While the importance of good teaching may be intuitively obvious, only over the past decade has education research begun to quantify the high economic stakes around teacher quality. In a world where the goals of national education systems are being transformed, from a focus on the transmission of facts and memorization to a focus on student…

How can teachers learn what they need to know? Every community of educators, regardless of field or specialization, can benefit from being well informed about current research findings. A considerable amount of mathematics education research exists to inform teachers and administrators about teaching and learning mathematics. Research can show…

Featuring an increased emphasis on the way today's changing science and technology is shaping our culture, this Second Edition of "Teaching Science in Elementary and Middle School" provides pre- and in-service teachers with an introduction to basic science concepts and methods of science instruction, as well as practical strategies for the…

Modern primary teachers must adapt literacy programmes and ensure efficient learning for all. They must also support children with language and literacy difficulties, children learning English as an additional language and possibly teach a modern foreign language. To do this effectively, they need to understand the applied linguistics research…

This book tells the stories of teachers who, guided by evolving understandings of constructivist mathematics learning, are meeting the challenge of reconstructing their teaching practice. Although the stories all reflect the experiences of a single in-service program, SummerMath for Teachers, each exemplifies an aspect of the change process…

Teacher centers in England are professional laboratories where inservice teachers (freed from their classrooms by a release program) can share ideas, experiences, and problems with their colleagues and participate in the development and testing of teaching materials. The evolution of the teacher centers, their functioning, their projects, and…

This volume contains papers submitted to the 10th Annual Conference of the Bulgarian Comparative Education Society, held in Kyustendil, Bulgaria, 12-15 June 2012. The overall goal of the 10th BCES conference is to facilitate discussion of different perspectives on international education providing a forum for scientific debate and constructive…

This comprehensive guide discusses how to design staff development in science and math. It is tailored specifically to the needs of individual schools or departments. Vignettes from real schools illustrate concepts within the book. The book provides 15 strategies for professional development and describes each one with its underlying assumptions…

Developed to serve as a comprehensive science methods text for elementary school teachers, this book combines method with content and presents 294 science activities for classroom use. The activities are organized by content areas into 20 chapters and address topics such as sound, weather, plants and animals, oceans, nutrition, and the…

A study was made to find out the average amount of time that teachers in South Bend, Indiana spent designing audiovisual aids and to determine their awareness of the availability of audiovisual production classes. A questionnaire was sent to 30% of the teachers of grades 1-6 asking the amount of time they normally spent producing audiovisual…

Research indicates that exemplary teachers share various characteristics, including a desire for continuous renewal. This book reports on a study to investigate exemplary teachers' personal and professional renewal throughout their career and selected factors that have enabled and/or constrained their renewal. The study involved six participants;…

This book is a collection of 10 papers discussing aspects of teacher development and working with children. "Teachers' Developmental Stages" outlines four developmental stages in teachers' professional growth, and suggests implications for teacher training. "Teachers in Preschools: Problems and Prospects" discusses child-adult…

This book, a research-based text, describes peer observation and assistance (POA), a method designed to isolate behaviors and skills shown to raise student achievement levels and the process by which teachers can help their peers improve performance in these areas. The volume is organized into 10 chapters: (1) Teachers Helping Teachers: The…

Although language specialists do not always agree about the best age at which to introduce English language instruction, policy changes are increasingly mandating earlier introduction of English in foreign language (EFL) settings worldwide. In this volume, language educators and program implementers from various countries describe programs and…

This book reviews both preservice and inservice teacher education in the Republic of China and provides detailed analyses. In the first chapter, an overview of the educational system's structure in modern Taiwan and the United States is presented and comparisons drawn. Features of Chinese educational and intellectual thought and philosophy are…