Can It Be a Means for Helping Teacher Candidates Learn About Student Diversity?

Teachers must have professional strategies that allow them to consider what students need in order to be academically successful, and then respond to those needs through instructional and management changes in the classroom. This is not a simple process for any teacher; for a novice teacher, this is a particularly complex challenge as they are still learning to teach while engaged in actual teaching (Darling-Hammond & Bransford, 2005; Wildman, Niles, & Magliaro, 1989). To that end, our work in the preparation of teachers led us to look for strategies that could support novices ’ attempts to meet students’ diverse needs. This paper describes the use of action research as one such strategy in a teacher preparation program focused on preparing teachers for diverse student populations. It was our hope that through engaging in the process of action research, teacher candidates would learn how to recognize, accommodate, and utilize th