This volume addresses the important problem of understanding good university teaching, and focuses on the thinking, beliefs, and knowledge, which accompany teachers' actions. It is the first book to address this area and it promises to become a landmark volume in the field - helping us to understand a complex area of human activity and improve both teaching and learning. It is for education researchers, staff/faculty developers and educational developers.

This book identifies strategies that are consistently associated with good teaching and presents them within a theoretical framework that explains how they promote students' active and meaningful learning. The book promotes teachers' pedagogical knowledge and their perception of teaching as scholarly, intellectual work, and provides extensive practical advice.

This is a companion volume to the editors' Insights into Teachers' Thinking and Practice (Falmer Press, 1999) and seeks to carry the discussion on further illustrating that there is a continuing intensity of thought, activity and debate on how to conceptualise research on teacher thinking, and thus generate knowledge for further understanding and action. The ethical questions on undertaking research on the inner lives of teachers remain unresolved. The international team present chapters which investigate the relationship between the researcher and the researched, and the relevance and role of research in teacher development. The papers are not presented as 'best practice' for such definitions would be inevitably value laden. Rather, they are indications and anticipations of key areas for the development of understanding of teachers' thinking and actions in the 1990s.

Francisco Rios' book sheds light on current scholarship around teacher thinking in cultural contexts and identifies promising practices that take into account context specific influences. He provides a theoretical and conceptual framework for understanding why teacher cognition as a context specific phenomenon is important, how it is studied, what can be learned, and how these learnings inform the preparation of culturally responsive educators. The contributors look at how teachers think about students of color and/or a multicultural curriculum and explore opportunities for reconstructing teacher knowledge of the cultural context. Rather than focusing on ways in which the students are "deficient," or on the behavioral elements of effective teaching, this book starts with the how and what of teacher thinking as a central element in the teaching-learning relationship. It places the teacher at the center of instructional activity. While teacher thought influences what happens in instructional settings, teacher thought is also influenced by the people and activity critical to those settings.

Originally published in 1983. A broad examination of the ways in which teachers gain and use knowledge about their work is presented in this book. At the time, within curriculum studies, there was a developing greater understanding of the major role that teachers play in the implementation of materials within the classroom - as autonomous agents holding, using and creating knowledge of particular kinds which informs all of their work. This book presents a case study using retrospective interviews with a high school English teacher. Through analysis of this series of interviews, this study describes and outlines the structure of the knowledge she uses and the views she has of her concerns.

This volume of Advances in Teacher Education is about beliefs held by teachers and addresses the important topic of teacher beliefs from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Most of the authors who have contributed to this collection of essays assume that beliefs are propositions that are felt to be true by the person embracing them, but that do not necessarily rest on the kind of evidence that justifies the use of the term “knowledge.” Teacher beliefs are an important topic because it is hypothesized that teachers and teacher candidates use them to shape the information they receive from formal teacher preparation and to direct subsequent decision-making in the classroom.