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Research over the last decade or so has made it clear that quality teachers matter to student achievement. What is less clear is the ways in which they matter and how we can prepare such high-quality teachers. Nowhere is this lack of clarity more evident than in special education, where we have few studies on teacher quality and even fewer studies on the type of preparation opportunities that would lead to high quality. Thus, it is difficult to make evidence-based decisions about how quality special education teachers should be defined and prepared. As a field, we have to turn to research in general education to provide a sense of some of the dimensions of teacher quality and effective teacher education. In this chapter, we provide a summary of the research on characteristics of highly qualified teachers and what we know from the research on teacher education and professional development that might foster these qualities, both in general and in special education. Part of our discussion centers on the concerns surrounding this body of research and the challenges of applying the findings to the field of special education. Although these challenges pose considerable problems, we are optimistic that potential solutions exist and can be reached through an alignment of initial teacher education and induction.

This chapter details our story of developing and using a series of videocases in elementary science teacher preparation. The Reflecting on Elementary Science videocases provide models of best practices in reform-based elementary science teaching. They reduce the complexity of teaching into a manageable story situated in a specific context, so that preservice teachers can uncover and reflect upon their theories about science learning and teaching. Through an accompanying research program, we have found that the videocases perturb student thinking and catalyze them to think like a teacher as they refine their science education theories.

To be a writer, one must write. Research shows when teachers write and identify as writers, they transfer their writing practice into their classroom, positively impacting their students' writing development. Shifting instructional practices or identities requires educators to self-determine a gap in order to take on transformative learning experiences, such as mentoring, professional development, or modeled learning. Often professional development is chosen by administrators for educators to shift their instructional practice, ignoring a teacher's curriculum-maker role, and best-loved self identity. This narrative inquiry analysis details one teacher-writer in a creative writing professional development residency as she supports educators with a goal to transform educators into teacher-writers. This chapter includes the small step successes and systematic struggles the author faced as she modeled the writer's craft and writer's workshop strategies with her teachers. The chapter concludes with a discussion on the important role teachers have to decide, navigate, and discover their own best-loved self-teaching identity.

This paper reports on the ways in which a group of middle school students who received character education in elementary school define and experience character. The research was designed to improve our understanding of the meanings that the children ascribe to their character lessons in the long term, and to determine whether they see connections between these lessons and their experiences with character in middle school. The data come from interviews with 24 children who attended five different elementary schools in one town that used the Character Counts! curriculum at the time of the study. The students were questioned about their understanding of the curriculum and their own personal experiences with character-related issues in middle school. The results demonstrate that the elementary school character lessons are carried forward. Children are able to recall the formal meaning of many of the character traits that they studied. As they graduate to middle school, however, peer culture assumes an increasingly important role and their lived experience of character become more complex. Thus, the preteens studied here are actively working to reconcile the differences between character as a “learned,” and then a “lived” experience. While maturation and character lessons received beyond school may confound these findings, the results presented here suggest the need to bridge, and then perhaps adapt character programming to empower adolescent input and embrace the role of peer culture in defining and then redefining character.

This chapter discusses the findings of a qualitative study conducted on the US–Mexico border to investigate preservice bilingual teachers’ understandings of the effective practices needed to teach content in bilingual classrooms. Specifically, participants’ understandings of teaching language through content to emergent bilinguals and the role of academic language in a content methods course taught in Spanish for preservice bilingual teachers were explored. The results of the study show that preservice bilingual teachers struggled to internalize how to develop language objectives that embed the four language domains as well as the three levels of academic language into their content lessons. Although participants emphasized vocabulary development, they integrated multiple scaffolding strategies to support emergent bilinguals. Moreover, although preservice bilingual teachers struggled with standard Spanish, they used translanguaging to navigate the discourse of education in their content lessons. The use of academic Spanish was also evident in participants’ planning of instruction. The authors contend that bilingual teacher preparation would benefit from the implementation of a dynamic bilingual curriculum that: (a) incorporates sustained opportunities across coursework for preservice bilingual teachers to strengthen their understanding of content teaching and academic language development for emergent bilinguals; (b) values preservice bilingual teachers’ language varieties, develops metalinguistic awareness, and fosters the ability to navigate between language registers for teaching and learning; and (c) values translanguaging as a pedagogical strategy that provides access to content and language development.

Thirty-two qualitative research reports on co-teaching in inclusive classrooms, identified through a comprehensive literature search, are reviewed. Studies have included significant diversity in grade level, geographical location, setting, and took place in three different countries. Overall, teachers and administrators reported a high degree of satisfaction with co-teaching. However, a number of needs were also addressed, including administrative support, appropriate caseloads, planning time, student skill level, and co-teacher compatibility. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

This chapter describes a partnership model in which a university in the United States facilitated cultural exchanges between elementary students in US schools with students in international schools in Central and South America. Through the partnerships, faculty members at the university were able to facilitate opportunities for elementary students to communicate and share experiences through the use of virtual field trips (VFTs) and gardening projects. These exchanges were achieved through the use of multiple Web 2.0 tools that allowed interaction between students. They led to the engagement of students both locally and globally by providing them with a dynamic environment, in which they could explore, discover, experiment, and learn. Descriptions of the challenges faced, lessons learned, and recommendations for educators are also included.

This chapter presents innovative approaches to active learning that were introduced into the teaching of preservice teachers at the Faculty of Education of University of West Bohemia, Pilsen, in the Czech Republic. Over the last three years, the Technology-Enhanced Learning course has seen substantial innovations in both the content and use of teaching strategies designed to prepare the students for their professional lives. The whole update of the course was implemented using the results of action research – all individual changes were rigorously tracked and analyzed. The state of the art in the active learning domain in education of preservice teachers is presented in this chapter.

There is a description of the procedure to update the course, based on the reflections of teachers and feedback from students, gathered during action research. Detailed evaluations of particular methods of active learning that have been proven in teaching are provided.

Besides practical activities with tablets and smartphones, during which students familiarize themselves with various types of applications and reflect on their use in teaching, the course was extended by the use of practical aids for the efficient inclusion of mobile technologies for teaching – the Czech version of Allan Carrington’s Padagogy Wheel. This aid is derived from the revised Bloom’s taxonomy and SAMR model and helps the systematic reflection of preservice teachers when preparing for technology-enhanced teaching.

A significant part of the teaching consists of cooperative projects between preservice teachers and pupils of elementary schools – for example, the preservice teachers help elementary school pupils discover possibilities of virtual reality during Google Cardboard activities, or preservice teachers in teams with elementary school pupils create digital stories together on the topic of Internet safety.

The innovative approach to active teaching in the Technology-Enhanced Learning course is apparent even during the exam. In the course of the exam, students process, present, and defend a lesson plan for the implementation of an activity using digital technologies.

Throughout the learning, as well as at the end, preservice teachers are encouraged to reflect on the teaching in the Technology-Enhanced Learning subject.