Section archive - Instruction in Teacher Training

Despite a plethora of research on the effectiveness and utility of naturalistic instructional procedures, few studies have examined the training and coaching practices used to prepare teachers to use these procedures. The authors trained two preschool teachers of inclusive classrooms to use naturalistic instructional procedures within the context of their daily activities. The training package consisted of the most commonly utilized teacher training and coaching practices. Teachers evaluated the social and ecological validity of the training and coaching practices throughout the study. Results indicated that both teachers acquired target naturalistic instructional procedures with concomitant decreases in the number of unrelated task demands presented to children. Teachers reported idiosyncratic differences across social and ecological validity ratings. Implications for future research and teacher training are discussed by the authors.

This study aimed to examine how certain underlying assumptions about mathematical learning, as reflected in a teacher educator’s discourse in whole-classroom discussions, align with opportunities to mathematize either ritually or exploratively. The authors argue that the findings showed that at the surface level, the instruction in the class seemed to align with ‘‘explorative’’ goals. The authors also argue that the instruction, however, was more aligned with ‘‘ritual’’ goals that are concerned with producing narratives about people, not about mathematics.

This study investigated executive function development during teacher preparation. The findings suggest that pre-service student teachers typically have average levels of metacognition index (MI) and behavioural regulation index (BRI) compared to the wider population.

The goal of the "Write for Your Life Project" was to strengthen teacher candidates’ skills in both traditional and digital writing literacies through the use of social networks, blogging, texting, online modules and other social media. The project was designed to encourage teacher candidates to write daily, devise writing minilessons, use peer conferencing, and publish final pieces. This paper describes how the Write for Your Life Project (W4YL) helped teacher candidates (TCs) integrate traditional approaches to teaching writing with new literacies.