The cultural disparity between teachers and students has been a concern among educators for quite some time. While the student body grows more ethnically heterogeneous, non-Hispanic Whites, especially women, continue to dominate the teaching profession. Ethnicity, language, and socioeconomic status (SES) all play a critical role in the education…

This qualitative case study reports on processes and outcomes of the National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded System-Wide Change for All Learners and Educators (SCALE) project at the California State University, Northridge (CSUN). It addresses a critical challenge in studying systemic reform in complex organizations: the lack of methodologies that…

Like many businesses across the country, institutions of higher education have been increasing the use of part-time and/or temporary staff. Nationally, adjuncts teach between 30%-50% of all credit courses and between 95%-100% of noncredit courses. At community colleges, adjuncts composed 60% of all faculty as of 1991, up from 56% in 1984 and 42%…

This is the fourth in a series of four books presenting a variety of field experience program models and philosophies that drive the programs provided to preservice teachers during their undergraduate teacher preparation. This book focuses on critical issues facing teaching education in the future, in particular field experiences. Major themes…

The Educational Testing Service is engaged in developing tests for teacher licensure, The Praxis Series: Professional Assessments for Beginning Teachers (TM). A central component of Praxis III: Classroom Performance Assessments is a set of proposed criteria that have been developed to assess the classroom performance of beginning teachers. The…

The Educational Testing Service is developing a series of assessments for the licensure of beginning teachers. The third stage of these assessments will measure the beginning teacher's application of teaching knowledge and skills, and the assessments will be performance-based. Job analysis studies were conducted to provide data to define the…

A job analysis was conducted to define the knowledge domain of general principles of teaching and learning necessary for newly licensed (certified) teachers, regardless of grade level or subject, to perform in a competent manner. The results of the study are being used to develop test specifications for The Praxis Series: Professional Assessments…

This paper discusses underlying beliefs about teaching that are related to the assessment of prospective teachers and elucidates some basic beliefs that are guiding the development of new types of assessments for new teachers. These new assessments are called "The Praxis Series: Professional Assessments for Beginning Teachers(TM)."…

This analysis of a pilot study in inservice teacher education seminars provides insight into the potential of case-based methods in multicultural education and exposes some of the difficulties that accompany this approach, for both discussion leader and participants. Rather than passively listening to generalized knowledge on multiculturalism…

This report charts a vision for preparing California teachers for the 21st century. The report is an adaptation of the national framework found in the Association of Teacher Educators' report, "Restructuring the Education of Teachers." Recognizing that learning to be an effective teacher is a developmental process, the report is…

This paper looks at issues subsumed by the phrase "learning to teach" that have implications for the design and conduct of teacher education. The first section lays out a temporal perspective by examining the times and places of learning to teach. The second section brings together disparate strands of research on the learners of…

This report reviews the research and literature on the improvement of college teaching through use of a model that stresses a supportive teaching culture and helps motivate individual faculty members to improve their teaching by utilizing a variety of sources of informative feedback. The sources include: colleagues and consultants, department…

A reform-oriented teacher education model and its effect on the eventual classroom practice of preservice program graduates is examined. An ethnographic description is provided of the program, which emphasized an experiential philosophical base that permeated both the program and the compulsory educational milieu of the training site. Research…

The purpose of this paper is to inform novice science teachers and science teacher educators of the pedagogy that science teacher supervisors value. As expert practitioners, supervisors have a perspective quite different from that of both novice teachers and teacher educators. Nine inservice science teacher supervisors assessed a novice teacher's…

The perceptions of novice and expert teachers in urban schools about their preparation through teacher education were studied. It is generally recognized that middle-class white teachers are strangers to urban cultures, and that they often believe the mass media's negative images about low- income African American and Latino communities.…