Section archive - Teacher Education

Hospital teachers work in a unique educational milieu that serves hospitalized children. In order to meet these children’s educational needs, teachers are expected to display high emotional abilities that will allow them to be creative, flexible and innovative, and able to work in distressing situations. For this reason a 30-hour Emotional Intelligence academic course for hospital teachers was developed and conducted, based on the revised theoretical framework of Mayer, Caruso & Salovey (2016). This mixed methods research study examined 50 hospital teachers who participated in this 10-week course, using a pre- and post-questionnaire, focus groups, semi-structured interviews and a final paper with a reflective summary. All training materials and examples were geared towards working with hospitalized children.

This study investigated little-c creativity in first-year preservice teacher candidates, as manifested in their yearlong fieldwork. It was designed as a qualitative empirical study. Three major themes related to the candidates’ creativity and the components that fostered it were revealed. The first was the process the candidates underwent to construct and implement their initiatives; the second was related to the process that the candidates underwent as they transitioned from feelings of chaos to creativity; and the third was the candidates’ interpersonal relationships. We conclude that preservice teacher education should provide unique experiences that foster creativity.

This year a Collaborative online project developed in Israel is shortlisted for the prestigious international Reimagine Education Award for best project to nurture 21st century skills. The project consists of 3 MOOC courses (Massive Open Online Courses) in Hebrew Arabic and English entitled Introduction to multiculturalism.

An interview is one of the most widely used tools in the admission of candidates for an academic study, particularly in the applied professions. The purpose of this paper is to present a study that assesses the quality of a new interview tool for the selection of teacher-training candidates, in order to find out its added value over other selection tools in use and to justify the effort invested in it. The main findings indicate a high quality of the new tool. The usage of the tool improved the selection procedure of qualified candidates, especially borderline candidates who would be rejected if using only the matriculation and the psychometric admission tools.