Suggestions for preparing itinerant teachers: a qualitative analysis.

Increased numbers of deaf and hard of hearing students live at home, attend their neighborhood schools, and receive major portions of their educations from general education teachers with support from itinerant teachers of deaf and hard of hearing students. Although the itinerant service-delivery model is used extensively, there is a paucity both of information about itinerant teaching and of research that has examined its effectiveness. The purpose of this study was to begin a database of information about the job responsibilities, perceptions, and preparation of itinerant teachers, as well as about the characteristics of the students they serve. Data from surveys returned by 319 itinerant teachers was analyzed. The responses indicate that itinerant teaching differs in numerous ways from more-traditional approaches to educating deaf and hard of hearing students. Results, implications, concerns, and suggestions for future research are discussed.

This article presents results from an observational study comparing instructional context, teacher behavior, and engaged behavior for 15 students with severe disabilities in general education classrooms and 15 students with severe disabilities in self-contained classrooms. The observational data system was the Code for Instruction and Student Academic Response–Mainstream Version. The major significant differences were that students in general education classrooms received a greater proportion of their instruction through academic rather than functional activities and received more one-to-one instruction and teacher attention than did students in self-contained classrooms. No significant differences were found between the settings for student response. The most interesting finding may be that so few differences were found between general education and self-contained classrooms.

Although studies of teacher preparation programs have documented positive changes in mathematical knowledge for teaching with preservice teachers in mathematics content courses, this study focused on the impact of a mathematics methods course and follow-up student teaching assignment. The presumption was that preservice teachers would show growth in their mathematical knowledge during methods since the course was structured around active participation in mathematics, research-based pedagogy, and was concurrent with a two-day-per-week field experience in a local elementary school. Survey instruments utilized the computer adaptive test version of the Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching (MKT) measures from the Learning Mathematics for Teaching Project, and the Attitudes and Beliefs (towards mathematics) survey from the Mathematical Education of Elementary Teachers Project. A piecewise growth model analysis was conducted on data collected from 176 participants at 5 time-points (methods, 3 time-points; student teaching, 2 time-points) over a 9 month period. Although the participants' demographics were typical of U.S. undergraduate preservice teachers, findings suggest that initial low-level of mathematical knowledge, and a deep-rooted belief that there is only one way to solve mathematics problems, limited the impact of the methods and student teaching courses. The results from this study indicate that in (a) number sense, there was no significant change during methods (p = .392), but a significant decrease during student teaching (p < .001), and in (b) algebraic thinking, there was a significant decrease during methods (p < .001), but no significant change during student teaching (p = .653). Recommendations include that the minimum teacher preparation program entry requirements for mathematical knowledge be raised and that new teachers participate in continued professional development emphasizing both mathematical content knowledge and reform-based pedagogy to continue to peel away deep-rooted beliefs towards mathematics.

Instruction-giving (IG) is central to classroom interaction in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), yet it is rarely taught explicitly in pre-service CLIL teacher education. In response, the authors redesigned a CLIL practicum course and introduced targeted IG training in the second year. This study (a) described the redesign of an IG-focused training component and (b) examined whether the redesigned course was associated with differences in student teachers’ IG practices across cohorts. Fifty-two pre-service teachers in an eight-semester Primary English Language Teaching program (PELT) in Germany implemented CLIL-based projects with 180 pupils (ages 9–10) across two consecutive cohorts (2024, n = 25; 2025, n = 27). The study compared a baseline course implementation (2024) with a redesigned implementation that included explicit IG training (2025) informed by previous research. Audio-recorded classroom discourse from a randomly selected subsample of STs (n = 20; 10 per cohort) was segmented into CLIL-related IG episodes and analyzed using eight IG principles rated on a four-point scale. Quantitative comparisons were complemented by qualitative classroom discourse analysis and field notes. Mean overall IG scores were higher in 2025 (M = 3.16) than in 2024 (M = 2.79). The largest differences concerned clarity, responding to non-understanding, and strategic L1 use. Differences were smaller for sequencing and multimodality, and modeling did not differ across cohorts in this dataset. The findings suggest that explicit IG training is a teachable component of pre-service teachers’ instructional repertoire. While the cross-cohort design does not support causal claims, consistent descriptive and qualitative differences suggest that explicit IG training holds pedagogical promise for CLIL teacher education. • Instruction-giving (IG) is a teachable component of student teachers' (STs ) instructional repertoire. • Explicit IG training improved STs' clarity, sequencing, multimodality, and strategic L1 use in CLIL classrooms. • Cohort comparison revealed medium-to-large practical gains for the explicitly trained group. • High-quality IG was characterized by micro-sequencing, modeling, and multimodal scaffolding. • Findings underscore the value of embedding explicit IG practice in pre-service CLIL teacher education.

Language teacher educators train pre-service teachers in numerous theories and pedagogical practices of language learning and language teaching. They expect that their student teachers will translate this conceptual and practical knowledge into action during their practicum. However, in the process of determining pre-service teachers’ readiness for the field experience and the profession in general, methods classes measure only their conceptual knowledge and omit looking at their student teachers’ belief system about language teaching and learning. This belief system is a strong indicator of how the students organize their knowledge for application (Borg, 2003) and may help teacher educators gauge students’ read ness in the use of new pedagogies that these pre-service teachers may not have experienced before. Using two reflective essays and a piece of authentic assessment as instruments to gather data, as well as Jürgen Habermas’s theory on cognitive interests as a framework to explore the espoused beliefs of nine pre-service language teachers at the end of a methodscourse, this qualitative study addressed the following questions: What levels of cognitive interests do the nine pre-service world language and ESL teachers exhibit prior to student teaching? To what extent do the students’ levels of cognitive interests change during the methods course called Teaching a Second Language? What are the most common cognitive interests regarding such areas of teaching performance, such as methodology and assessment among the participants? The results show that the nine pre-service teachers held mostly technicaland some practical cognitive interests at the beginning of the semester. In the end, most of the participants held practical interests, and three out of the nine pre-service teachers held elementary emancipatory beliefs. One pedagogical recommendation is to include experiences in the training of pre-service teachers that promote emancipatory beliefs that could support teachers in their pursuit of transforming challenging social conditions while examining and adopting new pedagogies.

The majority of deaf and hard of hearing students are taught in public schools. Many of these students are taught by itinerant teachers who report their primary areas of instruction are language, reading, and writing (Antia & Rivera, 2016; Luckner & Ayantoye, 2013). The purpose of this qualitative case study was to examine (1) how strategic and interactive writing instruction (SIWI) was implemented by three itinerant teachers of the deaf in one rural, one urban, and one affluent school district and (2) what context-specific variables impacted their writing instruction. Through observations of a unit of their writing instruction for informative writing, scoring their fidelity for that writing unit, and conducting interviews about their instruction, the researchers concluded that the itinerant teacher participants were able to implement SIWI with typical fidelity for teachers in their first year of using this instruction technique. Their unique insights highlighted ways that the interactive instruction principles of the instructional fidelity instrument could be revised to better align with the educational contexts of itinerant teachers. They also reported four main challenges to their writing instruction: working with general education teachers, district-related factors, time, and physical space and organization.

Identifying student teachers’ attitudes and anxiety toward artificial intelligence (AI) in regard to their field of study might be helpful in determining whether and how AI will be employed in their future classrooms. Hence, this study aims to compare pre-service STEM and non-STEM teachers’ attitudes and anxiety toward AI. In this quantitative research, the causal-comparative research design was adopted. The study involved 520 pre-service teachers from a faculty of education at a public university in Türkiye. Among all, 51.5% were pre-service non-STEM teachers while 48.5% were pre-service STEM teachers. Data were collected through the Turkish versions of “the General Attitudes toward Artificial Intelligence Scale” and “the Artificial Intelligence Anxiety Scale”. Diagnostic analytics were performed, and descriptive statistics and MANOVA were performed to analyse the data. As a result, pre-service teachers, in general, were mostly positive about AI, but undecided to be anxious about AI. STEM student teachers had more positive attitudes toward AI than non-STEM student teachers, and non-STEM student teachers were more anxious toward AI than STEM student teachers. The results imply that non-STEM teacher education curricula should be redesigned to be AI-integrated to better prepare teachers of the future as teachers with TPACK integrated with AI. Keywords: artificial intelligence, anxiety toward artificial intelligence, attitude toward artificial intelligence, pre-service STEM teacher, pre-service non-STEM teacher, pre-service teacher

Although student teaching plays a crucial role in teacher preparation programs, limited research has examined the specific features of this experience that positively impact preservice science teachers’ (PSTs) questioning competency. This multi-case study contributes to the existing body of research by presenting findings from an initiative in a teacher preparation program that integrates self-regulated learning (SRL) into professional learning (PL) and coaching to improve PSTs’ questioning skills. Despite variability in their initial SRL skills, all participating PSTs experiened shared learning opportunities related to asking higher-level cognitive questions. The PL and coaching during student teaching appeared to contribute to PSTs’ improvement in different aspects of asking questions. Coaching, in particular, enhanced PSTs’ application of strategies learned in the PL and facilitated learning from the act of teaching. The findings suggest that to help PSTs develop to ask higher-level cognitive questions, teacher preparation programs need to provide detailed, memorable, and theory-grounded descriptions of questioning techniques. In addition, integrating SRL processes into coursework and coaching can significantly enhance PSTs’ learning from teaching experience.

The purpose of this study is to determine the level of relation between pre-service teachers' university image perception and student loyalty. This research is designed as correlational survey model. University image scale and student loyalty scale are used in this study. Study group consists of 419 pre-service teachers studying at a state university in Turkey who were determined by simple random sampling method. The relations between student loyalty and university image are examined by Pearson correlation coefficients. Structural equation model is constituted to determine whether pre-service teachers' university image perceptions predict university loyalty. According to the descriptive analysis result, pre-service teachers' university image perception related to their universities is at highest level towards quality image and at lowest level towards pleasure image. Besides, among pre-service teachers' student loyalty levels, identification dimension has the highest level compared with self-commitment and determination dimensions. According to the correlation analysis among research variables, moderate level and positive relations are determined among university image perception and student loyalty variables. Path analysis results explain that university image significantly predicts organizational identification, determination and commitment dimensions of student loyalty: the most predicted dimension is commitment and the lowest predicted dimension is organizational identification.

PurposeThis study aims to comprehend vocational preservice teachers' recalled experiences with the Cooperative Problem-based Learning (CPBL) pedagogical approach in an entrepreneurship course and to reveal how these experiences will impact their future teaching practice. The course under study intends to improve preservice teachers' entrepreneurial attitudes while equipping them with the skills necessary to create a comparable teaching strategy at school after graduation.Design/methodology/approachThis study used the semi-structured interview data to triangulate the qualitative data collected from the students' reflection journals. The data were thematically analyzed whereas the codes with comparable elements were combined, resulting in themes that describe the relevance of scaffolding used with each component of the MUSIC motivational model.FindingsThe results revealed that the student teachers who took part in the research stated in their comments how the scaffolds used in the CPBL sessions impacted their learning. Additionally, they could articulate the experiences that strengthened their perceptions regarding entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship education.Practical implicationsBy implementing scaffolded CPBL in entrepreneurship course during the teacher preparation program, the preservice teachers would be able to put a similar approach into the practice of their future teaching profession in guiding students to accomplish instructional outcomes.Originality/valueThis study highlights the importance of providing more innovative practices for entrepreneurship education across teacher preparation curricula to help develop the skills necessary for entering the future profession. The findings also emphasize the value of scaffolding in PBL, including expert, peer and activity design scaffolding. It also completes the body of research indicating that PBL-based entrepreneur education instruction can help students develop their entrepreneurial skills and attitudes while also providing a great chance to improve their teaching abilities.

Teacher educators across the nation face the increasingly challenging task to better prepare preservice teachers to work with students of diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Most preservice teachers are from White and middle-class backgrounds and have had limited experiences with cultures other than theirs (Ladson-Billings, 1995; Schmidt, 1998a, b). Their life and cultural experiences shape their beliefs and perceptions of students from other cultures (Cabello & Burstein, 1995; Pohan, 1996; Sleeter, 1995). In 2000, 85% of teachers are White and middle class (Ladson-Billings, 1995), but 33% of school-age children are minorities (Adler, 1993). Many teacher preparation programs include multicultural education courses in the curriculum (Goodwin, 1997; Grant, 1994; Zeichner et al., 1998). However, they are particularly ineffective in changing preservice teachers' beliefs about diversity and students of diverse backgrounds (Deering & Stanutz, 1995; Goodwin, 1997; McDiarmid & Price, 1993), enhancing preservice teachers' culturally relevant teaching (Goodwin, 1997; Guillaume, Zuniga-Hill, & Yee, 1995; Zeichner et al., 1998), and promoting critical reflections upon diversity issues within a broader sociopolitical context (Goodwin, 1997; McIntosh, 1988; Sleeter, 1995). Many researchers and teacher educators have investigated different approaches to enhance the effectiveness of multicultural education courses. One approach is to immerse preservice teachers in cultural communities different from theirs (e.g., Mahan, 1982; Wiest, 1998). Another is to place preservice teachers in schools with students of diverse backgrounds for field experiences or student teaching (Bennett, 1995; Colville-Hall, MacDonald, & Smolen, 1995; Vavrus, 1994). Few, if any, studies have specifically investigated how preservice teachers integrate multicultural understandings into literacy instruction for students of diverse backgrounds. Researchers (Nieto, 1996; Sleeter & Grant, 1999) have documented that diverse students continue to experience school failure and that lack of adequate literacy skills appears to be a primary cause for their low school achievement (Allington & Walmsley, 1995; Au, 1993). Preservice teachers must be able to link their understandings of diversity to teaching reading and writing. In the study I report on in this article, I explored two questions: What were preservice teachers' understandings of their cultural backgrounds and their students' cultural backgrounds? How did preservice teachers integrate their understandings of diversity into literacy instruction? The ABC's Model Schmidt (1998a, 1998b, 1999) developed the ABC's Model based on the following premises. One must be familiar with one's cultural background and values before understanding others' cultural backgrounds (Banks, 1994; Zeichner, 1993). Learning about others' life experiences exposes one to others' cultures (Schmidt, 1998a, 1998b). Cross-cultural analysis of one's own and others' cultures, in turn, enhances one's awareness of similarities and differences among various cultures (Spindler & Spindler, 1987). The ABC's Model (Schmidt, 1999) includes five components: * An autobiography, written in detail, by each student to include key life events related to education, family, religious tradition, recreation, victories, and defeats. * The biography of a person who is culturally different from the student, written from in-depth, unstructured interviews (Spradley, 1979) that include key life events. * A cross-cultural analysis of similarities and differences between the life stories is charted (Spindler & Spindler, 1987). * An analysis of cultural differences examined in writing with encouragement for students to explain personal discomforts and identify positive affect. * Modification for classroom practice and communication plans for literacy development and home/ school connections based on the preceding process are designed. …

Globally, public schools enroll culturally and linguistically diverse student populations and teacher preparation programs must assess the cultural competence of preservice teachers. Yet, few adequately tested measures of teacher cultural competence are available. In this research study, a sample of 396 preservice teachers were surveyed to evaluate psychometric properties of one cultural competence measure designed by Liang and Zhang (2009) and to determine how well the instrument's factors reflected the construct of cultural competence. Data were collected over a 2-year period from preservice teachers enrolled in their last semester of student teaching in public school settings. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were conducted along with a Schmid-Leiman solution due to strong interfactor correlations. Results revealed residualized first-order factors accounting for 47% of the variance and a second-order factor, Cultural Competence, which accounted for 53% of the variance explained. Implications for assessing preservice teachers' cultural competence and future research are discussed.

I have felt like a student ... because [Mary] is teaching me so many things and so sometimes we're in that role. But it's not me sitting on the other side of the desk. It's kind of like sitting beside her being a student. And, I have felt like we're colleagues when we share, particularly when we work with literature. ... We were able to feed off each other. It wasn't me so much learning, I mean I was learning, we were learning from each other. A student teacher in the Effective Mentoring in English Education (EMEE) project, Jessica (pseudonyms used), described the various relations she negotiated with her cooperating teacher, Mary. In this interview, she portrayed herself as both student and colleague. Later in the same conversation, Jessica described Mary as a friend who invited Jessica to dinner when her husband was out of town. Jessica's portrayal provides a glimpse into the importance she attached to her relationship with her mentor teacher, one in which she could find guidance, mutual learning, and friendship. This supportive, friendly relationship has not frequently appeared in the professional literature on preservice education. Most recent studies have focused on the student teachers' perceptions of their preservice experiences or the power cooperating teachers exert over their less experienced colleagues (Britzman, 1991; Vinz, 1996). In these studies, mentor teachers have often been viewed as impeding student teachers' professional growth rather than as promoting it. Considering the importance student teachers place on their practice teaching and the crucial role that mentor teachers play in this experience, the few portraits of effective mentors highlight the need for detailed examinations of effective mentoring in preservice teacher education. To this end, the EMEE project explored how effective mentors, such as Mary, supported student teachers during their practice teaching. We organized this project as a clinical partnership (Wagner, 1997). In these partnerships, teachers participate in reflexive, systematic inquiry sustained by the opportunity to engage in extended conversations about teaching practice (Wagner, 1997, p. 13). In the EMEE project, the cooperating teachers and student teachers served as both coresearchers and informants, exploring with us the significance of their evolving relationships for the education of new teachers. This research process was exploratory, emergent, and dialogic in character (Allen, Cary, & Delgado, 1995; Clark et al., 1996; Dyson, 1995). It emphasized the voices of teachers and student teachers in understanding experiences while it engaged them in expanding the boundaries of their own knowledge about teaching and professional growth. This approach and the topic of inquiry are significantly connected to contemporary thought on teacher development (Clifford & Green, 1996; Elliott, 1995; Hawkey, 1997; McNamara, 1995). Previous studies have suggested that mentors act as instructional models, sources of advice, and sounding boards for concerns about teaching; they challenge student teachers to think more broadly about their practice; and they guide the student teachers' professional development (Daloz, 1986; Elliott & Calderhead, 1993). Moreover, research suggests that mentoring relationships evolve over time in predictable ways, although student teachers' growth may be spurred by unanticipated but significant events (Fairbanks & Meritt, 1998; Maynard & Furlong, 1993; McIntyre & Hagger, 1993; Vinz, 1996). Current research suggests that mentoring relationships shape new teachers' professional practice in important ways (Hawkey, 1997). McNamara (1995) argues that the quality of mentoring influences student teachers' capacity to reflect on teaching strategies and to incorporate them into their own practice. In sum, these studies suggest that mentoring consists of complex social interactions that mentor teachers and student teachers construct and negotiate for a variety of professional purposes and in response to the contextual factors they encounter. …

Acknowledging the need for pre-service teachers to learn about language structures, many teacher preparation programs have incorporated grammar courses into their curriculum. Recently, there has been a push from Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) scholars to switch to more functional views of grammar in these courses. Such a switch, scholars claim, can better prepare pre-service teachers (PST) for writing across the curriculum and for teaching writing to their prospective students. Despite the potential benefits, many efl teacher preparation programs are still cautious about providing instruction on SFL. This has created a gap in terms of how pre-service teachers would respond to this type of instruction. Considering this gap, scholars from a university in Medellín, Colombia implemented a three-month pedagogical unit within a grammar course, which intended to move pre-service teachers from traditional to functional views of grammar. As they did this, they conducted a case study which explored how psts responded to the implementation of this unit. Data analysis shows that psts’ responses do not always move in a straight line, that is, from resistance, to caution, to openness, but may very well vary depending on the sfl concept or premise that is being taught. The results suggest that English grammar courses offered in teacher preparation programs can have traditional grammar as a starting point and then move PSTs towards more functional and critical views. They also suggest the need to identify some strategies that could be used with PSTs who show either caution or resistance.

Introduction: Although there is ambiguity about the elements of teacher knowledge, all researchers accept that being able to anticipate what errors can be made, the reasons for and the strategies to overcome these errors, in short, the knowledge of students is important for student achievement. In this study, knowledge of students refers to being aware of students’ possible errors and underlying reasons for these errors and knowing how to overcome these errors. Based on this consideration, the purpose of this study is to investigate pre-service elementary teachers’ knowledge of students on the subtraction topic. Methods: Considering the purpose, the data were collected from 118 pre-service elementary teachers who were enrolled in a four-year Elementary Teacher Education program via a task-based questionnaire related to the topic of subtraction and semi-structured interviews following the questionnaire. The task-based questionnaire included three completed incorrect subtraction tasks and was prepared considering the related literature and the elementary school mathematics curriculum of Turkey. Each task in the questionnaire contained a different type of error. The pre-service elementary teachers’ answers to the task-based questionnaire were categorized as correct, partially correct, wrong, or no answer by means of categorical analysis. The pre-service elementary teachers who gave correct and partially correct answers to the tasks were asked to participate in the second part of the study to learn their possible strategies to overcome the errors made in the tasks. Results: As a result of the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the pre-service elementary teachers’ responses, it was found that their knowledge of students for subtraction is limited. Specifically, although the pre-service elementary teachers were partially able to identify the errors in the first and second task, they were not able to identify the error in the third task. Furthermore, they were better able to determine a more commonly occurring subtraction error compared to the uncommon ones. The pre-service elementary teachers could not identify the underlying reasons that led the students to the errors. They could not explain what conceptual knowledge related to the topic of subtraction the student lacked that resulted in the errors. As the pre-service teachers did not attain these reasons, they were not able to provide strategies to overcome these errors different than restating the rules or procedures to overcome students’ errors. Discussion: Only being able to identify the errors is not enough to make the instruction effective. Teachers also need to know and provide a rationale for why the errors happen and how to overcome them (Even & Tirosh, 1995). Contrary to this statement, the pre-service elementary teachers in this study could not attempt to understand the students’ thinking or could not explain the reasons behind students’ errors with the notion of subtraction. Son (2013) emphasizes that pre-service teachers tend to explain the reasons for students’ errors as procedural. Similar to this emphasis, the pre-service teachers identified the errors as resulting from not applying procedures carefully or not enough knowing algorithms to find correct solutions. However, without addressing the reasons or focusing on procedures does not promote students’ understanding of the related topic (An, Kulm, & Wu, 2004). The pre-service teachers’ difficulties in identifying the possible conceptual reasons may result from deficits in knowledge of students (Fennema & Franke, 1992; Ball et al., 2008). Limitations: The findings were limited with the responses of the pre-service elementary teachers participating in this study. Moreover, the pre-service elementary teachers’ knowledge of students was investigated within the scope of subtraction. Conclusions: Although the pre-service elementary teachers could identify students’ errors on subtraction, they had difficulty in identifying the reasons and suggesting strategies to overcome the errors. Therefore, it can be concluded that the pre-service teachers’ knowledge of students for the topic of subtraction is limited. An implication of this is that teacher educators need to include error-analysis tasks to help pre-service teachers be aware of the importance of their knowledge of students.