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This study aims to selects a teacher training program located in China’s rural area and focus on its preservice teachers’ attitudes towards inclusive education in China and their expectations of teacher training programs.

The selected teacher training program is in School of Education of a comprehensive university, located in a small town in Northeast China. Five preservice teachers in the Department of Teacher Education were interviewed. The interviewees were randomly selected among those who have already gained at least 60 credits of coursework prior to the interview. Each interview lasted for approximately 0.5 h. Interview notes were summarized and coded using Braun and Clarke’s (2006) six-step approach. In addition to interview data, other data sources were used, such as classroom observation and review of curriculum and program requirement.

Although the selected teacher preparation program started offering some selective special education courses to preservice teachers, there are limited number of offerings and a lack of field placement in inclusive settings, and stereotypical opinions towards disabilities still exist as a roadblock for choosing special education teacher profession.

The current study only focuses on one rural teacher training institution and report preservice teachers’ opinions toward teacher education curriculum, factors that lead to their decision in the teacher education major and their vision towards inclusion in China. Recommendations are provided to increase public awareness of disability, and create more field based experience in inclusive settings for preservice teachers. However, the result may not be generalized to reflect preservice teachers of teacher training institutions located in developed areas where there are rich opportunities for field experience in inclusive setting or special education programs, and who offer more extensive special education courses.

It is recommended that teacher preparation program modify curriculum and offer more special education courses, as well as develop connections with local special education schools and inclusive programs, thus creating more field based opportunities for preservice teachers to work with children with disabilities.

There are limited studies on rural preservice teachers’ attitudes towards being a special education teacher and how the teacher training programs prepare them to become a special education teacher. The current study fills the gap and conduct an interview study of preservice teachers’ from a rural teacher training programs perceptions of China’s special education, how they choose the program of study that prepare them to become a special education teacher, and their rating of the teacher preparation program.

The purpose of this study is to provide an analysis of the teacher education program focused on the development of the research competence of the preservice teachers, difficulties they encountered in conducting action research and the need to provide them with realistic research opportunities.

This qualitative study made use of data sources taken from observations, feedback sessions, presentations and follow-up written interview of 133 randomly selected preservice teachers.

Findings reported that the multicultural preservice teachers have novice research skills and that the real-world application of their research skills developed their research competence. However, they encountered difficulties creating their action research, such as in the literature review and the research conceptualization.

Aside from the self-reported experiences of the students, the training on the action research mainly focused on the conceptualization, design formulation of interventions and proposal writing stage but were not implemented due to course constraints.

This study can assist policymakers to integrate a mandatory research course as part of the curricular offerings and for the university to create space for students to practice their research skills based on real-life problems in the basic level institutions.

Understanding the challenges, difficulties, and basic competence in the research development of the preservice teachers would strengthen the research practice of the future teachers for evidence-based teaching in the schools.

The limited literature focus on the development of research competence on teacher education students using action research, including the difficulties that university students experience in doing research based on a societal context.

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.

The purpose of this current study is to follow the development of preservice kindergarten teachers during the practicum phase of their teacher education studies in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic and following the first period of lockdown.

The sample included 38 preservice kindergarten teachers in their third and final year of studies who worked in kindergartens as student teachers. Data were collected using reflective journals written by the participants during their studies, after returning to work following the first lockdown. The author analyzed the data using the life-story narrative method.

The analysis identified four different types of early education preservice teachers based on their ability to cope with the shift in work conditions. The discussion offers insight into participants’ ability to effectively implement the professional tools they had acquired in the program and during the practicum.

Limitations include reliance on data from reflective journals, which may be missing details that would have been collected face-to-face. The study has important implications for the functioning of kindergarten teachers in times of crisis, which should be taken into account in the design of the teachers’ training programs.

The effect of the pandemic on the quality of the preservice kindergarten teachers’ training process, and its implications for functioning in other types of crises are discussed.

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 study aims to focus on how preservice teachers' academic achievements, their frequencies of connecting to the distance learning management system, their gender and the related sub-scales influence their Web-based self-efficacies (WEB-PCK) and their attitudes towards distance education (WBI).

In the study, the structural equality model was used. In the path analysis, the maximum likelihood estimation method was used to predict the parameters of the model. This method allows determining the highest values for the population and the probability of the sample value to occur.

It was found that the sub-scale of Web communication (WEB-C) had a high level of direct and positive influence on the male preservice teachers' self-efficacy perceptions. As for the female preservice teachers, WEB-C did not have any direct influence on their self-efficacy perceptions. For the male preservice teachers, Web pedagogy (WEB-PC) had positive influence on their self-efficacy perceptions (β = 0.193), while the sub-scale of WEB-PC had a high level of influence on the female preservice teachers' self-efficacy perceptions (β = 0.534).

In the study, the purpose of was to examine the effects of the attitudes of the preservice teachers towards Web general (WEB-G), Web-Communication (WEB-C), Web pedagogical knowledge (WEB-PK), Web pedagogical self-efficacy (WEB-PCK) and Web-based instruction (WBI) with the help of the structural equation model with respect to gender, frequency of connection to the internet and academic achievement grades.