Middle school teacher Michael Yell and education professor Geoffrey Scheurman discuss a decades-long partnership of ongoing professional development opportunities that involve teachers, university faculty, and teacher candidates working together to create personalized, meaningful, and sustained initiatives that enhance the growth and skills of all…

We, four teachers in Ojibwe or majority-Ojibwe schools and three teachers in teacher preparation at a small ecologically focused liberal arts college, tell stories to reorient ourselves, centering place in ways accessible to our emerging practice. In these narratives, anchored in the seasons, we describe our challenges and successes in adapting…

This article presents how over two summers the authors worked with students from Syria, Pakistan, Tanzania, Mexico, Honduras, China, and Vietnam to create their own chalkboard project. They wrote "I am" poems and "I remember" memories. They engaged in the arts, creating their personal comic book heroes and leaving inspired…

The purpose of this paper is to describe a major revision process to the early childhood teacher education program at our 4-year university. We briefly outline the major policy and standards changes that we have witnessed impacting our work as early childhood teacher educators that were, in part, the impetus for our program changes. We describe…

Providing consistent, excellent teaching for each student in every classroom depends on whether states and districts commit to transforming teaching into a profession that reliably builds and grows teacher expertise over the career continuum. To address the problem of inequitable access to effective teachers, the U.S. Department of Education asked…

This article introduces the social studies field to Dorothy Heatchote's Mantle of Expert (MOE). MOE is a dramatic inquiry approach used in several subject areas and can work at all levels in the social studies curriculum. The authors go into the development of using this approach in an elementary and middle teacher education program. After sharing…

I am a public elementary teacher currently serving as a school-based supervisor for a Professional Development School (PDS) undergraduate elementary-teacher-education program in Madison, Wisconsin, where our charge is to leverage the intersecting contexts of school, university, and community to prepare skilled and caring teachers for urban…

Greater diversity and inclusivity in music curricula are goals that permeate discussions in education. Achieving these goals, however, is complex and presents inherent difficulties as music not only values tradition but also promotes the past. Many music traditions were exclusionary and unintentionally cultivated a culture in which many people…

One of the pressing issues facing public schools in the United States is the challenge of providing a quality education to English Learners (ELs). The vast majority of the teachers licensed at the authors' institution graduate with very little knowledge of how to work successfully with EL students. The need to prepare all teachers for work with…

A handful of states are gradually adopting licensing tests that measure aspiring elementary teachers' ability to master aspects of what's arguably their most important task: teaching students to read. In the most recent example of what appears to be a slow but steady push, Wisconsin became the latest state to adopt a rigorous, stand-alone test of…

The Early Learning Challenge (ELC) program awarded more than $1 billion in four-year grants to 20 States to implement comprehensive and cohesive high-quality early learning systems that support young children with high needs and their families. A key lever in making these improvements was the enhancement of States' Quality Rating and Improvement…

In the United States, as public demands for quality teachers have escalated, there has been a corresponding increase in national policy efforts to tie the standards of student success to teacher preparation, licensing, and evaluation. This conceptual paper examines how national authorities used specific policy tools to usurp the state's…

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…

Is what preservice teachers say about issues surrounding culture and diversity actually what they believe? Using a short critical analysis of "The Three Little Pigs," the author engages students in an anonymous writing activity that reveals dissonant opinions and leads to opportunities for discussion.

Many would say that while there are two ways to enter the teaching profession--traditional and alternative--there seems to be a common way to leave it: quickly. Across the board, more than half of beginning teachers leave teaching before their fifth year, and that percentage is even higher in urban public schools and for those prepared by some…