Teacher Training books

Recently, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan suggested that placing Black men in the classroom as teachers is a critical need in the American educational system. Many education policymakers and researchers falsely believe that Black male teachers have a primary responsibility to foster the social development of Black male students. However, increasing the presence of Black male teachers improves the diversity of the profession and should be viewed as a benefit to the system, as they provide quality services to all students regardless of race and/or gender. This edited volume offers sound suggestions for advancing diversity in the teaching profession. It provides teacher education programs with needed training materials to accommodate Black male students, and school district administrators and leaders with information to help recruit and retain Black male teachers. Each chapter will feature policy and practice recommendations and a case example to spur action and increase opportunities for discussion.

This volume is designed to accomplish three primary purposes: illustrate a variety of qualitative methods that researchers have used to study teaching and teacher education; assess the affordances and constraints of these methods and the ways that they focus and shape explorations of teaching; and, illuminate representative questions and findings associated with each method described. The book is organized around three issues that impact research in qualitative paradigms: perspective, methodology, and representation. The first section, 'Perspective: Whom Should I Ask?' explores what can be learned by assessing teaching from different perspectives (teachers, teacher educators, students, parents), emphasizing that the perspective of the respondent influences what we can learn and shapes both our questions and our potential findings. The second section 'Methodology: How Do I Look?' addresses some of the qualitative research strategies that have been used to study teaching, including historical accounts, photos, drawings, and video. The third section, 'Representation: How Do I Show What I Saw?' explores the affordances and constraints of narratives, practical arguments, video ethnography, portfolios, and theater as methods for representing research findings. Qualitative research paradigms typically do not make claims based in the kinds of foundational criteria for generating knowledge that establish bases for generalizability. The book addresses this dilemma by providing findings, insights, and claims from qualitative research that appear to be useful in settings beyond those that generated the data, and thus inform our thinking about teaching and teacher education. In addition, its explorations of the affordances and constraints of qualitative research methods provide insightful and occasionally controversial contributions to our thinking about research on teaching and teacher education.