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Focuses on the needs of recent immigrant children in Canadian cities. Outlines the problems teachers face in the assessment, placement in classes and teaching of recent immigrant children in a Winnipeg area elementary school. Suggests that there should be specific policies relating to the education of these children taking into account the sociological realities of school life. The policies should provide a context and the resources to support school and classroom practices that enable teachers to define and operationalize sound educational experiences for immigrant children.

States that historically, students with disabilities in the public schools in the USA were subjected to discrimination in the form of segregation from non‐disabled students. Also reports that much of this discrimination has subsided in recent years owing to successful advocacy by parents and community organizations before the Congress of the United States and both the federal and state judiciary. Reveals that national legislation was created so as to protect the education rights of such students and the courts have provided tests for their integration into school systems. Notes that, currently, there is some concern that this advocacy has gone too far and that court decisions authorizing “full inclusion” misinterpret the full extent of the law. Examines the scope of education for disabled children and provides a legal analysis of the educational placement of students with disabilities in the “least restrictive environment”.

In this paper, the author extends the current research on standardized performance assessments in preservice education by moving with novice teachers from their student teaching experiences into their first years as fully certified classroom teachers. Here, the author draws on scholarship that conceptualizes literacies as performative (Alexander, 2005; Youdell, 2010) to examine how engaging in a standardized performance assessment process shaped the teaching identities that participants carried into their first years of teaching in the field.

Through a qualitative case study, the author investigates the experiences of a group of six novice elementary educators in their first years in the classroom after completing the standardized performance assessment Educative Performance Assessment as a major component of their certification program. Data, which included focus group and individual interviews and artifacts (instructional handouts, teaching videos, lesson plans, written reflective commentaries), were analyzed through a performance lens.

Findings highlight how engaging with a standardized performance assessment shaped the meanings that participants made of their teaching practices, including lesson planning and implementation for and with students from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

This paper offers insights that can support teacher educators working toward preparing teachers for work with diverse students in public school classrooms that might produce more equitable policies, practices and transformative reforms, particularly for historically marginalized groups.

Although special education was built upon the foundation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the discrimination that many racialized students receiving special education services experience cannot be denied. Many culturally, ethnically, and linguistically diverse students receiving special education services encounter labels that perpetuate racism and ableism and lead to inequitable access to services and resources necessary for more positive postsecondary outcomes. By honoring intersectionality and dismantling the singular identity, educators can become change agents and shift the historic oppressive narrative to create a system of empowerment as these individuals transition from transitional kindergarten to age 21 special education programs (TK-21) schools into adulthood.

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 both elementary schools and elementary teacher education programs, social studies is marginalized while standards require increasingly more ambitious reasoning, reading, and writing in social studies than has historically been documented in American elementary schools. The purpose of this paper is to explain the challenges that elementary social studies teacher educators face in preparing elementary school teachers to facilitate the kind of ambitious social studies envisioned in the NCSS’s C3 Framework and advocate an approach to successfully address these challenges.

This paper articulates a targeted and ambitious approach to elementary social studies teacher education. The authors describe five recommendations from the teacher education literature for supporting preservice teachers in learning disciplinary-oriented social studies teaching, recommendations that guided the redesign of the social studies methods course. The authors then highlight key aspects of the redesigned methods course and demonstrate how the authors engaged the challenges inherent in the work of elementary social studies teacher education.

Although this paper is not arranged in such a way as to substantiate empirical findings, the purpose of the paper is to demonstrate an approach to elementary social studies education aligned with extant literature on preparing teachers to engage in reform teaching practices, specifically those disciplinary oriented practices suggested in NCSS’s C3 Framework. As such, the paper should be read as a perspective on practice.

The type of disciplinary-oriented approach described here is increasingly under investigation in secondary teacher education research and similar approaches are under investigation in elementary math and science education research. To the authors’ knowledge, the approach is novel in elementary social studies education. Furthermore, the authors believe it offers a direction for researchers interested in gaps in the literature related to practice based teacher education and disciplinary-oriented social studies teacher education.

The approach described here offers specific guidance and resources for teacher educators who are struggling with the challenges of the contemporary social studies education landscape and/or who wish to focus methods courses in disciplinary ways.

Research in social studied education has demonstrated that when students are exposed to disciplinary practices in social studies, their literacy skills improve and they learn analytical skills that support their development as citizens (consumption of media, participation in public discourse, ability to discern arguments).

As noted above, the approach described here is novel in elementary social studies education. Combining a disciplinary approach with a practice-based frame in elementary social studies represents an opportunity for empirical research and offers new approaches to the practice of teacher education and early career professional development.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how data are used in classroom placement routines. The authors explore educators’ assumptions about the purposes of the classroom placement routine, detailing the ostensive (i.e. structure and template) and performative aspects of the routine itself, and the implications of data use for equity and leadership practices.

Using a multi-site case study involving in-depth interviews of teacher and school leaders and observations of meetings, the authors examined the role that data played in classroom placement routines in three elementary schools in the USA.

Findings show that educators across schools collected similar types of multi-dimensional data; however, analysis and decision-making processes varied based on their assumptions and goals. Assessing student needs holistically and balancing students across classes based on academic diversity, behavioral or socio-emotional needs, gender and teacher workload were consistent patterns. There was a distinct difference between collecting data and actually using it as a basis of decision making.

These findings highlight the importance of using in-depth observations to understand data use in schools. Educators’ assumptions and philosophies about classroom placement contributed to the pattern of discussion and decisions made throughout the routines. Delving deeper into how data are used in specific routines and organizational contexts can illuminate how data use is socially constructed and enacted for equity.

Educators who guide school routines have the power to maintain taken-for-granted assumptions about students, or to create counter-narratives.

This study provides insights into classroom and student placement processes by emphasizing the social and interactional dimensions of data use as they unfold in practice. It also extends empirical knowledge about the purposes, dimensions, and uses of data-driven decision making models.

Students with learning disabilities are a large part of the population of students with disabilities as well as the total student body. In fact, for many students the general education classroom is where most of these students acquire their content knowledge. This, however, is not the only school placement in which students can receive services. This chapter will describe the historical perspectives regarding placement of students with learning disabilities. Next, it will compare the different instructional settings and interventions that have been effective for these individuals. The impact of the individualized education program will be discussed as well as controversial issues regarding the placement of these students. After reading this chapter readers will have a better understanding of placement issues surrounding students with learning disabilities.

Since the passage of Public Law 94-142, federal law has prioritized the education of students with disabilities with their non-disabled peers in the context of the general education classroom. This chapter examines the progress, and often lack thereof, with regard to educating students with extensive and pervasive support needs in inclusive settings. We examine current trends in placement, factors that contribute to those placement practices, and what IDEA says about the education of students with extensive and pervasive support needs. We examine what the research suggests happens in substantially segregated settings and then, in contrast, examine impacts and outcomes for students with extensive and pervasive support needs who are educated in inclusive settings. We also examine trends resulting from changing paradigms of disability that provide new opportunities for re-invigorating efforts to educate students with extensive and pervasive support needs in inclusive classrooms.

The process of placing students into special education programming often begins with the teacher being able to identify appropriate educational placements (Rizza & Morrison, 2003). It is important that educators know how decisions regarding placement will impact the daily lives of students including their social interactions with peers and the curriculum used to service students. The least restrictive environment (LRE) mandate of the Education of All Handicapped Children's Act of 1975, later reauthorized as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) of 1990 stated that students with disabilities must be educated with non disabled peers to the “maximum extent appropriate,” “and that they may be removed from the general education environment only if they cannot be satisfactorily educated with the use of supplementary aides and services” (Hosp & Reschly, 2003, p. 68). Furthermore, the LRE ensures that students with disabilities must have access to the general curriculum and be taught with their nondisabled peers (Turnbull, 2003). As a result, fully integrated applications of learning strategies designed originally for students with disabilities are implemented, and scores on No Child Left Behind (NCLB) have increased, and sanctioned accountability measures for all students have increased (Sailor & Roger, 2005).