Studying Teacher Education

by Marilyn Cochran-Smith (Editor), Kenneth M. Zeichner (Editor)

Published for the American Educational Research Association by Routledge This landmark volume presents the work of the American Educational Research Association's Panel on Research and Teacher Education. It represents a systematic effort to apply a common set of scholarly lenses to a range of important topics in teacher education.

The Panel's charge was twofold:
*to create for the larger educational research community a thorough, rigorous, and even-handed analysis of the empirical research evidence relevant to major policies and practices in pre-service teacher education in the U.S., and
*to propose a research agenda related to teacher education that builds on what is already known and that identifies the research directions that are most promising for the future.

Members of the Panel were appointed from various sectors of the educational research community and with different areas of expertise, including teacher education, policy, assessment, research design and methods, liberal arts, multicultural education, and school reform. Building on their diverse perspectives, they ably translated their charge into a series of questions that became the framework for this volume. The questions illuminate many of the issues that have been most contested in past and current discourse about teacher education reform. Studying Teacher Education examines research about the current pool of prospective and entering teachers and about local, institutional, state, and federal preservice teacher education policies and practices. The book includes three general chapters and nine research syntheses.

*The AERA Panel on Research and Teacher Education: Context and Goals
*Researching Teacher Education in Changing Times: Politics and Paradigms
*Teacher Characteristics: Research on the Demographic Profile
*Teacher Characteristics: Research on the Indicators of Quality
*Research on the Effects of Coursework in the Arts and Sciences and in the Foundations of Education
*Research on Methods Courses and Field Experiences
*Research on Pedagogical Approaches in Teacher Education
*Research on Preparing Teachers for Diverse Populations
*Research on Preparing Teachers to Work with Students with Disabilities
*Research on Accountability Processes in Teacher Education
*Research on Teacher Education Programs
*A Research Agenda for Teacher Education

Each chapter reviews the empirical literature and proposes a research agenda that builds on and extends what is known about a topic. A chart at the end of each chapter provides summary information for each of the empirical studies synthesized and two reference lists--one for all of the studies reviewed in the chapter and one for additional references used. The volume includes an introductory chapter on the Panel's context and goals, and an accessible Executive Summary of the book as a whole.

Studying Teacher Education: The Report of the AERA Panel on Research and Teacher Education is a timely, indispensable reference for all researchers and professionals in the field.

816 pages, Paperback

First published June 15, 2005

About the author

Marilyn Cochran-Smith is the John E. Cawthorne Professor of Teacher Education for Urban Schools at the Lynch School of Education, Boston College, where she served as Director of the PhD Program in Curriculum & Instruction from 1996-2017. Cochran-Smith is widely known for her work about teacher education research, practice and policy and for her sustained commitment to teacher education for social justice with inquiry as the centerpiece. She is a frequent presenter nationally and internationally.

Dr. Cochran-Smith and the BC research group, Project TEER (Teacher Education and Education Reform), will publish Reclaiming Accountability in Teacher Education (Teachers College Press) in April, 2018. Cochran-Smith has written nine other books, five of which have won national awards, and more than 200 articles, chapters, and editorials related to teacher education. She is a founding co-editor of the Teachers College Press book series on Practitioner Inquiry, which has published more than 50 books about practitioner inquiry or by teachers and other education practitioners.

Dr. Cochran-Smith is the Principal Investigator for a Spencer Foundation-funded study of teacher education at new graduate schools of education (nGSEs) in the U.S. She is co-founder of Project RITE (Rethinking Initial Teacher Education for Equity), a two-country research project at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She is also the Chair of the International Advisory Panel on Teacher Education for NOKUT, Norway’s government agency for Quality Assurance in Higher Education.

Cochran-Smith is a past president of the American Educational Research Association, an inaugural AERA fellow, and a member of the National Academy of Education. She has received many awards, including AERA’s Research to Practice Award, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Literacy Research Association, the Carl Grant Research Award from the National Association of Multicultural Education, and all of the major awards from the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE), including the David G. Imig Award for Achievement in Teacher Education, the Margaret B. Lindsey Award for Research in Teacher Education, and the Edward C. Pomeroy Award for Outstanding Contributions to Teacher Education.