The goal of this study was to shed light on mentor teachers' perceptions of their roles and responsibilities and to contrast their understandings with a normative view of mentoring (Goldsberry, 1998; Hawkey, 1997). The authors hypothesized that the mentor teachers' perceptions would likely differ from established conceptions of this construct. This difference has significant implications for mentor preparation and university collaboration.

The literature on teacher education shows that historically, teacher education programs have aimed to address diversity with add-on or piecemeal approaches, with little success (McDonald, 2005). Moreover, some authors (e.g. Lortie, 1975) have argued that “the predispositions teacher education students bring to teaching are a much more powerful socializing influence than either pre-service education or later socialization in the workplace” (Johnson, 2002, p. 154). This article investigates research and scholarship in this area.

The goal of this study was to examine the experiences of preservice elementary teachers in a content-specific field-based experience with elementary science specialists.The results showed that preservice teachers experienced a wide range of instructional and assessment strategies in specialists’ classrooms. However, the teachers failed to generalize aspects of the specialist model of science instruction to traditional models for delivery of science instruction at the elementary level.

The authors examine how a mixed-methods research team designed and conducted a 4-year study that tracked 300 teachers in 100 schools in England over a 3-year fieldwork period. The authors discuss processes that led to new knowledge.They consider the advantage of synergistic approaches and combination of a greater range of data.

This paper explains the process that is causing systems of teacher education in the EU, the USA and elsewhere to converge into a form of fewer qualitative distinctions. The authors argue that expansion brought about by processes familiar to globalization is creating wide differences in the cost of information that incentivizes use of standardized patterns for producing teachers. This study identifies institutional scale and the division of information as key factors that link the interaction of institutions across markets.

It is important that trainee teachers in the faculties of education should develop their critical thinking skills so that they can meet the expectations and needs of their profession. The goal of this study was to investigate the relationship between critical thinking skills and in-class questioning behaviors of English Language Teaching (ELT) students at the Faculty of Education at Mugla University.The data suggest that the questions asked by the students of the higher critical thinking score group are not questions that clarify unclear points, but questions asked out of curiosity, to remove the uncertainties, and to lead people to think profoundly.

This paper builds on the argument that during the late 1990s and into the early 2000s, a ‘new teacher education’ emerged in the USA. It was constructed as a public policy problem, based on research and evidence, and driven by outcomes. This new teacher education is both for better and for worse. The paper suggests that the trends that characterized the emergence of the new teacher education have continued and intensified, especially in light of larger national and global policy and political issues.

The goal of the study was to examine the nature of professionally oriented subject matter knowledge in mathematics. Therefore, the authors studied actual mathematics teaching and identified mathematical knowledge for teaching based on analyses of the mathematical problems that arise in teaching. In conjunction, measures of mathematical knowledge for teaching were developed.