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An analysis of traditional authoritarian preservice teacher development approaches in Pakistan demonstrates that they develop teachers as technicians who carbon copy the same authoritarian training model in their classrooms. The more contemporary approaches to teacher education with leadership development focus are mostly limited to in-service teacher education programs. The key dilemma with in-service education is that once the teachers have received higher qualification they tend to move out of the classrooms to assume management positions. What Pakistan requires is classroom teacher leaders who have the capacity to initiate and sustain school improvement. I propose the pedagogy of transformation, which is based on the principles of participation and emancipation suited to develop preservice teachers as active professionals who have the capacity to influence and drive improvements in their own learning and in the learning of the children. The transformation pedagogy encompasses five specific instructional strategies for nurturing teachers’ leadership skills in the current preservice teacher preparation program in Pakistan. These are: encourage active involvement and delegation of authority among preservice teachers, engage preservice teachers in critical analysis and meta-cognitive tasks, building collaborative teams and professional networks among preservice teachers, providing preservice teachers with experience of working with real-life teacher leaders, and develop preservice teachers’ moral and ethical reasoning. I bring the discussion to a closure in the form of a framework which encompasses key elements of the proposed pedagogy. The framework can be adopted or adapted to give due considerations to the complexities of the contexts where it is being implemented.

Learning through formal and informal experiences is critical for building content knowledge, pedagogical skills, and self-efficacy/confidence for preservice teachers. teachHOUSTON offers numerous teacher enhancement opportunities outside the teacher education courses which allows preservice teachers to connect to the real world which includes being able to relate to a diverse population of students and to understand how the course content can be related to them, their families, and communities in their everyday experiences. Through formal and informal experiences such as professional development workshops, discipline specific courses, research experiences, and internships, preservice teachers have the opportunity to engage in hands-on science activities they can use with their students, develop lessons, and gain knowledge on how to deliver this content while managing their classroom. This chapter will give an overview of the formal and informal experiences offered through teachHOUSTON with a highlight on the structure and content of the six week Noyce Internship Program which engaged interns as counselors and teaching assistants in a summer STEM camp for underserved middle school students and introduces the interns to interactive sessions that model promising practices for teaching.

In recent years, we have seen a paradox. No matter how much the government strives to incorporate technology into classrooms as a learning resource for students, both national and international reports prove that this is a difficult aim to achieve purpose. Training both preservice and in-service teachers is vitally important for technology to become part of everyday school life. But to achieve this, we must move away from the techno-centric focus of technology. This chapter analyzes the importance of focusing on implementing technologies in the learning activities that teacher-trainers design to prepare preservice teachers. We describe seven types of activities: assimilative, informative management, applicative, communicative, productive, experiential, and evaluation. All of these technology-based learning activities, organized in learning sequences, potentially help teachers to come to terms with technological knowledge in their pedagogical content area.

A shift from a medical model to a social model of including learners with disabilities has occurred over the past 25 years (Stella, Forlin, & Lan, 2007). This shift has impacted both preservice teacher preparation and in-service teacher professional development. This chapter utilizes a conceptual framework built on the work of Forlin and colleagues (Forlin, Loreman, Sharma, & Earle, 2009; Sharma, Forlin, Loreman, & Earle, 2006; Stella et al., 2007) to guide teacher preparation and professional development. This conceptual framework provides a model for (1) addressing attitudes and perceptions; (2) increasing knowledge of disability policies, laws, and evidence-based practices for providing instruction in inclusive settings; (3) and increasing experiences with individuals with disabilities, including experiences within inclusive settings. In addition, the framework incorporates aspects of the context within which inclusion is to occur. Implications include recommendations for teacher training and professional development to improve inclusive education for learners with LID.

Evidence-based practice (EBP) can have a powerful impact on school-aged children. Yet this impact may not be realized if classroom teachers do not use empirically supported interventions and/or fail to include the best research available when they make important educational decisions about children. Whether classroom teachers use EBP may be influenced, in part, by what they learned or failed to learn in their preservice preparation programs. This chapter describes recent efforts to assess preservice teachers’ understanding and use of empirically supported interventions and provides four examples of how such practices were taught to preservice general educators in a small, regional teacher preparation program. We discuss four contemporary educational reform movements (i.e., federal policies mandating EBP, state-level policies linking growth in pupil learning to teacher evaluation, clinically rich teacher preparation, and the emergence of a practice-based evidence approach) that should increase interest and use of EBP in teacher education and offer recommendations for how teacher educators might infuse EBP into their traditional teaching, research, and service functions in higher education.

This chapter discusses a form of pedagogy of reflection suggested to be defined as the dialogical-reflective professional-development school (DRPDS) – a framework that develops and empowers students by engaging them in a process of continual improvement, responding to diverse situations, providing stimuli for learning, and giving anchors for mediation. The pedagogy of reflection relates to dialogue not only from a theoretical historical context but also by way of example – that is, it offers empowering dialogues within the traditional teacher-training framework. This chapter outlines the importance of the pedagogy of reflection in the multicultural educational space of the preservice education field in Israel, analyzing the first university PDS model. The pedagogy of reflection in the context of the educational dialogue of educators is outlined as a tool for student empowerment, achieved through a community of learners who dedicate space to the development of their whole personality within the profession, taking a moral stance toward the educational discourse, minimizing judgmentalism and prejudice, creating national/gender equality with the goal of examining the fundamental question of educational performance, and reinforcing their sense of organizational belonging within the system. In these contexts, the chapter is based on the elements of dialogical philosophy exemplified in the thought of Burbules, Nelson, Isaacs, Bohm, and Heckmann and the reflective basis of educational and organizational performance exemplified in the writings of van Manen. The chapter also presents two examples from a project in which teaching units based on dialogue and reflection were developed within a dialogic community that represents in its very being collective empowerment, the possibility of coping with problems that are too large for an individual to solve on his/her own, and an alternative to sealed and alienated organizations.

The chapter discusses my response to the urgent need for a pedagogy that would effectively promote Israeli teachers’ meta-representational and particularly Visual Representational competencies in order to prepare new generations of school students to fully and successfully navigate the diverse, rich multimodal information that they encounter in the postmodern visual world. Currently, although VRs widely permeate school curricula, learners’ mass media sources for information gathering, and even matriculation testing, students’ meta-representational competence (MRC) are not intentionally developed to enable their dealing with visually transmitted information and their mindful manipulation of it for achieving their goals. VRs usages have been shown to be superficial, implicit, inadequate to utilize VRs’ potential for promoting knowledge acquisition and understanding, and even frequently erroneous. Following a short discussion of the constructs of Meta-Visual Representational Competencies and pedagogy, and potential institutional obstacles for introducing VRs, I propose core pedagogical guidelines for promoting such competencies in teachers, based on evidence collected continually over a decade of work with teachers at Haifa, Israel, while designing, developing, and refining this pedagogy in preservice teacher training and other programs at the University of Haifa and inservice frameworks. Each guideline is operationalized into tasks and activities designed for achieving its specific purpose, focusing on the application of these suggested guidelines in preservice teacher development program. The MRC-promoting pedagogy was designed and developed while keeping in mind the notion that a pedagogy should be flexible, adaptable to different instructional styles, goals, and contexts, and based on guidelines that are operationalized into detailed instructional plans for achieving specific goals, in accordance with teachers’ preferences.

Much of the literature on innovation and entrepreneurship in education focuses on how external ideas, processes, and techniques can be applied to education systems, schools, and classrooms to improve educational performance. Little research, however, addresses the ways that internal ideas, processes, and techniques within educational systems, schools, and classrooms impart innovation and entrepreneurial skills to youth worldwide. This chapter identifies ways that these skills can be developed in youth through mass education systems. Particular attention is given to the ways that youth are prepared to participate in the knowledge economy by becoming information innovators and knowledge entrepreneurs.