This study describes the process of forming a school-university partnership to support the professional growth of our pre-service teachers and the in-service teachers at one partner school district and improving middle school students' science learning amid the pandemic.

Educator preparation programs (EPPs) have an opportunity to leverage and strengthen existing district partnerships to lead the way in co-designing teacher Registered Apprenticeship Programs (RAPs), including the launch, operation, and continuous improvement of programs. At the very minimum, EPPs should be at the table as states, districts, and…

Concept mapping is a form of visual organization that can be used to categorize and represent knowledge about a particular subject or related subjects and foster development of these critical skills. A strategy initiated in the late 1990s (Novak, 1998), concept mapping employs concepts and propositions as central elements in structuring knowledge…

This Reflection on Practice is based upon a change in the undergraduate course "Family and Community Relations." Historically, this course has been taught on campus in a lecture format, as well as small and large group activities. However, during a spring semester at a midsized Midwestern University, it was altered to provide more direct…

Teacher shortages in some regions, schools and content areas have caused states to consider fast-tracking teachers into the classroom through avenues that include little or no clinical preparation. Teachers who enter the profession through these pathways are less likely to be prepared, less effective and less likely to remain in the profession…

This article features the creation of a makerspace in the elementary education (ELED) living and learning community (LLC) residence hall. This space was created based on the growing body of literature demonstrating the rise of makerspaces across learning environments as well as the need to expose pre-service teachers (PSTs) to early field…

This article describes four different mechanisms for preparing teacher candidates from a liberal arts institution to teach in project based learning (PBL) classrooms: Observe it, Experience it, Create it, and Become it. For each of the four mechanisms, the authors also provide concrete examples of candidates' PBL experiences and candidates'…

The Education Program Provider Chair's objective was to create a student legacy artifact archival retrieval system. The goal was to have the database system operational by Spring Semester, 2019. The purpose of the new system was to house and index student and pre-service candidate product across performance levels reflective of the program's key…

This is the tenth in a series of articles entitled "The Legacy Project." The Legacy Project focuses on the lives and actions of leaders who have forged our profession into what it is today. Members of the profession owe a debt of gratitude to these leaders. One simple way to demonstrate that gratitude is to recognize these leaders and…

This special report provides context and examples of new legislation impacting preparation, certification, induction, professional development, evaluation and compensation for leaders of schools and districts.

In this paper I describe classroom experiences with pre-service secondary mathematics teachers (PSMTs) investigating and extending patterns embedded in the Pythagorean configuration. This geometric figure is a fruitful source of mathematical tasks to help students, including PSMTs, further develop habits of mind such as visualization,…

The field of teacher preparation is falling short of its most important responsibility: ensuring that the teachers we train are ready to do the job. For more than a decade,TNTP preparation programs produced teachers who were no more or less effective than teachers from any other program-- some were great, some were poor, most were about average.…

This paper describes how the author's students (in-service and pre-service secondary mathematics teachers) enrolled in college geometry courses use the Geometers' Sketchpad (GSP) to gain insight to formulate, confirm, test, and refine conjectures to solve the classical airport problem for triangles. The students are then provided with strategic…

Improving teacher preparation is critical to long-term improvement in teacher quality. More than 200,000 new teachers enter classrooms each year. Increasing student enrollment, the retirement of baby boom generation teachers, and high attrition in their first five years (between 40 and 50 percent of new teachers leave the profession) have…

In the United States, only 2.2 percent of preschool and kindergarten teachers and 5 percent of child care workers are men. Other countries have much higher rates, but the percentage of men in U.S. early education has remained between 2 and 3 percent for the last several years. There are many reasons why so few men become early childhood educators.…