Pre-service TEFL programs are designed to prepare candidate teachers of English language for their future careers. To this end they provide students with a wide variety of techniques and strategies for enabling them to acculturate into their profession. An effective way of creating a professional learning community is to use a process of peer-teaching. The present study attempts to examine the impact of peer-teaching application on pre-service EFL teachers’ understandings of methodology course content and its effect on their learning and teaching experiences. The main goals of this study are to find out how teacher candidates view peer-teaching and how they think their understanding of course content is affected when peer-teaching technique is implemented. The study cohorts 38 pre-service teachers enrolled in a 14 week methodology course at a large, public university in Istanbul. Data were collected qualitatively via observations, interviews, peer-evaluation papers and self-analysis reports. All interview transcripts and written samples were inductively analyzed. Findings suggest that peer-teaching exercise is found valuable by teacher candidates in that it helps them to increase learning and to be reflective and at the same time provides the students the opportunity of self-reflection which later might lead to development of their teaching and evaluation skills. 

Aims of this paper is to present the results of the international research on the professional status of teachers from a comparative point of view. The first Italian workgroup, which met to discuss this subject in the summer of 2001, was progressively joined by groups of scholars from other countries, who were interested in giving a sense to teachers and value to their profession.

The year 2004 saw the publication of data from the Italian and United States sides and, in 2005, the results from Poland were made known. Thoughts from Belgium, Cyprus and Libya were added in 2006 and joined by those of Slovakia and Turkey in 2007.

The participants in the research provided for the translation of the questionnaire into their national languages, starting from the original English draft, prepared in the United States.

The data collected is more indicative, than statistically representative and able to be generalised, of what was felt by the teachers in contexts within which an identity of professional belonging was detected. We understand that the teacher is such within any context and that the phenomenal differentiations that characterise the various situations examined expand the viewpoint of the study without eliminating the mutual identifying features of the profession. 

Scaffolding is a teaching strategy that provides individualized support based on the learner’s Zone of the Proximal Development (Chang, Sung & Chen, 2002). In scaffolding instruction, another, more knowledgeable individual, provides scaffolds or supports to facilitate the learner’s development. Roehler & Cantlon (1997) identified five different strategies in instructional scaffolding: the modeling of desired behaviors, the offering of explanations, inviting students to participate, verifying and clarifying student understandings, and inviting students to contribute clues. In this research, the aim has been to analyze student teachers’ scaffolding strategies as they have been applied to the teaching of mathematics. The research was conducted with thirteen student teachers in their fourth year of study in Bachelor of Education (Classroom Teacher) Programs. Nine student teachers worked with two fifth grader learners, while the other four worked with three. In order to determine the participant students, a geometry test relating to the first unit of the fifth grade mathematics curriculum was administered. The student teachers worked on a one-to-one basis with students who were having difficulty in geometry and this scaffolding process was recorded. According to the results; inviting student participation was found to be the most commonly used scaffolding strategy. The least common were inviting students to contribute clues and the modeling of desired behaviors. While the majority of student teachers had similar tendencies, certain others had different inclinations. However, the reasons for their preferences in using these scaffolding strategies were not clear. 

The purpose of this study was to investigate how effective the pedagogical education was from the perception of mathematics teachers whose bachelor degree was from mathematics department of science faculty. For this purpose, as a sample, 15 mathematics teachers who had at least two year teaching experiences before taking pedagogical education were chosen with convenience sampling method. With the semi-structured interviews, their perceptions about special instructional techniques, developmental psychology, and curriculum development courses were gathered. In general, the results of this study revealed that teachers perceived that this education was required for all teacher candidates. On the other hand, it was found that there was a difficulty to apply what was learnt in these courses into practice in classroom environment due to various reasons. 

Many students at all levels have difficulties in understanding chemistry. Students’ constructions of a chemical concept sometimes differ from scientific explanations since they construct their own concepts. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to find out the pre-service chemistry teachers’ explanations regarding chemistry topics which are matter and particles, gases, solutions, vapor pressure and boiling point, chemical equilibrium, acids and bases, and electrochemistry. One-to-one semi-structured interviews were administered to a sample of six participants enrolled in the Department of Secondary Science and Mathematics Education at a university in Ankara. During the interviews, participants were questioned to determine their conceptual understanding aforementioned chemistry topics. Coding was made and five main (correct explanation, partially correct explanation, incorrect explanation without misconceptions, incorrect explanation with misconceptions, and no answer) categories were formed to analyze the data. Analysis of the transcribed interviews showed that the majority of the participants explained their ideas as incorrect and hold some misconceptions on aforementioned topics. In order to overcome these misconceptions it is crucial to diagnose and alternative views of them should be discussed in the class via implementing different teaching strategies and methods such as conceptual change, argumentation, and problem based learning.