Section archive - Preservice Teachers

This article examines the professional identities preservice early childhood teachers take up and speak into action while participating in classes focused on teaching in child care. Particular ways in which the preservice teachers talked about images of children and quality in early childhood are scrutinized for how discourses work to constitute the professional identities of preservice early childhood teachers. The findings revealed that the participants drew on a range of competing discourses available to them, through their degree, and from elsewhere to describe the work of teaching young children and teaching in child care. These competing and colliding discourses, it is argued produce an identity of preservice teachers as ‘heroic victims.’

This study investigated how to educate student teachers to develop a focus on student learning during teacher education. The designed learning environment characterized by the use of authentic contexts, authentic tasks and reflective dialogues. The study indicates that it is possible to change student teachers’ conceptions in a relative short period of time, even though there were substantial differences between student teachers. More specifically, six student teachers developed more constructivist and less transmissive conceptions as a result of the designed learning environment. The other four student teachers showed the same change in the drawings, and also developed more or maintained constructivist conceptions as shown in the metaphors, but maintained or showed less constructivist conceptions in the questionnaires.

This study examined the sense of efficacy of final-year Australian pre-service primary teachers and the sources of information that contributed to it. The findings revealed that these beginning teachers have a healthy sense of efficacy for teaching as they begin their professional lives, with the majority feeling they can influence the education of their students quite a bit. Furthermore, the results suggest that respondents did not make any differentiation between classroom management, instruction or student engagement tasks. Finally, the pre-service teachers appeared to use four distinct sources of information when assessing their sense of efficacy in classroom behaviour management: enactive mastery experiences/verbal persuasion, personal qualities, vicarious experiences and physiological and affective states.

This article used a mixed-methods design to explore general education pre-service teachers’ concerns regarding the implementation of Response to Intervention (RTI) based on the Concerns-Based Adoption Model. Results suggest pre-service teachers focused their concerns on feeling unprepared and not understanding how to effectively implement RTI.