As preservice teachers anticipate student teaching, they often experience excitement, for they realize they will soon be finished with their course work and out in a school all day, every day, for a semester. This excitement may be mixed with anxiety, however, especially if they have just completed an intensive field experience where they have…

Much recent research and funding have focused on building Internet-based repositories that contain collections of high-quality learning resources, often called "learning objects." Yet little is known about how non-specialist users, in particular teachers, find, access, and use digital learning resources. To address this gap, this article…

An overwhelming majority of public school teachers and students believe that racially integrated schooling is important. When asked what effect racially diverse environments have on achievement, half of teachers and three-quarters of students responded that integrated classes have no impact on student learning. This article reports on a poll…

The purpose of this study was to determine degrees of internalization of character traits across two groups (K-12 teachers and Extension staff) with varying years of participation in character education professional and program development activities. An online survey was developed to collect data describing the 109 respondents, the extent of…

The Write for Your Life project allows students to examine life events that affect their health and well-being by creating spaces for them to inquire into the circumstances of their lives. This paper examines Write for Your Life in a Texas middle school with a diverse student population, focusing on three students' writing projects. (SM)

A teacher educator gives a personal account of how her experience in trying to create an egalitarian, communitarian spirit in a graduate education course challenged her feminist notions of power, empowerment, and authority and provided insights into the practical aspects of developing instructor-student collaboration. (IAH)

To examine the hypothesis that alternative routes to teacher certification are more likely than traditional routes to recruit successful urban school teachers, beliefs and practices of 45 secondary English and mathematics novice teachers from both routes were studied. Findings confirm the importance of teacher sensitivity to urban multicultural…

Surveyed middle school principals to examine middle level programmatic characteristics, appropriateness, and current implementation. The study also examined teachers' perceptions of school climate. Program implementation, rather than principal's perceptions, affected school climate. Intramural programs affected school climate, influencing…

Describes a teacher-driven, teacher-defined professional-development process designed to create an immigrant-responsive high school. The project involved English-as-a-Second-Language and content teachers who collaborated to improve students' literacy. They examined other models, their own needs, and student data, then created an accelerated…

To examine how childhood memories and social stereotypes influence the identities and voices of emerging teachers, this study analyzed student teachers' and experienced teachers' drawings of teachers, exploring stereotypes and contradictions in teacher identity and practice and focusing on images of teacher control and nurturing. (SM)

The last 20 years have seen immense gains in computing power available to schools and a wide variety of useful educational software and services. Professional development in the computer area, however, has not resulted in the widespread use of computers in classrooms. This article reports on the use of the Charles Sturt University Remote Telescope…

In this paper we analyze the reasons why the teaching of probability is difficult for mathematics teachers, describe the contents needed in the didactical preparation of teachers to teach probability and analyze some examples of activities to carry out this training. These activities take into account the experience at the University of Granada,…

The United States has engaged in intensive reform efforts in school mathematics education in the decade since the publication of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics' Standards for School Mathematics. This context has generated interest in how to best develop reform-oriented teachers. In this article the authors describe their thinking…

A Pennsylvania district used study groups to help teachers districtwide change their science teaching to standards-based practice of inquiry. Standards-based inquiry instruction requires that teachers have a deeper content knowledge as well as understand the process of inquiry. Making those changes requires support and a collegial environment.

Growing awareness of the importance of teacher quality in mathematics and science has stimulated a variety of national reports and funded initiatives for the purpose of improving teaching and learning in K-12 schools. This study examined the work of awardees in one federally-funded program that included a focus on increasing the number, quality,…