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The purpose of this study is to explore how multicultural curriculum and instruction in a teacher-credentialing program prepared pre-service teachers to work with diverse students.

The research method used was a qualitative approach. The research design was a descriptive single embedded case study to interview pre-service teachers who were in their second semester in a teacher-credentialing program at a university on the west coast and pre-service teachers who were in their final semester in the same teacher-credentialing program. Pre-service teachers discussed their disappointment in the program for their lack of training in how to work with culturally diverse students.

The findings from the study will add to the body of knowledge specific to teacher-credentialing programs, curriculum developers and universal design for learning on K-12 education.

As schools become more diverse, an important role of teacher-credentialing courses is to train future teachers with the knowledge to assist culturally diverse students. If teachers were multicultural teachers, they would be better prepared to instruct culturally diverse students and could acknowledge sociocultural resources and information that students bring to the classroom.

The study is essential because training teachers to instruct culturally diverse students is critical as student demographics become more diverse.

In this paper, the results of an investigation aimed at analysing and comparing the environmental competences of future teachers undergoing training in two universities are presented. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the difference in the acquisition of environmental competences amongst two groups of students enrolled in two universities with different levels of introduction of the environmental education (EE) and sustainability contents in their curriculums. This objective is inserted into a wider finality: to provide recommendations regarding the redesign of pre-service teacher training curricula and learning programmes.

A specifically designed questionnaire was used in this study to analyse the environmental competencies of students in the final year of their degree in primary education in two Spanish universities. One of them had a highly environmentally oriented programme, and the other had a scarcely environmentally oriented programme.

Results show that no significant differences were observed in the results related to the greening level of the training programmes. Pre-service teachers have insufficient environmental knowledge, but with quite positive, responsible attitudes towards environmental issues, and pro-environmental actions that could be categorised as moderate. Results point to the need for further and better pre-service teacher training in environmental issues.

One of the main factors in the appropriate treatment of EE in schools is teacher training. Despite this principle being widely recognised, not all pre-service teacher training programmes adequately address EE. The added value of this paper is the comparison established between the students that followed a degree with a high impact of the environmental competences in its curriculum and another one that has very few references to these competences in the curriculum.

The purpose of this study was to assess the diversity-related professional development needs of pre-service teachers in our college. According to a report released in 2017 by the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES), minorities accounted for 20 per cent of all public elementary and secondary school teachers in the United States during the 2015-2016 school year. The same report noted that 51 per cent of all public elementary and secondary school students in the USA were nonwhite during the same school year. Schools will continue to become increasingly more diverse as it relates to the student population. Students of color are expected to make up 56 per cent of the student population by 2024 (Digest of Education Statistics, 2013). With the changing demographics of US schools, pre-service teachers must be prepared to teach, interact and support students and families whose cultures, beliefs and lifestyles may differ from their own. Cultural competence is having an awareness of one’s own cultural identity perceptions and views about difference, and the ability to learn and build on the varying cultural and community norms of students and their families (Muñoz and Graybill, 2015). The mere presence of diverse communities on college campuses is not sufficient in promoting positive educational outcomes related to diversity (Museus, 2008).

Qualitative survey research was used to assess diversity related professional development needs of pre-service teachers. Students were asked an open-ended question: ‘Please list topics of diversity training that should be offered to students in the college’ After the question, a text box was provided to allow respondents to provide a unique answer. This approach, as opposed to providing a list of predetermined responses to select from gave respondents the freedom to say exactly what they felt should be offered.

After analyzing the 163 open-ended responses provided by students six themes emerged. The themes were offering diversity-related professional development in the areas of disability/mental illness, cultural competence/awareness, LGBTQAI+/gender, facilitating conversations about diversity, discrimination and race/ethnicity.

The sample came from one university; therefore, the results may not be generalizable to other predominantly white universities. Future research should collect data at other universities or the schools within the university system to determine the needs for other campuses. The results of such a study will always be limited in scope but they do describe the needs at the targeted University. The response rate was low, 24 per cent. The reasons for the low response rate are unclear. Other survey techniques, such as mail surveys or face-to-face meetings, may be more successful in obtaining a higher response rate.

Teacher preparation programs should assess students’ perceptions, knowledge and experiences as it relates to diversity, and survey pre-service teachers to determine gaps in the diversity training currently being offered. Diversity training must be intentional to prepare pre-service teachers to meet the demands of the diverse classroom.

Future research should aim to assess pre-service teachers’ beliefs about diversity throughout the entirety of teacher preparation programs by assessing pre-service teachers in multiple classes and participants who attend independent diversity training opportunities. To address the rapid increase in cultural and ethnic diversity in education worldwide, pre-service programs should target and challenge pre-service teachers’ beliefs to assure equitable education to diverse students.

The paper that has been submitted is an original research that was conducted by the first author. The first and second authors used manual coding for data analysis.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss a curriculum change in the provision of health promotion in pre‐service teacher education in a one‐year postgraduate certificate in education (PGCE) secondary course in one Higher Education Institution (HEI) in England.

The paper describes the iterative development process, from an initial survey and mapping of the existing pre‐service teacher training programme, which provided an evidence base for the piloting of a new health promotion component in the curriculum, and its subsequent evaluation. Changes to the health promotion element of the curriculum reflect the programme philosophy which balances the requirements of a competency based curriculum with a more liberal approach to education and training in which pre‐service teachers are expected to critically reflect on, and evaluate their practice. This work adopts a socio‐constructivist approach to teacher education, in which teachers develop their knowledge, skills and attitudes by interacting with others through dialogue, and learning from more knowledgeable others in a cooperative and scaffolded manner.

The paper presents the results of these changes and discusses implications for their sustainability. The changes made to the health promotion component of the programme and their implementation would not have been possible without the inter‐professional collaboration that took place over three years.

To the authors’ knowledge similar work involving a multi‐disciplinary collaborative approach to the development of a health education component of a pre‐service teacher education curriculum has not been employed or reported.

This study aims to enable pre‐service teachers to cooperate with teachers and to participate in solving classroom problems with the guidance of academic staff in an action research (AR) project.

Eight pre‐service teachers took an AR course and simultaneously participated in a collaborative AR project. While learning about the steps and nature of AR, pre‐service teachers worked with teachers and designed their own project proposals in order to solve classroom problems. A questionnaire about “doing” an AR and reports prepared by the pre‐service teachers were used as instruments.

Pre‐service teachers worked on different classroom problems together with the teachers and seven out of eight ARs were presented at a national teachers' conference. Moreover, all the pre‐service teachers reported that they were eager to apply AR in their future classrooms and they decided to apply their AR proposals even though the course had finished.

The study is limited by the participants and the instruments used here.

AR courses enable pre‐service teachers to take an active role in authentic workplaces, thereby encouraging them towards workplace learning.

The study shows that collaborative AR can enable pre‐service teachers to identify and solve classroom problems, thereby providing them with an environment in which to use their theoretical knowledge gained at university. Hence, AR courses could be integrated into teacher training programs in order to fulfil the missing link between theory and practice in teacher training.

With critical reviews of previous studies in workplace learning, this paper aims to investigate workplace learning for pre-service teachers’ practice and quality teaching and learning in technical vocational education and training: key to professional development.

The study adopted multistage sampling technique to select sample for the study. Empirical analysis was adopted to analyse the data collected from technical vocational education and training pre-service teachers.

The result of the study revealed that the constructs of social learning theory had a stronger linkage with the constructive teaching than traditional management.

This study emphasizes the need to adequately train pre-service teachers on instructional delivery processes, building strong relationship with learners and build the ability to organize and execute necessary actions required to successfully carry out a specific educational task in a particular context.

The purpose of the present study was to examine the impact of a student teaching internship program on the self-efficacy of pre-service teachers in China.

With 1,367 participants, structural equation modelling was used to evaluate the fit of the hypothetical model and a latent path analysis was conducted to identify the relationship among various variables.

The results suggested that the program had a significant impact on efficacy in terms of personal skills, general teaching skills and personal qualities of the student interns concerned. Although this study was set in rural China, the findings of this study offered insights for teacher education in other places.

To the best of our knowledge, no research studies have been conducted on this in-service teacher training program in a systematic and comprehensive way using a large sample size and involving all major stakeholders. The aim of the present study is to fill this gap, by exploring the experience of a large cohort of pre-service teachers participating in this student teaching internship program. Studying the experiences of these student teachers will illuminate some of the key challenges faced and how they impacted their teaching and learning during their teaching practices in rural areas. The findings may help teacher education institutions to review and enhance their existing approaches to teaching practices and professional development initiatives not only in rural China but in similar contexts in other countries.

One of the major challenges in teacher training programs is the gap between the theory that is presented to pre‐service teachers and actual classroom practice. Many researchers, educators, and pre‐service teachers have emphasized the difficulty of linking theory and practice in teacher education programs. The purpose of this study is to better understand the impact of online teaching videos on the development of self‐efficacy beliefs in pre‐service teachers.

Over 400 student teachers participated in this study. Statistical analyses of questionnaires were conducted to assess the impact of online teaching videos. The results reveal that online videos did affect the self‐efficacy beliefs of pre‐service teachers.

Online videos of teaching practices appear to contribute positively to feelings of self‐efficacy in pre‐service teachers.

Given the importance of self‐efficacy for teachers' professional development, online videos could prove highly useful to this end. Apart from the impact of the videos themselves, self‐directed learning has the benefit of flexibility in terms of time and space, which is typical of open and distance learning in general. Furthermore, online videos can be readily adapted to individual professional development plans, according to the teacher's needs, in contrast to more formal training programs (either initial or continuing) with their relatively rigid, predetermined contents.

This study presents an original self‐training online video device that could easily be integrated in teacher training to support effectively their professional development.

E‐learning has been applied in pre‐service teacher training for many years. The purpose of this paper is to present the use of e‐learning in a pre‐service teacher training course and discuss the relevant issues involved.

The article reviews literature related to instruction design, and e‐learning concepts and practice. A survey is conducted, the course having been offered for two years.

The use of e‐learning in this pre‐service teacher training course is successful because it achieves the expected goal. The self‐study ability of pre‐service teachers is improved. Learners also participate actively. However, further improvement needs to be done in curriculum design teacher support.

This paper integrates theories and practice. It shows a sample of applying e‐learning into a course for pre‐service teacher education. This blended approach is new in the context of China.

Over the years, game-based learning approaches have been adapted in teaching and learning both to engage and motivate students during learning activities. Game technology, such as serious and simulation games, have been used as a new generation of training educational tools enhancing students’ learning and academic performance. An important aspect in the evaluation of those methods is that it focusses particularly on cognitive learning outcomes, ignoring the significance of other processes including emotional aspects in game environments that also contribute significantly to learning, performance and motivation. The purpose of this paper is to present the empirical evidence of a research related to the emotional experiences of pre-service teachers, after the implementation of a simulated classroom environment during the semester.

SimSchool classroom simulation was used for the training of pre-service teachers in classroom and for behavior management issues. The research took place at the Democritus University of Thrace (DUTH) and the School of Pedagogical and Technological Education (ASPETE), in Greece. This study aimed to gain insights related to the emotions that pre-service teachers experienced during the simulated activities.

The results indicated that participants from DUTH experienced more negative and less positive emotions during the game including anxiety, nervousness, disappointment, insecurity, inability to deal with simSchool activities, defeat, dissatisfaction, fatigue, fear and stress. Moreover, the results revealed that ASPETE’s participants experienced more positive and less negative emotions during playing with the simulation, including excitement, motivation and satisfaction.

The related research on the use of games in teacher training is still at its infancy, the current research aimed to address teacher training through a simulated classroom environment and investigate the emotional experiences of pre-service teachers during simulated activities.