Section archive - Trends in Teacher Education

Lesson Study and Learning Study are popular teacher professional development models across the world. Drawing on an extensive review of research and literature, this paper aims to identify the features of the two models to contrast and establish their similarities and differences particularly with regard to their application in practice. The paper focuses on their impact on teaching and learning as well as the rationale behind the process of Lesson Study and Learning Study. Four major distinctions between the two models are revealed: ways of identifying a topic for teaching, views and methods for understanding student learning, the focus of teacher collaboration on lesson design and implementation, and the overall instructional design. The paper concludes that the two models appeal to different practitioners depending on their aims and objectives in teaching and learning as well as their broader perspectives on education. In addition, this paper suggests that the two models could complement each other to improve the effectiveness of teaching and learning in different contexts.

The capstone project discussed in this article is a multimedia digital storytelling project using iMovie, produced by first-year teachers simultaneously earning their master’s degree. Teachers created their own capstones representing their personal experience, professional development, and overall process toward becoming an empowered educator, while teaching students in urban schools. Utilizing a constant comparative content analysis, the authors determined whether and how teachers defined and represented empowerment in their capstones. Implications for the affordances of a multimedia capstone experience are discussed.

This article aims to provoke debate and discussion about teacher education futures, with particular reference to the interactions between knowledge and technology, within the teacher education community. The authors employed futures methodologies based on scenario creation. In these scenarios, the authors play out how and why changing versions of knowledge and their interactions with technology impact on teacher education. The authors note that in these scenarios, technology is primarily referred to in terms of its relationship to knowledge building and acquisition. They argued that the scenarios offer a dialectic between the influence of knowledge and that of technology. They also argue that these scenarios have a practical value in offering alternatives, encouraging debate.

This study aimed to examine the relationship between policies related to the recruitment, selection, preparation, and certification of new teachers and (a) the quality of future teachers as measured by their mathematics content and pedagogy content knowledge and (b) student achievement in mathematics at the national level. The findings revealed statistically significant associations between the overall strength of these quality assurance arrangements and the quality of graduates. The authors found that countries with strong quality assurance arrangements, such as Chinese Taipei and Singapore, scored highest, whereas countries with weaker arrangements, such as Georgia and Chile, tended to score lower on these measures. The results also showed a statistically significant relationship between quality assurance arrangements and the mathematics achievement of students.