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With an increasing diversity in American schools, teachers need to be able to collaborate in teaching. University courses are widely considered as a stage to demonstrate or model the ways of collaboration. To respond to this call, three authors team taught an integrated methods course at an urban public university in the city of New York. Following a qualitative research design, this study explored both instructors? and pre-service teachers? experiences with this course. Study findings indicate that collaborative teaching of an integrated methods course is feasible and beneficial to both instructors and pre-service teachers. For instructors, this collaborative teaching was a reciprocal learning process where they were engaged in thinking about teaching in a broader and innovative way. For pre-service teachers, this collaborative course not only helped them understand how three different subjects could be related to each other, but also provided opportunities for them to actually see how collaboration could take place in teaching. Their understanding of collaborative teaching was enhanced after the course.

Trying to develop new perspectives of teaching is never easy, but trying to cultivate ownership and initiative among teacher education students is a still greater aspiration that is infrequently realized. This article addresses each of these highly valued goals for teacher educators as a case study reveals the impact of involving teacher candidates in interdisciplinary focused, constructivist and reflective models and planning for teaching, and then student teaching, which reaffirms this approach. Most significant is the phenomenon of several teacher candidates continuing their development and study of innovative drama play projects with their classes after the semester finishes. The resulting transformations in professional identity development, self-efficacy and student-teacher relationships confirm the value of the teacher education model which has developed over a decade of practice (Lyublinskaya & Kerekes, 2009). Appended to this document is "The Magic Carpet Play." (Contains 5 figures.)

This study examined the effects on math performance of the use of the rekenrek, a manipulative developed by Adrian Treffers. The rekenrek looks like an abacus, but differs in that it is based on a five-structure and not a ten-structure system. It is comprised of two rows of 10 beads, each broken into two sets of 5 by color (i.e., in each row the first 5 beads are red and the next 5 are white). Forty-five students with learning disabilities were divided into three equivalent groups based on their pretest scores: Group 1 received instruction using rekenrek, Group 2 received instruction without rekenrek, and Group 3 received no instruction. Data were analyzed using one-way ANOVA followed by the Scheffe post-hoc test. Results indicated that students in Group 1 scored significantly higher on an addition and subtraction test with numbers from zero to 20 than did students in either Group 2 or 3. Use of multiple-regression analysis confirmed that the results were significant and meaningful. The advantages of the rekenrek and the implications of the study for math instruction within the Realistic Mathematics Education model are addressed. (Contains 4 figures and 4 tables.)