Bold Ideas for Improving Teacher Education and Teaching: What We See, Hear, and Think

Teacher education has been struggling with the central chal-lenge of preparing and retaining sufficient numbers of high-quality teachers who can work effectively with students from diverse cultural and racial backgrounds, especially in urban school contexts. As teacher educators, we work in an institution situated in the frontline of facing this challenge, where we have learned that bold ideas—fresh, creative, dif-ferent, and empirically sound concepts, strategies, and perspectives—are crucial for understanding this challenge and developing useful solutions toward educational reform. As researchers with varying scholarly interests and from dif-ferent research traditions, we also know that bold ideas are as crucial to the sustenance and development of scholarship in teacher education and teaching as they have been to the development of human knowledge (Kuhn, 1962).