designed to support learning through facilitated video case discussions in secondary teacher education programs. The goal of instruction with STEP is to help pre-service teachers acquire useful scientific knowledge about cognitive psychology and other learning sciences. STEP Web is currently being used and evaluated in connection with psychological foundations courses taught for teacher education majors at UW-Madison and Rutgers University. We report user preference data on web site design and related instructional formats, and provide evidence that the STEP approach can produce transfer and flexible use of course concepts.

We report research and development work with STEP (Secondary Teacher Education Project) Web, an innovative and complex web site designed to support learning through facilitated video case discussions in secondary teacher education programs. The goal of instruction with STEP is to help pre-service teachers acquire useful scientific knowledge about cognitive psychology and other learning sciences. STEP Web is currently being used and evaluated in connection with psychological foundations courses taught for teacher education majors at UW-Madison and Rutgers University. We report user preference data on web site design and related instructional formats, and provide evidence that the STEP approach can produce transfer and flexible use of course concepts.

All students have the right to quality educational experiences that is inclusive. For this to become a reality, there is a need to have teachers who respect and appreciate diversity and are capable creating inclusive educational experiences that support diverse students learning need. This chapter attempts to look at how secondary teacher education programs can prepare preservice teachers who understand diversity and are capable of integrating inclusive education strategies in their teaching. It examines how inclusive education can become an integral part of the processes and procedure involved in secondary teacher education programs.

All students have the right to quality educational experiences that is inclusive. For this to become a reality, there is a need to have teachers who respect and appreciate diversity and are capable creating inclusive educational experiences that support diverse students learning need. This chapter attempts to look at how secondary teacher education programs can prepare preservice teachers who understand diversity and are capable of integrating inclusive education strategies in their teaching. It examines how inclusive education can become an integral part of the processes and procedure involved in secondary teacher education programs.

This article examines the experiences of a group of nine community-based mentors of teacher candidates who partnered for several years through a local, community-based organization with the graduate elementary and secondary teacher education programs at a research university in the Pacific Northwest. Following a brief discussion of the history of partnerships between teacher education programs and local communities, we report the findings of a study of the perspectives of these community mentors on their work with teacher candidates and university teacher educators.