Section archive - Preservice Teachers

The purpose of this study was to disrupt whiteness through the use of critical race counternarratives during a critical literacy workshop with middle-school preservice teachers. Over two years, 57 preservice teachers participated in and reflected on their experiences reading master narratives and viewing counternarrative texts in a critical literacy workshop. Students responded in a variety of ways that ranged from displacing responsibility for their ignorance about the counternarrative texts onto educational structures, to troubling their roles in reproducing oppressive school environments and considering action steps for future teaching. Our research has important implications for preservice teachers, teacher educators, and those interested in implementing preservice teacher educator curriculum using a critical race theory lens.

It is generally assumed that in order to teach mathematics effectively, middle years teachers ought to have a high degree of knowledge of mathematics and confidence in their ability to do the mathematics as well as self-efficacy to teach it. This study examines the content knowledge, mathematics confidence and self-efficacy of 99 graduate-entry pre-service teachers in an Australian school of education. The findings indicate that, in general, their mathematical content knowledge was not strong. Further, the participants expressed different levels of confidence and self-efficacy for specific concepts, so, while the scale used had high Cronbach’s alpha coefficients, its internal consistency was relatively weak. That is, confidence and self-efficacy were found to be content specific. Further, the participants tended to have confidence and self-efficacy scores that, while low, were inconsistent with their ability to do the mathematics; they tended to overestimate their mathematics competency. The findings with respect to pre-service teachers’ deficit of relevant mathematical knowledge, confidence and self-efficacy have implications for teacher preparation to teach mathematics in the study institution and potentially more broadly in the West.

This qualitative study sought to understand the reasoning of pre-service teachers through think-aloud interviews with teacher education students at the beginning of their postgraduate degree (six elementary and six secondary). Interviews focused on contextualised and challenging teaching scenarios with a range of response options previously confirmed through the use of situational judgement test (SJT) methodology. The authors’ three-step analysis revealed seven concepts that highlighted the motivations and beliefs underlying the reasoning of pre-service teachers. Practical implications include professional development around decision-making during teacher education programs. Future research will explore the use of SJTs in developing key non-academic attributes for effective teaching.

This study addresses how teacher candidates committed to a social-justice-oriented urban teacher residency programme articulate and reflect why they want to be teachers in high-need public schools and what they expect from teaching so as to ascertain what they expect to do. The participants of this study included 77 graduates who participated in four cohorts of an urban teacher residency programme from 2010 through 2014. Employing a qualitative case study design, the authors analysed 77 sets of admissions essays, which were completed as part of the residency application process. Building on their analysis of candidates’ admissions essays through inductive coding, the authors find that candidates’ reflections on why they want to be teachers in high-need public schools and what they expect to do, stem from their beliefs in their role as a teacher and their beliefs about the role of education. Such reflections are grounded in beliefs of teacher activism, pupil activism, and advocacy for pupils who have been marginalised due to systemic inequalities. The study illuminates committed teachers’ reasons for entering the teaching profession so as to inform better recruitment strategies, and has implications for how initial teacher education (ITE) programmes could specifically improve their professional preparation and practices to recruit and retain qualified teachers who intend to stay.