Under-Prepared Students: Essentials beyond Academics

Teacher education programs continue to struggle with preparing highly qualified teachers ready to meet the academic, cultural, exceptionality and linguistic challenges, which are increasingly the reality of American's classrooms. Despite increased academic rigor in such programs, many emerging teachers are still ill prepared to each effectively students from cultural and racial backgrounds different from their own. The article asserts that this is due in part to a lack of an appropriate disposition on the part of future teachers. Further, the authors provide three strategies they use routinely with their undergraduate teacher education students that hold promise for effecting positive changes in disposition.