Section archive - Instruction in Teacher Training

This article proposes a learning development (LD) perspective to peer learning in higher education. This article focuses on the PAL scheme, which was introduced at Plymouth University in 2011 (PALS@Plymouth) with the specific intention to promote a LD perspective. The author conducted a small scale study based on informal, semi-structured interviews seeking the views of PALS leaders about how their involvement in the scheme might serve to focus attention not just on individual student needs but on to problems arising from academic practices more broadly. The interviews with the PALS leaders revealed the value of learning from peers. The author suggests that student-led sessions could offer opportunities to assimilate and gain confidence in academic discourse, as advocated by PALS leaders in this study.

This article describes one postgraduate teacher education programme, where video narratives were evaluated as a valid way to assess student teachers’ teaching competencies, promoting connections amongst different competencies, situating these in practice and showing their development over time. The findings revealed that most student teachers succeeded in meeting the set criteria for the video narrative assignment with connected video clips and text frames. However, student teachers also came up with only a few video episodes and loosely connected clips, reflections and other sources. Although most of the students during the programme did explicitly reflect upon their personal development towards becoming a teacher, almost none of them explicitly connected these ideas to their long-term development.

This article examined a professional development course within a large urban school district for preKindergarten and Kindergarten teachers. In the course, the teachers were asked to reconceptualize their pedagogical practices with their students and engage in learning activities in their classrooms that attended to the children’s sociocultural worlds.

The purpose of this research is to identify the factors within the school environment that enhance and facilitate a teachers’ innovative behavior. Furthermore, it aims to examine whether it is possible to predict a teachers’ innovative behaviour with the proposed two-layer model (with self-efficacy being the first layer and teaching practices being the second). In this study, a model for predicting teachers’ innovative behaviour was proposed, with three general factors of school environment: interaction and involvement, need for innovation and freedom for innovation. The authors conclude that a teachers’ innovative potential is developed and used in the best possible way, when the school environment provides them with possibilities for self-development, recognition for their innovative behaviour and professional development and also constructive feedback from school management and the students’ parents.