Dr. John L Pecore

The first warnings of a potential teacher shortage in the United States occurred in the mid-1980s. According to a Rand Corporation Report (Darling-Hammond, 1984; Antonucci, 2016) titled Я Coming Crisis in Teaching, the main causes of an impending teacher shortage were poor working conditions, low pay, lack of decision-making input, and a prevalence of standardized testing. Of the impending teacher shortage, Linda Darling-Hammond (1984) wrote: "LTnless major changes are made in the structure of the teaching profession, so that teaching becomes an attractive career alternative for talented individuals, we will in a very few years face widespread shortages of qualified teachers" (p. vi). Darling-Hammond's report cautioned that the least academically qualified people could become the teaching force for future generations of American schoolchildren. The predicted teaching shortage of the late 1980s, however, was averted because of a growing teaching force and consistent student enrollment (Antonucci, 2016) resulting in a lower overall pupil-teacher ratio (Ingersoll & Merrill, 2013).

According to the report, rote memorization and repetition is today's dominant teaching method (Creativity in Learning, 2019). Interestingly, the Gallup study (Creativity in Learning, 2019) revealed that parents and teachers do not value standardized testing as an effective measure of student learning with only 4% of parents and 1% of teachers ranking scores on standardized tests as an important learning outcome. Despite rising calls for preservice teachers to be prepared with the pedagogical content understanding needed to teach statistics, there are few stand-alone statistics courses available. [...]she contends that teachers from all subject areas must be able to decipher the statistical data generated on their pupils, schools, and themselves.

Ashim suggested the importance of teaching mindfulness as a means to develop resiliency and to deal with problems encountered in life. [...]mindfulness is particularly important in helping students cope in times of crises like the recent pandemic. Concerns of the well-being of teacher education students exhibiting an unhealthy focus on grades over learning, hypersensitivity to constructive feedback, and lack of academic risk-taking provide the rationale behind Elizabeth Dorman's manuscript, "A Cycle of Fragility: Prospective Teachers' Emotions and Perspectives Around Being Assessed and Evaluated." [...]Leslie Keiler, Raffaella Diotti, and Kara Hudon's article, "The Role of Student Mentors in Teacher Program Induction," explores a provocative idea of having students mentor teachers learning a new instructional model in a professional development program.

If emissions are not reduced, the planet faces a great risk of extreme drought, wildfires, floods, and food shortages for hundreds of millions of people (UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2018). The nonbinding resolution calls for reducing U.S. dependency on fossil fuels and curbing greenhouse gas emissions by supporting new high-paying jobs in clean energy industries (Friedman, 2019). [...]Denise McDonald's article, "Investigating Intentionality and Mindfulness of Storytelling as Pedagogy: What Student Evaluations Reveal about My Practice," contributes an analysis of five years of course evaluations for an undergraduate course in classroom management.

This year the American Association for Teaching and Curriculum (AATC) celebrates a quarter of a century as an association dedicated "to promote the scholarly study of teaching and curriculum." The founders of AATC felt a strong need for a national learned society to serve the field of teaching and curriculum and its intersections with theory and practice. Thus, AATC is dedicated to fostering intellectual conversations among its members and producing scholarship that explores the relationship between theory, practice, and policy in teaching and curriculum.