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In this National Board-commissioned study, we examined types of feedback that teacher candidates for certification might receive along with their score reports after completing the Board's assessment process. We designed three standardized forms of feedback and interviewed 29 teachers from the 1993–1994 Early Adolescent/Generalist cohort about their preferences for each of the feedback options and about the inferences that they drew about their performance based on each type. The three feedback formats were (a) cases – extended descriptions of actual performances, annotated with scorer notes; (b) performance syntheses – brief descriptions of the scoring criteria accompanied by a variety of excerpts from candidate materials portraying performances at each level; and (c) illustrative summaries – evaluative descriptions of various candidate responses. Teachers reported that, of the three standardized formats offered to them, they preferred the cases format with its extended descriptions of an actual performance accompanied by annotated scoring notes. In terms of learning effects, candidates drew reasonably accurate inferences about their performance based on both cases and performance syntheses. The central conclusion we reached based on these findings was that feedback needs to be clearly organized around the scoring criteria for the exercise, and that examples of actual performances illustrating the application of the scoring criteria are important. However, teachers also reported that they would have preferred individualized, customized feedback on their own performance, although this option was not offered by the Board. As well, teachers indicated they would have preferred receiving the standardized feedback as “feedfront” to use in guiding them in their teaching and in preparing their assessment materials.

This study reports on changes made within the study, plan, teach and reflect steps of lesson study with pre-service teachers who were learning to teach within a disciplinary literacy course.

Using methods associated with formative experiments and design-based research, this study gathered data over four iterations of the disciplinary literacy course. Data included the course materials, pre-service teachers’ written work, observational notes from research lessons, transcripts of post-lesson discussions and teacher-educators’ analysis sessions and pre-service teachers’ post-program interviews. Data were analyzed within and across iterations.

Initial adjustments to the lesson study process focused on the reflect step, as we learned to better scaffold pre-service teachers sharing of observational data from research lessons. Later adjustments occurred in the study and plan steps, as we refined the design of four-day lesson sequences that better supported pre-service teachers’ attention to disciplinary literacy while providing room for their instructional mentors to provide specific team-based feedback. Adjustments to the teach step included reteaching and more explicit attention to literacy objectives.

This paper contributes to the literature by explicitly applying formative experiment and design-based research methods to the implementation of lesson study with pre-service teachers. Furthermore, it contributes examples of lesson study within a disciplinary literacy context, expanding the examples of lesson study’s applicability across content areas.

This study was concerned with relationships between selected candidate characteristics and both candidates' immediate reactions to interviews and interviewers' evaluations of them. Candidates' self‐reported academic performance was unrelated to their immediate reactions to interviews. Candidates whose academic performance was poor were judged to be weak candidates by interviewers. Interviewers also saw these candidates as less intelligent. Candidates who came from working class background were more highly motivated to succeed and also tended to be more anxious before interviews. However, social class background was unrelated to interviewer judgments. There were a number of relationships between candidates' recollections of their affective responses during past interviews and their immediate reactions to the interviews studied here. Compared with other candidates, those who had disliked being interviewed in the past were more anxious and less confident about their interviews and also liked interviewers less personally. These negative affective responses were also associated with poor evaluations from interviewers.

The purpose of this paper is to cover the inaugural UK employment candidate experience awards (The C&Es). It aims to include details of the program, best practice case studies and some of the 2012 C&Es winner success stories.

This paper draws on research findings from participating organizations that shared data on their candidate experience processes and practices. This also includes research findings from 857 candidates who applied to these organizations. References may also be made to the North American research data – the second year has just concluded – with 90 participating companies and 17,500 candidate responses. Some of the organizations featured include UK winners GE Capital, Risk Management Solution and Avanade, and North American winners Adidas Group and Deloitte.

Organizations which do not recognize the importance of providing good candidate experience practices will find it increasingly difficult to source the right talent. Candidates expect a return on investment, and time invested will become the currency that fuels their expectations. Their key expectation/requirement will be timely, accurate and transparent communication. A personalized experience, and all that entails, will become the norm.

The paper provides evidenced research findings which were verified by candidates who experienced part or all of the organizations' recruitment processes.

In this chapter, we explore two intersecting plotlines of teacher knowledge and content knowledge through an experience in which we engaged our teacher candidates during our mathematics methods course. Teacher candidates were tasked with the challenge of creating hands-on, interactive activities for small groups of fifth-grade students based on a selected Common Core State Standard for Mathematics (CCSS-M) related to the area of fractions. Responsible for both planning and preparing their activities, the teacher candidates were the curriculum designers. What we designed as the practice teaching activity involved a morning of planning and implementing a fraction activity with small groups of fifth-graders in short sessions, making adjustments, prompting and cueing students, extending learning, managing behaviors and distractibility – experiencing the early challenges and rewards of their first experiences in teaching – gaining practice and feedback. Forming the core of this chapter is a narrative construction of Michelle’s personal experience working with teacher candidates and fifth-grade students in practice teaching spaces for the first time, discovering moments along with our students, when they bridged the expansive gap from living as education students to feeling like beginning teachers. Teacher candidates’ responses to the experience and reflections on their challenges and successes are shared.

In this chapter, we discuss how to use technology to enhance teacher education through the discussion of teacher education programs at two Maryland universities. University of Maryland University College, a public university, was founded to address the needs of the military overseas following the end of World War II, as an offshoot of the University of Maryland College Park. It has become the largest primarily online public, not for profit, university in the United States. Its Master of Arts in teaching program was reinstituted in 2009, after a several year hiatus. The second university, Bowie State University (BSU), is a more traditional, historically black university (HBCU) founded as a teacher education institution in the 1800s and has been training teachers ever since. Both institutions of higher education are part of the University System of Maryland and the teacher education programs are certified by the Maryland State Department of Education (MSDE). These two universities were selected to highlight how different types of universities are implementing technology into their teacher education programs. The distinction illustrates a fully online teacher education program and a fully face-to-face teacher education program and the nuances between the two. These distinctions offer a broader view of how technology is used to enhance teacher education and to offer equal opportunity to students who want to become teachers. The chapter focuses on the uses of technology for the instruction of teacher candidates’ field experiences and internships. Technology enhancements provided in teacher preparation courses for student academic instruction and university faculty and school personnel training in the use of technology and Web 2.0 tools are discussed.

English teacher candidates have limited opportunities to examine classroom-based discussions about LGBTQ-themed texts and heteronormativity in teacher education courses. This chapter presents one effort to address this issue using a video-based field experience in the English Methods course that demonstrated a critical unit of instruction about the play, Angels in America. The chapter provides a description of the project and English teacher candidates’ perspectives about what they learned for English educators interested in devising similar projects for their courses.

National Board Certified Teachers (NBCTs) are highly accomplished teachers who have learned to deprivatize their teaching practice, and hence provide a valuable model for teacher leadership. This chapter, which focuses on NBCTs as mentors of teacher candidates in a professional development school (PDS) setting, blends the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards’ Five Core Propositions, Teacher Leadership Exploratory Consortium Standards, and National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education PDS Standards to operationalize teacher leadership among four NBCTs. Utilizing multiple case-study research methods, data were gathered using prereflections, weekly e-mail prompts, and end-of-semester interviews. Six common threads focus on NBCTs serving as bridges from preservice to in-service teaching and creating distributed leadership opportunities.

Campaign contributions are typically seen as a strategic investment for firms; recent empirical evidence, however, has shown few connections between firms’ contributions and regulatory or performance improvements, prompting researchers to explore agency-based explanations for corporate politics. By studying intrafirm campaign contributions of CEOs and political action committees (PACs), we investigate two hypotheses related to public politics and demonstrate that strategic and agency-based motivations may hold simultaneously. Exploiting transaction-level data, with over 6.8 million observations, we show that (i) when PACs give to specific candidates, executives give to the same candidates, especially those who are strategically important to the firm; and (ii) when executives give to candidates who are not strategically important, PACs give to the same candidates potentially due to agency problems within the firm.