Thirty preservice teachers enrolled in a field-based science methods course were placed at a public elementary school for coursework and for teaching practice with elementary students. Candidates focused on building conceptual understanding of science content and pedagogical methods through innovative curriculum development and other course…

The paradigm of content area literacy instruction is shifting from a view of literacy as generalizable across the curriculum to a disciplinary perspective of literacies specific to the specialized language, text structures, and habits of thinking within particular subject areas. Preservice STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics)…

Preparing early childhood and early childhood special education preservice teachers for inclusive settings is the focus of this article. The need for all teachers to be prepared for inclusive settings has become evident with the growing diversity of children in every classroom. Integrating inclusive content throughout the teacher preparation…

This article describes a course-specific model for organizing field experience in the teacher education program at Morehead State University. Students in an elementary social studies methods course had class and field experience within the same public school. Guidelines for effective collaboration between the university and the school are…

The University of Hawaii's exploratory Observation-Participation Program trains education majors in observing a host teacher and working in a classroom. The author, a host teacher, describes the structure and content of the experience she presented to her trainees, secondary speech-communication majors. (SJL)

A Northern Kentucky University professor questions the relevance and effectiveness of a required fundamentals of secondary education methods course, and discusses his counteroffensive, which combines lecture, field experience, and post-experience reflection on methods to meet state certification standards. (CB)

In this article, the authors try to extend the complex and provocative conversations at the Conference on English Education Summit. They argue on several critical programmatic issues, including the need for greater program coherence, the continuing dilemma of the gulf between schools and universities, and both the promise and the problems of…

An effective junior-year student teaching program in elementary education was designed that combines application of theory learned in methods courses with practical school experience. The objective was to prepare education majors for student teaching and to give them an opportunity to evaluate themselves and the prospects of a teaching career.…

Teacher education programs are being encouraged to collaborate with K-12 partners to develop and implement contextually rich field experiences that integrate methods course instruction with public school practices. As a result, we outline four models of integrating methods instruction and field experiences and raise the question "How does the…

Section 1 of this report reviews the background planning and basic program components of the elementary division acroclinical semester, a 16-credit hour accelerated program designed to correlate instruction in professional methodology with the psychology of learning and student teaching. Section 2 details more fully the scheduling of the 9-member…