Pedagogical balancing acts: Attempts to influence prospective teachers' beliefs

Evaluating constructivist beliefs of teacher candidates

“…Teacher candidates are experienced and familiar with schooling and from personal experience they form beliefs about school, teaching, and learning (Bird, Anderson, Sullivan & Sullivan, 1993;Richards, 1996;Tatto, 1998). If beliefs are left unattended, teacher candidates incorporate new ideas into old frameworks, adopting strategies that match their preset belief orientations and use personal beliefs to comprehend teacher education courses and teaching experiences (Pajares, 1993;Richards, 1996).…”

The political is personal: reflections on facilitating action research in gender issues in science education

“…As such they need to be examined theoretically. Our experiences, and those of other educators (Lewis, 1992;Bird et al, 1993;Shapiro, 1990) illustrate that effective dialogue with an emancipatory focus is very difficult to foster and maintain in a course setting. This may be particularly true in the context of preservice teacher education (Gore, 1992;Zeichner & Gore, 1995).…”

“…Our challenge was to balance and integrate our social and professional worlds with the intellectual worlds represented in theory and the graduate classroom. Our difficulties arose in establishing supportive personal relationships, which enabled us to manage ambiguity and risk within the group, and facilitate the simultaneous growth of our personal knowledge and the knowledge available from educational theory (see also Bird et al, 1993). We discovered that different perspectives and needs in a group cannot always be reconciled (see Nyhof-Young, 2000b, for a discussion of emotional dimensions of action research).…”

The Costs of Reflection in Initial Teacher Education

“…Reflective, reflexive and reflection have become headline words, not only in teaching, but in professional education more generally; however, relatively few accounts exist of the difficulties of operationalising the concepts (Argyris, 1976;Schon, 1987;Korthagen, 1988;Jarvinen, 1989;Griffiths & Tann, 1991;Bird et al, 1993). All of these accounts highlight difficulties.…”