Preservice Teachers (535 items)To section archive

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Faculty from three different teacher preparation programs implemented classroom scenarios to help preservice teachers practice holding difficult conversations with students. The goal was to enhance critical reflection and discussion around creating culturally responsive classrooms to change preservice teacher conceptions of effective teachers' qualities. Results indicate that preservice teacher conceptions of effective teachers shifted from a focus on personal attributes to teaching skills. This study addresses the need for practice-based teacher education that has advanced in parallel with efforts to find new ways to the practical knowledge needed to be culturally responsive teachers.
Published: 2021
Updated: Aug. 03, 2022
The early childhood workforce needs to be prepared to support children with disabilities within the inclusive preschool classroom. Early childhood personnel standards and requirements include competencies for supporting children with disabilities and their families. Teacher preparation programs should ensure that preservice teachers engage in coursework and placements that prepare them to teach in inclusive preschool classrooms. Existing qualitative studies exploring the inclusive preschool preparation experiences of preservice teachers provide insights into these experiences. Yet, a synthesis of these findings does not exist. Hence, a qualitative metasynthesis was conducted to provide insight to the field of early childhood teacher preparation in regards to preschool inclusion. Qualitative findings from 11 peer-reviewed studies were analyzed, synthesized, and interpreted to understand the experiences of preservice teachers and highlight what they learned from these experiences and the resulting impact on their dispositions and confidence in regard to inclusive preschool. Suggestions for early childhood preservice preparation programs and future research are discussed.
Published: 2022
Updated: Jul. 25, 2022
In this paper, the authors report an enquiry into elementary preservice teachers’ learning, as they engage in doing mathematics for themselves. As a group of researchers working in elementary Initial Teacher Education in English universities, they co-planned and taught sessions on growing pattern generalisation. Following the sessions, interviews of fifteen preservice teachers at two universities focused on their expressed awareness of their approach to the mathematical activity. Preservice teachers’ prospective planning and post-teaching evaluations of similar activities in their classrooms were also examined. They draw on aspects of enactivism and the notion of reflective “spection” in the context of teacher learning, tracing threads between preservice teachers’ retro-spection of learning and pro-spection of teaching. Their analysis indicates that increasing sensitivity to their own embodied processes of generalisation offers opportunities for novice teachers to respond deliberately, rather than to react impulsively, to different pedagogical possibilities. The paper contributes a new dimension to the discussion about the focus of novice elementary school teachers’ retrospective reflection by examining how deliberate retrospective analysis of doing mathematics, and not only of teaching actions, can develop awarenesses that underlie the growth of expertise in mathematics teaching. The authors argue that engaging preservice teachers in mathematics to support deliberate retrospective analysis of their mathematics learning and prospective consideration of the implications for teaching can enable more critical pedagogical choices.
Published: 2022
Updated: Jul. 18, 2022
This study examines pre-service primary school teachers’ (PSTs’) possible selves in relation to science teaching and the ways in which these possible selves change over time. This longitudinal study adds to the body of knowledge by examining PSTs’ possible selves at various time points throughout their teacher preparation: three PSTs, selected from a wider sample, were interviewed three times about their future aspirations as science teachers. Narrative analysis was applied to show the changes in three PSTs’ possible selves in response to the science methods course and teaching practicum. PSTs articulated general, collective and specific hoped-for and feared possible selves. The findings highlight the changes in the possible selves that pertain to their cognitive and affective dimensions and occurred in different stages of teacher education. These changes were significant for the development of PSTs’ identity. The implications of these findings are discussed in the context of science teaching.
Published: 2022
Updated: Jul. 12, 2022