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Gaps or Bridges in Multicultural Teacher Education: A Q Study of Attitudes toward Student Diversity
This article aimed to examine both preservice teachers’ and teacher educators’ attitudes toward student diversity. Two array groups emerged: Students Are Students and Diversity Advocates. The authors find gaps in attitudes toward student diversity between the two array groups. These gaps indicate both consensual and divided attitudes toward student diversity.However, a major gap in attitudes toward student diversity between the two groups is similarity versus diversity: while one group highlights similarity among students, the other group appeals for the importance of acknowledging and addressing student diversity.
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Leveling the Field: Negotiating Positions of Power as a Preservice Teacher
Drawn from a larger study, the authors examine how one preservice teacher negotiated positions of power with students in ways that enabled and prohibited him from enacting his preferred teacher identities. Specifically, this study illustrates how video analysis opened opportunities for this preservice teacher to reflect on the relationship between positions of power and identity enactment during moment-to-moment classroom interactions. The analysis challenged the preservice teacher to study how he positioned himself as a teacher, how students positioned him, and how he positioned students during classroom interactions.
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Investigating Teacher Efficacy: Comparing Preservice and Inservice Teachers with Different Levels of Experience
This research examined differences in the levels of domain-specific and general efficacy across groups of preservice and inservice teachers. The participants divided into four classifications: the preservice teacher—prior, preservice teacher – post, novice teacher and experienced teacher. The findings revealed that experienced teachers held the highest general teaching efficacy as well as the highest efficacy with regards to domain-specific areas such as student engagement and classroom management.
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Systematic Design of Blended PBL: Exploring the Design Experiences and Support Needs of PBL Novices in an Online Environment
This study aims to inform teacher educators, professional development specialists, and researchers how they can better support teachers in designing blended PBL, especially in online environments. The study focused on an individual project, which required the participants to design a blended PBL lesson for their selected target audience. The results of this study suggest that professional development programs provide PBL novices with (a) an opportunity to design the whole PBL process using a systematic approach, (b) synchronous, interactive questioning sessions and customized scaffolding, (c) concise and easy-to-understand guidelines and checklists, and (d) opportunities to have a successful experience with PBL design.
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Shifting Sands in the United Arab Emirates: Effecting Conceptual Change for Creativity in Early Childhood Teacher Education
The purpose of this study was to explore conceptions held by student teachers of creativity and to examine conceptual changes they experience during a series of workshops informed by the Conceptual Change Model. The findings reveal that during the course of the workshops, the participants changed their vision of their role as teachers from managers who deliver the curriculum and assess it, to observers and facilitators of learning who are interested in creatively engaging children. Furthermore, by the end of the workshops, participants reported being comfortable working with creativity and felt they could benefit the school by bridging a perceived gap in readiness to teach for creativity.
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