This article examines data from nine statewide administrations of the Idaho Comprehensive Literacy Assessment (ICLA) over three-years. The ICLA measures pre-service teachers’ knowledge of research-based content and pedagogy related to reading instruction and assessment. The purpose of this article was first to examine pre-service candidates’ performance on areas of literacy knowledge. Candidates scored highest when matching literacy terms to definitions; they were mildly less successful matching terms to descriptions of research-based instructional activities; moderately less successful when asked for words containing specified phonic patterns from a passage; and least successful when addressing essay-formatted scenario questions. Idaho literacy instructors have used this information to inform them of their teaching effectiveness. A second purpose of this article was to highlight the challenges and benefits for faculty and programs interested in adopting a similar testing model. The article also points out the organizational and political constraints that can delay adoption and use.

May Sarton’s (1961) novel, The Small Room, provides a rich and compelling description of the complex relations among teachers, students, and subject matter at Appleton College. This article explores that “wild triangle of relations” in the context of teacher education, arguing that teacher educators and their students (prospective teachers) should recognize and embrace vulnerability and love as necessary relational qualities in developing and maintaining both the art of learning and the art of teaching. This requires that teacher education in both language and practice relinquish a focus on control and mastery, relinquish a focus on an enclosed and controlling self, and redirect attention to nurturing a loving gaze to what lies outside of us.

This study examines the impact of intensive mentoring as an induction program component aimed at improving teacher quality in ways that link teaching to student engagement. The Atmosphere, Instruction/Content, Management, and Student Engagement (AIMS) measure of teaching practice, focused on a research-based conception of high-quality teaching known as effective balanced instruction, was used to measure the impact of the intervention. Using a matched comparison group design with 24 beginning teachers, the study tested the effects on teaching practice of intensive mentoring. Findings indicate that the improvement in the beginning teachers’ AIMS scores from fall to spring was greater for the experimental group than for the comparison group of teachers.

Supporting student teachers in learning to teach is a collaborative effort by mentor teachers, teacher education supervisors, and student teachers. Each of the participants appraises effort and progress in learning to teach from different perspectives, however. This study explores how practice lessons are assessed by multiple raters. Teacher educators, mentor teachers, and student teachers (51 participants in total) were asked to appraise a practice lesson given by the mentored student. Alignment in rating was analyzed in 17 triads and compared with respect to purpose of assessment, object of appraisal, preferred methods, and focus of the appraisal as well as on the criteria used by the various assessors. Shared problems encountered during the appraisal were also gauged. Our findings indicate considerable variation in purposes and multiple perspectives in criteria among the different assessors. Differences and similarities among the stakeholders were interpreted as contributing to a multifaceted appraisal of accomplishments. Nevertheless, a shared, common ground is also needed to value the different aspects that should be included in an integrated or encompassing approach for assessment of learning to teach.

Stage-based views of teacher development hold that novice teachers are unable to attend to students’ thinking until they have begun to identify themselves as teachers and mastered classroom routines, and so the first emphases in learning to teach should be on forming routines and identity. The authors challenge those views, as others have done, with evidence of novices attending to students’ thinking early in their teaching and offer framing as an alternative perspective on whether and how teachers attend to student thinking. By this account, most teachers work in professional contexts that focus their attention on curriculum, classroom routines, and their own behavior, rather than on student thinking. An account of framing suggests an early, strong emphasis on attention to student thinking in teacher education.

In the context of educational innovation, it is important to investigate how in-service teachers learn and adapt their knowledge to changing professional circumstances. The authors investigated the informal learning of a small number of experienced science teachers in their first few years of teaching a new science syllabus in secondary education in the Netherlands. The storyline method was used to elicit the teachers’ perceptions of their learning from experiences at work. The authors focused on three aspects of learning, namely, teachers’ learning activities, courses of development, and changed competences. From the results, two qualitatively different ways of learning were identified. Type I represents a revolutionary course of development in a teacher’s engagement in mainly individual activities in the working context. Type II symbolizes an evolutionary development in a teacher’s participation in both individual and collaborative activities. Implications for professional development initiatives are discussed, as are suggestions for initial teacher education.