Professional teaching placements are an essential part of secondary teacher training, with trainees spending around two thirds of their time in schools. This practical handbook helps trainees fully prepare for their school experience, offering the guidance and reassurance to ensure they are confident and successful during placement. It is full of invaluable advice and practical suggestions, with clear links to the Professional Standards for QTS throughout.

Professional teaching placements are an essential part of secondary teacher training, with trainees spending around two thirds of their time in schools. This practical handbook helps trainees fully prepare for their school experience, offering the guidance and reassurance to ensure they are confident and successful during placement. It is full of invaluable advice and practical suggestions, with clear links to the Professional Standards for QTS throughout.

Winner of the 2004 Critics' Choice Award presented by the American Educational Studies Association Teacher educators from ten institutions and programs in the United States, Canada, and Germany describe the ways in which they have changed teacher preparation to more fully incorporate cooperative learning concepts. Analytical commentaries on the programs highlight the learning experience of these programs as well as underlying issues of needed reforms in teacher education. Included among best practices in education, cooperative learning may require a shift in program philosophy and disciplinary areas to meet the challenge of complex organizations and diverse student populations. As the essays in the volume demonstrate, a new alignment of field experiences to provide support for novices to implement cooperative strategies, and to receive timely and effective supervision for these attempts, may also be required.

'Trainee teachers will welcome the concise and reader-friendly format this book offers. Julia Lawrence has taken great care to provide a balanced and relevant overview of the major topics trainee teachers often lack confidence in, when planning and delivering lessons. A particularly useful and welcome feature for trainee teachers is the book's companion website with helpful links to teaching resources. This book provides essential reading for all trainee primary teachers.' Nigel Clarke, Senior Lecturer in Physical Education, University of Cumbria. Physical Education is an important part of the primary curriculum and one that provides unique challenges for those involved with its teaching. Teaching Primary Physical Education provides a concise overview of the knowledge, skills and understanding required for the confident teaching of physical education in primary schools. This book offers a balanced and comprehensive overview of the subject, covering issues such as safe practice in PE, inclusion, subject leadership and cross-curricular approaches to physical education supported by an accessible theory-informed approach. Teaching Primary Physical Education is supported by a companion website www.sagepub.co.uk/lawrence, which includes further practical examples of applications, links to relevant literature and teaching resources, offering further student-friendly material for use across different physical disciplines. This is essential reading for all students studying primary physical education on primary initial teacher education courses including undergraduate (BEd, BA with QTS), postgraduate (PGCE, SCITT), and employment-based routes into teaching, and also for those on Sports Studies courses with a Primary PE component. Dr Julia Lawrence is Subject Leader of Physical Education at Leeds Metropolitan University.

This is an informative, engaging and accessible book about teaching that covers a broad range of content without being superficial.

In this book, Janet Alsup reports and theorizes a multi-layered study of teacher identity development. The study, which followed six pre-service English education students, was designed to investigate her hypothesis that forming (or failing to form) a professional identity is central in the process of becoming an effective teacher. This work addresses the intersection of various types of discourse within the process of professional identity development, emphasizes that the intersection of the personal and professional in teacher identity formation is more complex than is acknowledged in typical methods classes, and accents the need for teacher educators to take steps to facilitate such integration. Specific suggestions for methods courses are presented that teacher educators can use as is or adapt to their own contexts. Teacher Identity Discourses: Negotiating Personal and Professional Spaces speaks eloquently to faculty, researchers, and graduate students across the field of teacher education.

This concluding report of the Jobs for Youth series analyses the situation of youth employment and unemployment in the context of the jobs crisis and identifies successful policy measures in OECD countries as well as structural reforms in education and in the labour market that can help.

It is increasingly being acknowledged that subject leaders hold the key to school improvement and professional development. However, there is little information available for subject leaders to help them with the day-to-day practicalities of running a department on top of existing teaching commitments. This uniquely practical book deals specifically with current issues faced by subject heads of department (HoDs). Engagingly and entertainingly written, this book covers the major areas of concern to subject leaders, including leadership styles, managing staff, managing pupil performance, strategic planning, curriculum development and coping with problems.

Teacher quality is the single most important school-related factor influencing student success. The author examines the body of research on the subject of teacher quality to draw conclusions about which attributes makes teachers most effective, (experience, preparation programs and degrees, type of certification, specific coursework taken in preparation for the profession, and teachers' own test scores), with a focus on aspects of teacher quality that can be translated into policy recommendations and incorporated into teaching practice.