Practicum experiences are an extremely critical component to any teacher education program. Yet how pre-service teachers are included in classrooms can be organized in multiple ways and is influenced by many factors. Structurally, universities must consider school schedules and student course offering schedules. More important is ensuring…

Creating the most effective and well-educated teachers possible has been always the clear focus of the Teacher Education Department at the University of Nebraska at Kearney (UNK). During the academic year of 1999-2000, a tripartite task force was created for the College of Education at UNK to identify areas in need of revision or elimination from…

The student teaching practicum is the capstone event of a new teacher's sequence of formal education and shapes the beginnings of one's foray into to the teaching profession. Vital to that experience is the influence of the cooperating teacher. This study sought a better understanding of that influence, particularly the various aspects of…

Jonathan Livingston Seagull represents the concepts of change and growth in the elementary student teaching program at Indiana University-Purdue University. Student feedback indicates acceptance of the symbolism as it is used in materials and activities to reinforce the motto, "We can be free! We can learn to fly!" (CM)

This paper communicates the generative potential of classroom skits as curricular openings in teacher education. Although assorted incidences of the use of skits in classrooms have been documented, literature on the use of skits as a learning tool is very limited. I suggest that skits allow for the generally absent observation component during…

This article discusses one component of an ongoing project to explore differentiated instruction as an approach for meeting the academic and related needs of a wide array of diverse learners in schools. The project originated with a task force examining the results of the 2001 student teacher exit survey at a regional university's teacher…

To meet challenges of diversity in classrooms various multicultural teacher education programs to prepare pre-service teachers are introduced with the objective of changing beliefs, attitudes, knowledge base, and pedagogical skills. Studies reporting effectiveness of these programs used measure such as portfolio assessment, interviews, survey and…