In today's diverse schools, meeting individual literacy needs of students is one of the most challenging aspects of teaching. Instructional scaffolding is a powerful tool that many literacy teachers use to meet the challenge. While the term denotes a wide array of strategies, most teachers use scaffolding in some form or another in their…

As part of a Canadian International Development Agency funded project working with rural teachers in central China, recent graduates Lebans and Radigan spent a month teaching in Chinese schools. The primary purpose of the project is to work with members of the Sichuan Provincial Teacher Training Centre and rural teachers from Wenchuan County…

In this study a teacher educator worked with two elementary teachers to facilitate a self-study of their learning during a professional development programme. The programme extended for 6 months and was underpinned by four learning processes--reflection, sharing, action and feedback. The two teachers documented their learning experiences and were…

Professional Development teams including in-service and preservice teachers offer a bridge across the continuum of mathematics teacher education. This manuscript documents the experience of one such team and reflections on the learning experience through the eyes of a member of the team at the preservice stage of her career as a teacher of…

More and more school districts are interested in school-based coaching as a method to directly influence student learning. However, school-based coaches face complex challenges. The shift to teaching adults from teaching children is dramatic. Coaches are no longer closely connected to a group of students, but instead are focused on adult learning…

The purpose of this literature review is to explore the role of professional collaboration within the school context as a means of improving the quality and retention of beginning special education teachers (SETs). The assumption underlying the review is that the local school context in which new SETs work should also function as the primary…

Improving professional learning for educators is a crucial step in transforming schools and improving academic achievement. To meet federal requirements and public expectations for school and student performance, the nation needs to bolster teacher skills and knowledge to ensure that every teacher is able to teach increasingly diverse learners,…

Understanding the interplay among experience, beliefs, and contexts of teaching in preservice and inservice teachers' learning to teach is crucial to improving teacher quality for diverse populations. This study examined the impact of a summer camp English teaching experience in China on the ideas and practice of two White, middle-class female…

Purdue University recently received $1.2M in funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for the development of educational programs for high school teachers, high school counselors, and high school students. The purpose of these intervention programs is to show that women (and men) can have interesting, useful, and society-impacting…

Three years after implementing a standards-based teacher evaluation system in a private K-12 school, research was conducted to determine what attitudes and perceptions teachers had on the effectiveness of the system. The survey includes questions about the teacher evaluation process and the goals of the test school in implementing the process. The…

This article examines why teachers should be evaluated, how teacher evaluation is perceived, and how teacher evaluation can be approached, focusing on the improvement of teacher competency rather than defining a teacher as "good" or "bad." Since the primary professional activity of a teacher is teaching, the major concern of teacher evaluation is…

In this document, two evaluations of college instruction models are proposed. Model A, a very objective summative evaluation is made utilizing behavioral objectives. The evaluating committee secures copies of the instructor's course examination. The evaluation committee will analyze the examination from the standpoint of instructional emphasis,…

This study developed and evaluated a manual for the improvement of teachers' effectiveness in explaining. A class of 60 beginning teacher trainees was randomly divided into two groups. All subjects were given a pretest that required them to make three oral explanations in response to three questions asked by an experimenter; the questions and…