Professional Development

We discuss affordances and liabilities of using a storyboard to depict a written case of a teacher’s dilemma that involves race, opportunity to learn, and student community. We rely on reflections by the teacher educator who authored the written case and later depicted it as a storyboard to use it with his preservice teachers (PSTs).

This chapter focuses on the design of simulation assessments to learn about pre-service teachers’ capabilities with eliciting and interpreting student thinking. We present a simulation assessment and show what a performance on that assessment can reveal about a pre-service teacher’s eliciting and interpreting skills, as well as their mathematical knowledge for teaching. We consider the specific design features that make it possible to appraise pre-service teachers’ capabilities.

In this chapter, we examine what aspects of Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching of Proving (MKT-P) can be observed in written scenarios of classroom interactions, produced by pre-service teachers (PSTs) of mathematics. A group of 27 elementary and middle school PSTs completed an online interactive module, intended to trigger reflection on, and crystallization of their knowledge of the roles of examples in proving.

Although teacher education is the formal means by which novices are prepared for teaching, they come having already had significant experience in schools. Preservice teachers have formed habits of “teaching” which influence their learning to teach. This article reports a study of the specific knowledge of and skills with teaching practice that novices bring to teacher education with respect to one teaching practice, eliciting student thinking in elementary mathematics, and describes the use of a standardized teaching simulation to learn about novices’ skills.

We describe a four-step strategy used in our professional development program to help elementary science teachers recognize and create lesson plans with coherent conceptual storylines. The conceptual storyline of a lesson refers to sequencing its scientific concepts and activities to help students develop a main scientific idea and, often, is an implicit component of a lesson plan.

Amidon, J., Chazan, D., Grosser-Clarkson, D., & Fleming, E. (2017). Meet me in Azul’s room: Designing a virtual field placement for learning to teach mathematics. Mathematics Teacher Educator, 6(1), 52–66. DOI10.5951/mathteaceduc.6.1.0052

The traditional model for supervision of pre-service science teachers during the field experience within teacher preparation programs includes the appointment of a university supervisor who is often a retired teacher and/or adjunct faculty and a school-based co-operating teacher who rarely receives training from the university to be a mentor. This can lead to a disconnect between the university supervisor, co-operating teacher, and university, and a disjointed experience for the pre-service teachers.

While the scholarship examining the teaching of high leverage teaching practices in the context of pre-service teacher education is continuing to grow (Ball & Forzani, 2009; McDonald, Kazemi, & Kavanaugh, 2013; Windschitl, Thompson, Braaten & Stroupe, 2012), fewer teacher educators have been examining how to bring those who mentor pre-service teachers, sometimes called cooperating teachers or pre-service mentor teachers, into this effort.

Released in 2013, the Next Generation Science Standards have the potential to revolutionize science education in the United States, requiring a very different way of thinking about learning and teaching science. Now is the opportune moment to prepare teachers for these new approaches to science instruction and classroom assessment and introduce them to the types of curriculum resources needed to implement the NGSS successfully. What are these teaching resources and professional development needs?

In 2012, the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City launched the Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) Urban Residency Program. The AMNH recruits Earth science majors from across the United States who are motivated to teach in high-need schools in New York State. Developing a teacher preparation program from scratch is a tall order, and the museum is learning a tremendous amount from its pilot effort.

Kinzler, R. & Macdonald, M. (2014, January-February). Preparing new science teachers for high-need schools. Dimensions Magazine, 27.