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In the United States, policy discussions of teacher education in relationship to teacher quality have tended to focus more closely around debates about the nature of teacher preparation and the need for quality teachers to possess advanced degrees or certification. The field is in need of an array of indicators – a set of powerful, well-researched indicators that can be applied to large public universities as well as small regional private colleges, from university-based programs to “alternative” programs and to more “hybrid” programs. These indicators need to be relevant for teacher certification across a variety of age-ranges and developmental stages. In this chapter, we build on a growing conversation about practice in teacher education and efforts on the part of researchers to identify key features of powerful teacher education. We propose that quality teacher education is designed around a clear and shared vision of good teaching; it is coherent in that it links theory with practice and offers opportunities to learn that are aligned with the vision of good teaching; and it offers opportunities to enact teaching. While these features are supported for the most part by growing consensus in the literature (National Research Council, 2010; NCATE, 2010), there is also an emerging empirical base that provides support for the value of these features as well.

The purpose of this paper is to share findings from research on preservice social studies teachers’ visions of themselves as they prepare to enter their student teaching experience.

The guiding research question for this study asked, “How do preservice social studies teachers articulate their visions of themselves as powerful social studies teachers just before their student teaching experience?”

The authors found that their visions of themselves emphasized aspects of powerful teaching, yet lacked explicit and important connections to social studies teaching. In their discussion and conclusions, they share the implications of these findings for their social studies teacher education program and other social studies education programs generally.

The authors contend that while powerful teaching is important, without an emphasis on powerful social studies teaching, they may struggle to achieve social studies teaching goals and purposes, such as teaching for democratic living, the common good, or citizenship. The distinction between powerful teaching and powerful social studies teaching, the authors believe, should be of concern for social studies teacher educators interested in positioning student teachers to create classroom spaces focused on the common good, national and global societies, or the deepening of democracy.

English education researchers have used video annotation to connect theory to practice and to encourage prospective secondary English teachers (PSETs) to reflectively evaluate their own and others’ teaching. This study aimed to examine whether and how PSETs’ annotations of their own and others’ teaching videos reveal (dis)connections between visions of English teaching valued in methods courses and those practiced in local school field placements.

Examination of 538 annotations on 18 lesson videos – recorded in a university teaching-methods course and in local secondary classrooms by 12 PSETs in a rural, northeastern US teacher-preparation program – revealed what kinds of practices PSETs evaluated and with whom they identified (student or teacher) as they made those evaluations.

Annotations from two PSETs illustrate a trend in the larger data sets: PSETs’ annotations expressed pedagogical values that differed and sometimes conflicted according to their identification with the role of student or of teacher. PSETs’ preferences as students were often superseded by visions of what one must do/be in the secondary English classroom.

This study identifies tensions among PSETs’ annotations that corresponded to their identifications with the role of student or of teacher but does not explore whether and how they reconciled these tensions, or how they might affect student learning. Future research might explore how PSETs negotiate contradictions in their pedagogical preferences as they annotate their own and others’ teaching videos.

English teacher educators who use video-based methods might attend to whether and how such assignments/activities position PSETs as students or as teachers in viewing teaching videos.

PSETs may value different and even conflicting pedagogical practices, regardless of setting and despite their own experiences, based on their identifications with the role of student or of teacher. These identifications may allow them to compartmentalize visions of teaching that might otherwise come into productive conflict.

Pre-service teachers may leave their graduate programs with strong social justice leanings, yet most begin teaching struggling to integrate their visions into a context constrained by accountability demands. Pressures and constraints, such as high-stakes testing and mandated curriculum, may require teachers committed to social justice to negotiate what they want to teach and what they are able to teach. This piece highlights the daunting journey of one beginning teacher and her struggle to uphold her commitment to teach for social justice while still meeting administrative expectations. The study’s findings point to the myriad complexities surrounding teaching social studies for social justice, especially regarding integrating social justice content into the general curriculum. As a result of these findings, several questions have been formulated for further research surrounding the education of teachers for social justice.

This chapter explores the notion of teacher identity and how teacher education might help to create a strong and clear vision for what it means to be a professional teacher. Within the organizational features and structures of teacher education, the pedagogy that students of teaching experience is crucial in shaping their understanding of their sense of identity. Teacher education needs to acknowledge and respond to the needs, issues, and concerns students of teaching have and create expectations that push beyond the personal and strive for the professional. This chapter suggests that in recognizing the importance of pedagogical reasoning and understanding learning about teaching through an inquiry stance, that students of teaching might begin to not only recognize the importance of knowledge of practice but also begin to see how to create knowledge from practice. A vision for their professional identity is then borne of a need to see value in “noticing” through practice in order to become more informed about teaching and learning. In doing so, the importance of pedagogy as a relationship between teaching and learning and the teacher’s role in mediating that relationship can support the development of an identity as a professional teacher.

To describe how a digital storytelling project used in preservice elementary literacy methods courses expands the notion of video reflection and offers an intentional zone of contact in which preservice teachers create their own idealized vision of their future classroom.

Using the multimodal text as a point of departure, each researcher used a different analytical method to approach the data, allowing for examination of different aspects of the product and process of digital storytelling. These analysis methods include theoretically driven analysis based upon theories of Bakhtin (1981) and Vygotsky (1978), metaphor analysis, and performative analysis. This chapter describes the findings from each analytic lens, as well as the affordances of the multiple research lenses.

The results of the study shed light on how preservice teachers constructed a dialogue around their beliefs about themselves as teachers and visions of their future classrooms. The space between the real and the imagined provided a critical writing space where preservice teachers were able to vision their evolving identity and make visible their negotiation of intellectual, social, cultural, and institutional discourses they encountered. These artfully communicated stories engaged preservice teachers in creating new meanings, practices, and experiences as they explored possibilities and imagined themselves in their future classrooms. In these compositions, the preservice teachers maintained, disrupted, and/or reinvented classroom contexts to accommodate their own understandings of literacy teaching and learning.

The zones of contact that were consciously created in this digital storytelling assignment allowed teacher educators to provide the cognitive dissonance which research shows makes teacher beliefs more amenable. Additionally, asking preservice teachers to engage in the type of analysis described in this chapter may prove to be a useful avenue for helping to make the negotiation that took place during the composing of the digital stories more explicit for the preservice teachers.

This chapter is focused on a 3-year, privately funded project. Dean David England, the dean of our College of Education at Western Michigan University from 2000 to 2002, worked in collaboration with Elizabeth Binda, the chairperson of the board of directors for the Guido A. and Elizabeth H. Binda Foundation, to develop a project that would contribute in substantive ways to the improvement of teacher education. As a veteran K-12 teacher and teacher educator, Elizabeth Binda has long taken great interest in contributing to the profession where she has invested a good deal of her life.

Challenge-based learning (CBL) is a trending educational concept in engineering education. The literature suggests that there is a growing variety in CBL implementations, stemming from the flexible and abstract definition of CBL that is shaped by teachers' perceptions. The chapter discusses how the CBL concept has been developed at Eindhoven University of Technology and describes the development and use of two educational resources aimed to facilitate conceptualization, design, and research of CBL for curriculum designers and teachers. The first resource is a set of CBL design principles for framing the variety of CBL and providing teachers with advice about how to develop CBL courses within an overall CBL curriculum. The second resource is a curriculum-mapping instrument called the CBL compass, which aims at mapping CBL initiatives and identifying gaps, overlaps, and misalignments in CBL implementation at a curriculum level. Both CBL design principles and the CBL compass have been developed by combining insights from theory and practical examples of CBL at TU/e into a higher order model of vision, teaching and learning, and support. We discuss the two educational instruments and showcase their application in the Eindhoven Engineering Education (E³) program, and we discuss preliminary findings and insights. The chapter concludes with recommendations for future practice and research.

We read and hear frequently about the role of vision in leadership. Standards for leadership education programs typically emphasize vision as a core component of leadership education and published accounts of successful leadership usually extol the leader’s vision. Given the prevalence of this term in discourse on leadership, it is surprising how little literature exists with specific discussions of how to teach it. In this article I discuss the potential of problem-based pedagogy for teaching the concept of vision. This paper draws on literature, theory, and my professional experience as a faculty member for 20 years in a graduate-level education leadership program.

The impact of education and research skills on the strategic digital transformation of education is straightforward. In this context, the Saudi National Institute of Health plays a pivotal role in the design and implementation of a resilient and robust strategy for the development of skills and competencies to young health professionals. In this chapter, the authors provide a brief overview of the Vision 2030 in Saudi Arabia and its basic priorities in the areas related to the Education and Research in the healthcare domain. The authors also elaborate on the key plans and initiatives undertaken by the education and research skills directory of the Saudi National Institute of Health (SNIH) towards transformative learning with impact on the implementation of the Vision 2030.