A Head-Start to Teaching: Exploring the Early Field Experiences in Pre-service EFL Education in Turkey

This study explored the experiences of pre-service English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers, cooperating teachers, and university collaborators in a structured early field experience course. Qualitative methodology including data sources of interviews, observations, focus groups, audio and video recordings were used. The results of the study indicated that the exposure of pre-service teachers into real school contexts provided them with the necessary foundations of becoming reflective practitioners. The benefits of the structured early field experiences outweighed the challenges. Early field experiences are critical in forming the pre-service teacher beliefs and philosophies of pre-service teachers, so they should be designed carefully to meet their needs

Communities of Practice Along the Texas-Mexico Border: A University and School District Leadership Partnership

This chapter focuses on how one university leadership preparation program along the Texas-Mexico border made a deliberate and concerted effort to build a principal pipeline by establishing a local university school partnership with several local school districts along a border that is bilingual, bicultural, and binational. The preparation program focused on realigning to national standards, actively sought out collaborative feedback from district partners on the development of course assessments, the co-design of clinical experiences, establishing accessible in-district program scheduling, course instruction provided by highly qualified faculty, developing and implementing multiple program and course assessments, and established and implemented dispositions