Section archive - Trends in Teacher Education

The education system suffers from a tendency to be pulled in two opposing directions. On the one hand, the 21st century demands constant innovation and change as a way of life. On the other, the education system tends to eschew changes that are liable to trigger crises in its smooth organization. Today's world is based on the ideology of constant change. The education system has to present the public with constant invention and change, and all educational administrators and educators are obliged to continually present their latest innovations. Conversely, public education is the most successful revolution to have occurred in the last 300 years. Like any other successful revolution, it tends to conserve the existing situation and not rock the boat. The revolution, which began in the 17th century, is still going strong. It can be described as public education gaining control of the world.

This paper reports on how teacher educators from a university, acting as facilitators, supported teachers in conducting a school-based action research project as a practice of professional development in the context of reform in language assessment in Hong Kong. In particular, the article problematises how the facilitators and teachers negotiated and managed identities whilst being engaged in a collaborative action research project. A key finding was that identities were neither fixed nor finite in the context of collaboration, but were negotiated within and against a range of contextually salient discourses. A major contribution of the article lies in its examination of the complexities of negotiating identities when educators from two different institutional cultures collaborate.

In this study, the authors conducted a systematic review of the literature to examine research focusing on the teaching, learning, implementation, and evaluation of Response to Intervention (RTI) in general education (GE) teacher preparation during the last decade (2003–2013). Results reveal a longstanding gap in the literature on how GE preservice teachers can understand and apply RTI in their classrooms.

This article aims to describe a major revision process to the early childhood teacher education program at a 4-year university. The authors describe their teacher education program as it was configured 2 years ago and as it exists today after major change efforts, highlighting the purposes and desired outcomes of these changes. They have conceptualized this journey as both a revision of the program and a re-visioning process. They focus on their attempt to integrate the intentions underlying policy and standards changes into their work in preparing teachers for the full range of early childhood program auspices, as well as for any and all of the children who are enrolled in them.