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Concerns about the disconnect between what goes on in teacher preparation programs and school classrooms have led to a greater emphasis on opportunities for preservice teachers to engage in the practice of teaching during their teacher education programs. Pedagogies of enactment have been shown to provide opportunities for preservice teachers to enact teaching practices and to learn from that enactment. However, little is known about "how" preservice teachers learn from pedagogies of enactment. This study examines how preservice teachers learn through the implementation of a pedagogy of enactment, the Bellringer Sequence, in the context of a middle school mathematics methods course. The results of the study show that preservice teacher learning takes place through rich generative conversation centered on preservice teachers' contributions and collaboratively negotiated interactions with those contributions. The study identified communication that prompted learning (learning prompts), 16 speech events that characterized conversation in the learning prompts, and three stages of learning in the learning prompts--Initiation, Precisification, and Equilibration. The study provides insight into how preservice teacher learning can be supported through intentional use of pedagogies of enactment.

This study investigated the influence of competence acquired through the Bachelor of Secondary Education (BSEd) program on the development of employability skills among graduates in Midwestern Uganda. This research begets a core question- what are the relevant competencies for employability skills of graduate teachers in mid-western Uganda? To unveil the socially constructed realities shaping BSEd teachers' perceptions of competence and the development of employability skills, we applied qualitative methodologies particularly case study design with interviews. Hence the study found out that, well-mastered principles of the subject would render a university teacher graduate employable. Communication skill was also an antecedent for greater performance within the teaching trial. Several other skills were found to depict our study employability skills framework and cognizant of the nature of training that empowered the BSEd graduates in various employable skills. Withal, school administrators reported a lack of some of the 21st-century skills from the graduate teachers (for example problem-solving, and critical thinking skills). It's recommended that universities align BSE programs with the competence-based curriculum to ensure more employable and relevant citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using student mathematical thinking during instruction is valued by the mathematics education community, yet practices surrounding such use remain difficult for teachers to enact well, particularly in the moment during whole-class instruction. Teachers' orientations--their beliefs, values, and preferences--influence their actions, so one important aspect of understanding teachers' use of student thinking as a resource is understanding their related orientations. To that end, the purpose of this study is to characterize teachers' orientations toward using student mathematical thinking as a resource during whole-class instruction. We analyzed a collection of 173 thinking-as-a-resource orientations inferred from scenario-based interviews conducted with 13 teachers. The potential of each orientation to support the development of the practice of productively using student mathematical thinking was classified by considering each orientation's relationship to three frameworks related to recognizing and leveraging high-potential instances of student mathematical thinking. After discussing orientations with different levels of potential, we consider the cases of two teachers to illustrate how a particular collection of thinking-as-a-resource orientations could support or hinder a teacher's development of the practice of building on student thinking. The work contributes to the field's understanding of why particular orientations might have more or less potential to support teachers' development of particular teaching practices. It could also be used as a model for analyzing different collections of orientations and could support mathematics teacher educators by allowing them to better tailor their work to meet teachers' specific needs.

This study investigated attributes of 278 instances of student mathematical thinking during whole-class interactions that were identified as having high potential, if made the object of discussion, to foster learners' understanding of important mathematical ideas. Attributes included the form of the thinking (e.g., question vs. declarative statement), whether the thinking was based on earlier work or generated in the moment, the accuracy of the thinking, and the type of thinking (e.g., sense-making). Findings illuminate the complexity of identifying student thinking worth building on during whole-class discussion and provide insight into important attributes of these high potential instances that could be used to help teachers more easily recognize them. Implications for researching, learning, and enacting the teaching practice of building on student mathematical thinking are discussed.