Teaching quality impacts classroom instruction. Teaching is difficult, demanding and draining work; teaching in urban environs exacerbates the difficulties, the demands and the complexities of teaching. Through the eyes of an assistant superintendent, charged with implementing a new vision for literacy teaching and learning, this manuscript…

To counteract disempowerment frequently experienced in education, in 2001 the authors initiated a "Problem Solution Project" (PSP) in the second year a two-year urban certification and Master's program. The PSP, designed to promote empowerment of first-year urban teachers and their students, involves both service learning. In 2004, the authors…

Broadly speaking, this reflection approaches the on-going concern of capacitating an overwhelmingly White teaching profession for effectively teaching inner-city students attending "de facto" segregated schools. Using professional identifications, this reflection presents narrativized understanding of respondents' "becoming"…

Current federal and state education mandates were developed to make schools accountable for student performance with the rationale that schools, teachers, and students will improve through the administration of high-stakes tests. Public schools are mandated to adhere to three accountability systems: national, state, and local. Additional elements…

The detrimental effects of high-stakes testing and accountability mandates are experienced disproportionately in high-poverty urban schools, which African American and Hispanic students are more likely to attend. However, the literature does not fully address how teachers experience the inequitable working and learning conditions in these…

This paper responds to the call for further inquiry into the experiences of graduates of urban focused teacher education programs. I present and analyze the experience of Mia, a White, monolingual English female who earned licensure in secondary social studies through a graduate-level, equity-focused teacher preparation program before accepting a…

Educating a nation of culturally, ethnically/racially, and linguistically diverse (CLD) students is one of the many challenges facing teachers and teacher educators, resulting in teachers' questioning their ability to improve learning for these groups. Yet teacher efficacy is significantly related to student achievement, motivation, and students'…

The "urban" mathematics classroom has become an increasingly polarized site, one where many middle-class White teachers attempt to bridge the divide between themselves and their relatively economically disadvantaged, non-White students. With its mania for high-stakes testing, current education policy has intensified the importance of…

This qualitative study examined the question: How do African-born teachers in U.S. urban schools conceptualize the "teacher" and his/her role and characteristics in an African school context? The data resulted in the conceptualization of the teacher as "the community teacher" who is intimately invested and integrated into the community,…

This article chronicles the perspectives of two teacher candidates who displayed comfort with cultural issues and teaching for social justice, in contrast with many of their peers in the program who were uncomfortable with diversity. Their field experiences in a piloted urban reading practicum are documented, as part of a partnership with a…

This article examines the usefulness of engaging culturally relevant texts with five levels of analysis to foster critical thinking and academic writing. Teachers who are not critical of seemingly a theoretical, ahistorical reading methods often overlook the ways that cultural biases in instructional methods ignore the cultural and critical needs…

This case study is an examination of one pre-service teacher's experience in a reading methods course, entitled Reading Models and Methods, and corresponding urban reading practicum. Jennifer (a pseudonym) participated in a program aimed to address varying dilemmas that persist in the field, including: pre-service teachers' discomfort with…

The current generation of urban pre-service teachers attended K-12 schools under the increasing influence of a testing and standards-based, market-driven education, a trend that has been growing since the 1990s (Ravitch, 2010). Because of this, I argue here that exposing these pre-service teachers to an inquiry-driven learning experience, in this…

The purpose of this qualitative case study was to examine urban high school mathematics teachers' perceptions of how they manage their own and their students' emotional intelligence (EI) to facilitate instruction and learning; their reports of how they handle their emotions as urban mathematics teachers; and their reports of how they manage the…

Approximately 80% of new teachers have mentors, yet mentoring typically fails to foster new teachers' professional learning--particularly in high-poverty schools. This qualitative study was situated within an urban teacher residency context and explored how six first-year urban teachers and the two induction mentors with whom they worked perceived…