Section archive - Teacher Education Programs

The article describes a new preservice teacher education called classmates, a collaboration between several Australian universities. Classmates aims to prepare pre-service teachers to work in challenging, hard-to-staff schools. These contexts typically have socially disadvantaged populations and annually experience teacher shortages and high teacher turnover, particularly amongst beginning and early career teachers.

Training teachers to supervise paraeducators is critical to their effective and ethical use in school programs (Drecktrah, 2000; May & Marozas, 1986; Wallace et al., 2001). This project has demonstrated that an online model for delivery of instruction can be developed at one university site and implemented effectively in other preparation programs to increase preservice teachers' and their instructors' knowledge of topics and awareness of issues in supervising paraeducators.

Web-based instruction (WBI), including both online courses and online degree programs, offer flexibility to students and instructors and are now typical in higher education programs. Researchers compared WBI to traditional instruction for teaching undergraduate students about students with disabilities. Forty-four students participated in this study. Half were enrolled in the Web-based section of the course; half were enrolled in the traditional section.

The government supported study in Scotland, explored behavior changes and absences from students. The study followed one-year study, and explored all 32 authorities in Scotland, a sample of students in training in two universities and teachers, School principal and pupils in eight case study schools, and also a sample of their parents. Two dominant models emerged from the data: Primary school teachers were able to support their students, and secondary school teachers thought it a separate function, they refused to undertake.