No abstract

All educators must be prepared to meet the substantial instructional challenges that await them in 21st Century classrooms. Significant among these challenges will be the ability to improve the academic and behavioral performance of a more diverse and often impoverished student population within the context of an ever-expanding curriculum and an educational milieu that may provide fewer instructional resources and less educational support. To meet such challenges, all educators must work collaboratively to develop, implement, and evaluate effective teaching practices that can be applied feasibly and sustained over extensive time periods. Here, we have made a modest attempt to help one classroom teacher address some aspects of her impending instructional challenge. Using an alternating treatments design, we compared the effects of Response Cards, Numbered Heads Together, and Whole Group Question and Answer on 6th graders daily quiz scores and pretest-posttest performance in chemistry, and examined how each instructional intervention affected teacher questioning and student responding patterns in class. Implications are discussed for teachers, teacher educators, and educational consultants.

Teacher educators are under increasing pressure to show that preparation programs meaningfully impact instruction among pre-service teachers, who are then influential in student learning. This external pressure is challenging for teacher educators. We present an early field-based course and applied teaching project to examine teaching practices and pupil outcomes. Over 400 candidates taught lessons, utilized evidence-based practices, collected information before and after instruction, and responded to information gleaned from instructional experiences. Candidates provided nearly 17,000 hours of in-class assistance over four semesters, taught more than 800 lessons, used selected evidence-based teaching practices with high degrees of accuracy, and made a noticeable impact in over 60% of sampled lessons. Implications for teacher educators in general and special education are discussed.