Every public school teacher's professional career will eventually come to an end, but the natural process of reflecting on one's career will last the rest of his/her life. When that time arrives to reflect, the author would like to have good memories and extreme pride of accomplishment both for himself and his students. As most people know,…

Prior work has shown that early childhood educators demonstrate a lack of knowledge and understanding about technology and engineering, and about developmentally appropriate pedagogical approaches to bring those disciplines into the classrooms. This paper reports a study in which 32 early childhood educators participated in an intensive three-day…

This paper argues that all learners need teachers who are not only professionally qualified but also culturally competent. This is particularly so with teachers of indigenous students, who face the conflicting expectations of schools and those of their home cultures. References to Pacific students will be used to illustrate some of the conflicts…

In response to the need to cultivate pre-service Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) teachers' information and communication technology (ICT) competency in online synchronous environments, this research adopted a three-stage cyclical model named "cooperation-based cognition, action, and reflection" (CoCAR). The model was implemented in an 18-week…

Japanese college students (N = 18) aspiring to become English teachers in junior or senior high schools studied several examples of educational games and created their own English games as an assignment during the last two weeks of an educational psychology course. Results indicated (1) a significant increase between pre- and post-…

This study explores the characteristics and distribution of the feedback provided by the participants (a teacher and her students) in an activity organized inside a collaborative online learning environment. We analyse 853 submissions made by two groups of graduate students and their teacher (N1 = 629 & N2 = 224) involved in the collaborative…

This article analyzes the current challenges facing inclusive education in Latin America and explores some possible solutions. The author suggests that teachers play a key role in providing education that is inclusive for all. In Latin America, today, however, inclusive education often does not respond to the needs of children and young people,…

Since non-native English speaking teachers (NNESTs) are always compared with native English speaking teachers (NESTs) on linguistic grounds, their strengths and weaknesses as English teachers are worthy of investigation. This paper reports on a mixed methods study which examines the strengths and weaknesses of NNESTs and NESTs through the…

Teachers in the Netherlands hesitate to accept responsibility for students with special needs in regular education. They generally do not have positive attitudes towards inclusive education, citing a lack of personal knowledge and skill for teaching students with special needs, an area that was not sufficiently covered in their basic teacher…

Using data from the 2003-04 Schools and Staffing Survey, the authors studied how various aspects of teacher preparation affect the retention of new teachers--specifically mathematics and science teachers. They found that the preparation of new mathematics and science teachers differs from that of other new teachers in various respects, but factors…

Learning the grammar of a language is an integral part of learning a second or foreign language. Studies on teacher beliefs, teacher language awareness (TLA) and grammar teaching have reported that the majority of English language teachers recognise the importance of teaching grammar (Borg, 2001; Borg & Burns, 2008). At the same time, many…

Since 1980, the recruitment of teachers in many countries has followed a systematic certification procedure, i.e. a selection procedure according to criteria set by the State which are considered the minimum qualification for entrance into the profession. The term used in the last few years to define the desired level of qualification of teachers…

Teacher turnover in urban schools is occurring at a breakneck pace; thus, it is important for us to understand the characteristics of teachers who stay and succeed in these settings. In order to address this need, this study examines the preparation and induction experiences of teachers who completed a Transition to Teaching- a funded urban…

This study investigated the knowledge and skills of undergraduate and graduate practicum and student teaching students with positive behavior supports (PBS). Participants for this study consisted of a population of one hundred students from a southwestern university's College of Education teacher preparation program. Students completed an adapted…

Teaching assistants (TAs) comprise a quarter of the school workforce in England and Wales. There has been controversy over TAs' deployment and appropriate role regarding supporting learning and these debates have been transformed by findings from the largest study of school support staff (the DISS project), which show that TA support has a…