Through growing formative research, lesson study has emerged as a powerful practice that affects teachers' practical analysis of learning and teaching. Such research, however, also recognizes challenges to its implementation. In a methods course, lesson study has the potential to provide valuable links between teacher education and practice. In…

This study was prompted by the growing amount of research that is in support of science reform and from this researcher's personal experience and concern that science instructions is no longer a top priority in elementary schools nor are young scientists given the opportunities to act as scientists in a real world setting. This study uses…

Although increasing emphasis is being placed on mathematical justification in elementary school classrooms, many teachers find it challenging to engage their students in such activities. In part, this may be because the teachers themselves have not had an opportunity to learn what it means to justify solutions or prove elementary school concepts…

This study investigated the effect of problem posing on the pre-service primary teachers' understanding of fraction concepts enrolled in two different versions of a methods course at a university in Turkey. In the experimental version, problem posing was used as a teaching strategy. At the beginning of the study, the pre-service teachers'…

Research on learning to teach mathematics reveals that mathematics teaching is a complex process (Lerman, 2000) and classroom teaching and learning is a "multifaceted, extraordinarily complex phenomenon" (O'Connor, 1998, p. 43). Moreover, research reveals that the mathematics reform agenda has had an impact on what happens in the mathematics…

Dispositions supporting the teaching of science as structured inquiry by four elementary candidates are presented. Candidates were studied during student teaching based on their positive attitudes toward teaching science with reform-based materials in their methods course. Personal learning histories informed their attitudes, values, and beliefs…

How elementary pre-service teacher candidates with considerable experience in clinical field placements identified, photographed, discussed, and categorized samples of what they construed as democratic citizenship education occurring within elementary classrooms was explored in this study. Candidates discussed an initial set of captioned photos…

The authors believe that by working together, teachers and school counselors can better support students and more effectively work for their success. In this article, we present our efforts in creating a collaborative class for preservice English teachers and school counselor interns. While offering an overview of English teachers and school…

This article considers how theories of instructional scaffolding--which call for a skilled expert to teach a novice a new task by breaking it into smaller pieces--might be employed in graduate-level qualitative methods courses. The author discusses how she used instructional scaffolding in the design and delivery of a qualitative methods course…

This quantitative study examined the effectiveness of pairing preservice teachers with young readers during a 9-week reading methods course to participate together in reading-related activities and partner journaling. It was hypothesized that these preservice partnerships would strengthen preservice teacher perceptions about their ability to…

This article describes a 3-week intensive molecular biology methods course based upon fluorescent proteins, which is successfully taught at the McGill University to advanced undergraduates and graduates in physics, chemical engineering, biomedical engineering, and medicine. No previous knowledge of biological terminology or methods is expected, so…

Although text-based discussions are considered by many literacy researchers and educators to be optimal contexts for teaching students how to comprehend text, a discussion is an ill-structured instructional space with complicated demands. A challenge for teacher educators is to acknowledge this complexity and provide ways for teachers to learn how…

This study examined pre-service teachers' development of mathematical knowledge for teaching (MKT) over their final year in a university based teacher education program. This was done through analyzing written reflections, focus group interviews, individual interviews, teaching observations, and post-observation interviews as well as through the…

In this article we consider how elementary education students' views of mathematics changed during their mathematics methods course. We focus on four female students: two started the course with mainly positive views of mathematics and a task orientation, two with negative views of the subject and an ego-defensive orientation. The biggest change…

During the past decade, there has been more than an adequate amount of research addressing issues regarding social studies methods courses. However, the apparent void is that there is no clear understanding of what pedagogical content knowledge or understanding of pedagogical approaches teacher candidates bring with them to social studies methods…