We examine how teachers from two alternative preparation programs--Teach for America (TFA) and Kansas City Teacher Residency (KCTR)--contribute to the teacher labor market in and around Kansas City, Missouri. We show that TFA and KCTR teachers are more likely than other teachers to work in charter schools, and more broadly, in schools with high…

This paper explores the ways in which success in school is constructed by a majority White teaching staff during day-to-day classroom practices and schoolwide policies, such as the disciplinary systems at a "no-excuses" charter school in one of the largest urban districts in the U.S. Stakeholders were assessed by interviews and…

Policymakers' demands for standardization and improved student achievement increasingly define what early childhood educators working in publicly funded programs teach. Doing so has made it difficult for educators to engage in practices with children that incorporate their sociocultural worlds into their instruction. To begin to address this…

The purpose of this article is to share findings about Head Start teachers' attitudes and perceived competence toward inclusion based on data gathered from 41 instructional professionals in 18 Head Start classrooms using surveys and interviews. Results showed that all of the participating teachers agreed with inclusion and identified several…

This article reports on urban elementary teachers' understandings of cultural relevancy and the practices they enacted after a professional development on culturally relevant education (CRE) and cognitive apprenticeship. Focus group interviews support that participating teachers understood some principles of CRE but did not always match the theory…

Teacher turnover in urban high-poverty schools is detrimental to students' achievement. In fact, one of the most prevalent social justice issues today is the unequal distribution of experienced teachers to urban high-poverty schools. Researchers suggest that experienced teachers are more effective at raising student performance than new or early…

With an increasingly diverse, K-12 public school student population, adequately teaching and instructing all student demographic groups is a pertinent educational issue. As such, there has been an ensuing need for teachers to develop the knowledge, dispositions, and pedagogical skills and competencies necessary to teach children from diverse…

Rehearsals are lesson enactments with feedback prior to implementation with students, and are one facet of practice-based teacher education with an aim to promote ambitious teaching in all contexts. This study explores how rehearsals, related to literacy instruction, were enacted in an urban K-8 school between teacher candidates and their mentor…

This article investigates the experiences of three early-career secondary English urban teachers who sought to strengthen their perspectives and practices of social justice teaching through professional development. Data include teacher interviews across their first three years of teaching, artifacts across three participants representing their…

In this study, the author reports on the professional learning of three primary teachers who engaged in three cycles of collaborative action research over a three-year period from 2013 to 2016. Case study was chosen as a methodology to gain insight into the context of the teachers' work as they interacted with others and adopted multiple tools.…

This qualitative study case study explicates how a preservice teacher of color in an urban teacher education program (TEP) peripherally engages critical pedagogy with perceived content irrelevancy and cultural conflict. Findings reveal how her maneuvering of corporatized model student behaviors is friendly yet subversive. These tactics result in…

This study examines the degree of agreement between three Haberman Foundation-trained facilitators' interviews and pre-service teachers' self-evaluations of behavioral attributes associated with successful urban teaching. Using a quasi-experimental design research approach, data for this investigation was collected from 17 subjects who are all…

The fears of pre-service teachers, particularly Teach for America (TFA) teachers. about working in urban classroom settings are framed as racial stress. Racial stress is the threat of well-being when one is unprepared to negotiate a race-related interpersonal encounter. Currently, there exist no measures on racial stress, socialization, and coping…

This study looks at the experiences of pre-service teachers who began their student teaching assignments amidst the 2012 Chicago Teachers Union strike. Four yearlong student teachers reflected on their understandings of teaching, unionism, and activism before, during, and after the strike. Findings suggest pre-service teachers need greater…

A teacher at an urban middle school worked to become part of her students' communities and utilized the notion of community within her pedagogy. Her example offers hope that engaging with students' communities and building community within the classroom are attainable and valuable goals. Her example also demonstrates that the concept of community…