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Educational research and many aspects of the educational system in Germany are facing a challenge. With Germany’s participation in large-scale assessment studies such as PISA, the German educational discourse is increasingly incorporating international developments in terms of educational standards, accountability, and students’ performance testing. At the same time, the long-standing history of German Didaktik has influenced and shaped teacher education programs in Germany for decades. Research conducted at a German university shows how these two concurrent developments can be fused – without neglecting their distinct differences. A crucial aspect revealed in this work shows that preservice teachers are prepared for their future profession in a rather output- and standard-based educational system in inquiry-based classes. In these classes, their research-based reflective thinking, didactic expertise, and their leadership skills in the sense of didactic ownership are strengthened.

This chapter will provide an overview of the types of concerns that are evident in the research literature regarding how well teachers are prepared to teach in inclusive classrooms citing both preservice education and in-service professional development/learning. It will present an overview of the measurements that have been used to measure teachers’ perceptions of preparedness for inclusive environments and the use of surveys to assess attitudes, beliefs, and values. The chapter will conclude with a discussion regarding measuring teachers’ perceptions to inform/improve teacher preparation efforts/policies/practices and what needs to be done to improve teacher preparation for inclusive education.

This case study examines the experiences of 20 student teachers at an Indonesian private university in enhancing their self-efficacy in utilizing instructional technology.

The participants of this study had different cultural backgrounds and spoke different indigenous languages. Situated in diverse classroom settings, the participants were interviewed using online platforms to examine their learning experience when learning to integrate technology into teaching. Furthermore, observational data were collected through photographs taken during the learning process to triangulate the findings.

Grounded in case study analysis, the study reveals three emerging themes indicating the development of the preservice teachers' confidence in multilingual classrooms: (1) designing technology-mediated learning activities, (2) using learning technology to foster students' autonomy in learning and (3) promoting peer engagement in diverse classrooms through technology-based learning. Furthermore, the participants demonstrated their ability to develop self-efficacy in overcoming the challenges associated with technology use in education by adapting, innovating, and collaborating.

The study has three limitations. First, the limited number of participants involved in the study restricts the generalizability of the findings and does not allow for testing the potential influence of variables such as age, gender or experience on preservice teachers' beliefs. Second, limitation pertains to the reliability of self-report data provided by the preservice teachers. Given that self-efficacy can fluctuate over time, a longitudinal study is needed to investigate whether preservice teachers' self-efficacy in utilizing technology for learning evolves over time. Third, while the study was conducted in diverse classroom settings, it lacks an in-depth exploration of how cultural diversity impacts the learning outcomes of these preservice teachers.

The findings suggest that nurturing the technological self-efficacy of preservice teachers enhances their competence in technology-mediated pedagogy, both during the pandemic of COVID-19 and in the future.

Our purpose in this chapter is to present a model of coaching used in a preservice elementary teacher preparation program that relies on video as a mentoring tool. We call this tool RCA, or Retrospective Coaching Analysis, and it is based on Goodman’s (1996) work on Retrospective Miscue Analysis. We also provide examples of how cooperating teachers used videos to identify important moments of practice to elicit reflection with their preservice teachers.

We collected video recordings of cooperating teacher/preservice teacher pairs engaging in mentoring conversations using videos of preservice teachers’ practice.

In this chapter, we focus on the cooperating teachers’ choices about when to stop the video to engage in reflection with their preservice teachers. In selecting a focus point for the RCA Event, the CTs chose moments that met some of these four criteria: appreciative, learner-focused, disruptive, and/or generative. We also found the challenges in selecting focus points and in staying with moments of video long enough to generate reflection, which made the model of mentoring challenging to implement.

The analysis of this reflective mentoring tool has led to revisions in our theoretical model of coaching, as described in this chapter. The research suggests the importance of closely examining reflective talk between cooperating teachers and preservice teachers. Our work also illustrates a shift in the use of video in preservice teaching from a video-case based perspectives to reflection embedded in practice.

Our study suggests the importance of selecting moments of practice as the basis for mentoring and coaching, but the research helped us to understand that RCA has affordances and constraints, and therefore, should be a tool for teachers to use flexibly within our theoretical model of Coaching with CARE.

Teacher educators will find the RCA model to be a new way of approaching collaborative work with teachers in the field within a practice-based teacher education program.

This paper reports on experiences of university-level mathematics teacher educators (MTEs) from participating in lesson study to improving mathematics teacher preparation. The authors investigate the questions: “What did MTEs report as benefits of participating in cross-departmental lesson study?” and “What considerations did MTEs report for stakeholders interested in lesson study?”

This study employed qualitative methodologies on one cycle of lesson study where the authors served as lesson study participants. Debrief and focus group interview data were analyzed for emergent codes on benefits, supports and challenges from a university-level lesson study.

Engaging in university-level lesson study provided MTEs firsthand professional development, created community, enabled attention to detail, improved knowledge of issues related to teaching mathematics, improved curricular materials and extended beyond one lesson. Institutional support, a natural evolution of the process, alignment of goals among members and support within the group supported their university-level lesson study. Challenges of time and funding, imposition, misalignment of goals and building trust are discussed.

The paper contributes insights about benefits for MTEs who use lesson study to examine their own teaching practice for mathematics teacher preparation. The importance of supports and constraints is highlighted.

This chapter presents the findings of a Gender and Leadership study on promoting gender responsiveness and equality in Ghanaian Colleges of Education (CoEs) conducted in 2017. Specifically, this chapter explores CoEs actors’ perspectives on and experiences with using predetermined gender-responsive scorecard (GRS) as a strategy for promoting gender equality within the CoEs. Multiple-case study involving 10 CoEs selected purposively was used to explore the GRS implementation. Data collection and analysis methods included semi-structured interviews and “processual” analysis. The findings revealed a general contradiction among respondents regarding which gender actions/strategies had been implemented in the case study CoEs. Nonetheless, amid reported implementation challenges, there was general acknowledgment of the importance of the GRS in running gender-responsive CoEs in Ghana. The study concludes that the effective use and implementation of the GRS strategies appear imperative in promoting female success in CoEs, not only in Ghana but also in contexts where gender gap is an issue in teacher education.

Certainly, most academic-disciplinary literacy initiatives in the Ibero-American context have arisen with the purpose of achieving social justice, especially in a territory that has suffered from inequity and whose deepening has increased with the current health emergency situation. However, despite well-intentioned initiatives, these programs, in general, have followed Anglo-Saxon models far removed from Ibero-American needs and reality. Therefore, in their implementation, they have dichotomies that ultimately weaken their sustainability over time and their results in their level of real inclusion, some of these – considering the approaches of Tierney (2018) and others – are: assimilation/accommodation, elitism/inclusion, institutional reform/educational innovation, research/action, remediation/re-mediation, standardization/contextualization, performance/learning, submission/emancipation, monologism/dialogism and homogeneity/diversity. In this way, based on a qualitative and reflective analysis on the experiences of three academic literacy programs in three universities in Argentina, Chile, and Spain, we will make these tensions explicit, and we will reveal practices that are truly contextualized to the communities where they are inserted, such as their eclectic, collaborative, dialogic, and remediated nature, which allows them to be constantly codesigned by the participation of students, professors, and tutors and whose research is promoted through action. In this sense, these countries can be related by sharing the language, a recent tradition of academic literacy and high school dropout rates. Finally, knowing both the strengths and the contradictions they still hold will contribute to continuing the process of contextualizing to the communities and, thus, establishing them as emancipatory pedagogies from the South to the South.

The purpose of this paper is to present a case study investigating students’ patterns of collaborative content creation in a wiki project that was designed to promote self-directed and collaborative learning in the context of a university course. In addition, it proposes a new organizational and analysis framework of students’ constructive and collaborative activities in wiki-authoring projects.

The key notion, around which the present conceptual and research framework was built, is that a wiki integrates a content space and a social (discussion) space both considered in collaborative manner. The analysis of student contributions to their wiki was organized along two dimensions: interaction and refection posts were analyzed using the framework of Community of Inquiry; content contributions to the wiki pages were classified into five categories: creating a new page, content expansion, content reorganization, content enrichment (with video, images or hyperlinks) and editing and grammatical corrections.

The analysis of the research data revealed important information that could help to depict an overall representation of individual interactions and contributions, students’ collaborative performance within wiki groups as well as the overall evolution of the wiki content. The findings showed that properly designed wiki projects can be effectively introduced in higher education with the aim to support students to improve their authoring and collaborative skills through critical thinking, peer interaction and reflection.

The findings of this study are limited by the specific sample and the context of implementation. Future research will be directed to various educational contexts and to include in the analysis students’ experiences and learning outcomes of wiki-authoring activities.

The results provided supportive evidence that successful wiki-based projects in higher education depend on the way students’ individual and collaborative authoring contributions are interwoven. Effective wiki-based interventions should consider students’ learning as the outcome of both, individual and collaborative work, determined by self and peer reflection in wiki groups.

The originality and the significance of the present study are justified by the conceptual framework proposed which can guide both aspects of students’ learning presence within self-directed wiki-authoring projects, i.e. research and educational practice (design and monitoring).

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.

A growing body of research has pointed to the potential benefits of a co-teaching clinical residency model in preservice education. Preservice co-teaching research has focused primarily on conditions necessary for effective co-teaching to occur, factors that inhibit successful co-teaching implementation, and teacher candidate development. Researchers have called for further exploration into potential benefits of preservice co-teaching models for the mentor teacher. In this study, the authors explored ways in which mentor teachers who participated in a co-teaching pre-service program experienced professional growth.

In order to gain insights into the perspectives of mentor teachers and ways in which they experienced professional growth through their experiences in the co-teaching program, the authors used a qualitative, descriptive approach. The authors’ primary data source included interviews conducted with 42 mentor teachers from five content-areas. Researcher communication and interactions with co-teachers over time, along with artifacts including field notes, co-teacher reflections on practice, and program documents, served as peripheral data sources.

Results indicated that co-teachers experienced meaningful professional growth in areas represented by the following themes: (1) critical reflection, (2) pedagogical renewal, (3) in situ feedback and refining practice and (4) application of learning to leadership roles.

This study, which is one of only a few studies focusing explicitly on mentor co-teacher professional growth, provided new insights into learning opportunities afforded to mentor teachers through a participation in a blended model of co-teaching and communities of practice.