Adding to the Knowledge Base Overview of Features and Articles in This Issue

In our first two issues as editors of the Journal of Teacher Education (JTE), we expressed a commitment to facilitating the development of the knowledge base in teacher education while strengthening the connections among research, practice, and policy. Sharon Robinson, President and CEO of the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education (AACTE), provided a guest editorial in our initial issue (JTE Vol. 62, Issue 5), which signaled the increased importance and need for research informing practice in educator preparation. The current issue features a guest editorial by Donna Wiseman, Chair of the AACTE Executive Committee, which extends the connections between research and policy through a focus on the need for scholarly solutions to the myriad policy questions and issues that confront teacher education today. In addition, this issue includes five articles that contribute to our knowledge and understanding of preservice and inservice teacher education as a means of improvement of classroom instruction, networks for support and development of certain dispositions, and community-based experience in relation to the learning trajectories of preservice teachers. The first article, "Teaching, Rather Than Teachers, As a Path Toward Improving Classroom Instruction," by James Hiebert and Anne Morris, argues that we have traditionally relied more heavily on either recruiting more talented people into teaching initially or improving the quality of teachers entering the profession to improve classroom instruction. Instead, they make the case for improving instructional methods by using knowledge products (annotated lesson plans or common assessments). In other words, they claim that the focus of teacher education needs to be on teaching rather than the teachers themselves. Although the second article, "Practice-Based Professional Development for Self-Regulated Strategies Development in Writing: A Randomized Controlled Study," by Karen Harris, Kathleen Lane, Steve Graham, Steven Driscoll, Karin Sondmel, Mary Brindle, and Christopher Schatschneider, is not necessarily an explicit example of Hiebert and Morris' definition of professional development through focus on teaching rather than teachers, it exhibits many of the characteristics. Harris et al. used practice-based professional development to enable teachers to implement strategies instruction and included detailed lesson plans for instruction that teachers discussed and adapted. Notable characteristics of this randomized controlled study include the focus on student outcomes as well as observed teacher implementation and students' and teachers' perceptions of the social validity of the strategies instruction program. The next two articles provide a contrast to the notion of focusing on teaching rather than teachers. Both studies investigate the role of networks in recruiting, developing, and sustaining certain teacher dispositions identified as important in previous research and theory. Scott Ritchie's contribution, "Incubating and Sustaining: How Teacher Networks Enable and Support Social Justice Education," uses a backward mapping approach to examine the role of various types of networks in supporting teachers who enact critical pedagogy and social justice education. …