During the course of an Initial Teacher Education programme, beginning teachers develop strong professional relationships. This study investigates the nature of these webs of relationships as networks, from a teacher's ego-centric perspective. Three case studies, set within a wider sample of 11 secondary school science teachers leaving one UK university's PostGraduate Certificate in Education, were studied. The focus of the paper is on how the teachers used others to help shape their sense of belonging to this, their new workplace. The paper develops ideas from network theories to argue that membership of the communities are a subset of the professional inter-relationships teachers utilise for their professional development.

The goal of this study is to investigate the nature of student-teachers' learning practices in primary school chemistry classroom contexts. The theoretical approach of this study is based on the sociocultural view of learning and development. Forty university students participated in the study at the at the Department of Educational Sciences and Teacher Education, Oulu University, Finland. This qualitative case study follows a three-step research design: pre-narrative, intervention and post-narrative, in order to highlight the practices involved in teacher learning and development.

This paper explores how a group of engaged, enquiring teachers orient themselves towards research. The evidence discussed in this paper comes from work undertaken by teachers in the Learning to Learn Phase 3 Evaluation. This action research project ran for three years in primary and secondary schools in three clusters across UK. The paper focuses on identifying those aspects of being involved in L2L that support teachers' learning and the way that the teachers themselves understand the impact on their professional development. The findings contribute to our understanding of the role of inquiry and research in schools in supporting professional learning by suggesting how tools and models of working are developed.

In this essay, the author takes a serious look at constructivist teaching practices highlighting both the promises and potential problems of these practices. The author argues that constructivist teaching has often been misinterpreted and misused, resulting in learning practices that neither challenge students nor address their needs. The author also presents two examples that illustrate the effective use of constructivist teaching and explains what makes them successful. The author concludes that as evidenced by the examples, constructivist teaching can produce tremendous results when used correctly and judiciously; it can also lead to poor results and ineffective learning when it is misconstrued or misused.

This article describes strategies used by the authors to assist preservice social studies teachers with understanding and applying models and practices for effectively integrating technology into their future classrooms—thus, strengthening the link between technology, pedagogy and content. Efforts with preservice teachers described here have been informed by the authors’ successes assisting in-service teachers with understanding how technology can empower inquiry-based teaching practices in social studies classrooms, as well as efforts to more fully integrate technology into the overall teacher education programs at the authors’ institutions.

In this paper, the authors’ goal is to explore how teacher candidates are inclined to think through issues of content and pedagogy, the cultural backgrounds of their students, and the values driving their moral reasoning. The authors provide a heuristic that organizes dispositions around three domains - intellectual, cultural, and moral. The authors use a small sample of teacher candidate journal entries to ground the discussion of each disposition domain. The authors offer recommendations for how teacher education programs can provide opportunities for prospective teachers to consider their dispositions and to identify how their dispositions influence teaching decisions.