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Teachers Without Borders

Breaking Free from Myths About Teaching and Learning - 2 views

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    Breaking Free from Myths About Teaching and Learning: Innovation as an Engine for Student Success
Teachers Without Borders

MOFET ITEC - Seeking Knowledge for Teaching Teaching: Moving beyond Stories - 1 views

  • Many self-studies are derived from the issues, problems and concerns that emerge out of a teacher educator's practice. These self-studies are accounts of a teacher educator's search for meaning in teaching about teaching. This search is commonly driven by a teacher educator's desire to know if he/she is making a difference in students' learning. The author argues that what makes these self-studies so powerful is the knowledge about practice that is derived from the study itself. This article sets out to question a common feature of self-study by exploring why stories are so prominent.
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    Many self-studies are derived from the issues, problems and concerns that emerge out of a teacher educator's practice. These self-studies are accounts of a teacher educator's search for meaning in teaching about teaching. This search is commonly driven by a teacher educator's desire to know if he/she is making a difference in students' learning. The author argues that what makes these self-studies so powerful is the knowledge about practice that is derived from the study itself. This article sets out to question a common feature of self-study by exploring why stories are so prominent. 
Teachers Without Borders

Action Research: A Self-Directed Approach to Professional Development - 4 views

  • The best part about being a teacher is that you get to remain a student forever. Teachers are lifelong learners. To be an effective educator, you must constantly pursue learning through workshops, conferences, on-site or online training modules, and seminars. Professional development can help teachers stay up-to-date with new trends and learn new techniques, strategies, and methods for dealing with various classroom challenges. But all professional development is not the same.
  • If you feel frustrated by not being able to find what you need, how about creating your own solutions? Every classroom challenge is as individual as the students in the class. Sometimes, instead of looking for solutions out there somewhere, it helps if a teacher learns to understand the challenge and experiments to find the answer that suits her class or students. Most teachers shy away from the word "research," thinking it is scholars' job to conduct research and come up with condensed data or analysis. But all of us are researchers, consciously or otherwise.
  • Teachers can do action research by formally defining a problem, drafting a hypothesis, collecting and organizing data, and coming to a conclusion about the effect of the hypothesized change. And the conclusion you derive will be more meaningful and effective because it deals with your challenges and your solutions, keeping in mind your circumstances and resources.
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    Action Research: A Self-Directed Approach to Professional Development
Teachers Without Borders

UPDATED: Keeping Cultural Ties Helps Mexican-American Pupils Succeed - Learning the Lan... - 1 views

  • A new study from the University of Missouri suggests that Mexican-Americans in U.S. schools fare better when they maintain a connection to their heritage. "Culture Predicts Mexican Americans' College Self-Efficacy and College Performance," published in the journal Culture and College Outcomes, shows that Mexican-Americans who continued to speak Spanish and remained attached to their cultural heritage had higher GPAs and were more successful in college.
  • He spoke about the importance of educators understanding cultural differences: "Educators need to be aware of students' home lives," Aguayo said. "Immigrant parents, in particular, tend to put more trust in educators, rather than being involved in the child's education like we normally see in the U.S. If educators can take the time to learn about the parents' culture, the educators can have a positive impact on the students' future."
  • The study adds another voice to the conversation about best practices for teaching ELLs. Arayo says that his results indicate that English-only education may hurt some students: "I understand the reasons behind English-only efforts, but the research shows that if we don't accept the cultural identity of these students in our schools, such as tolerating their native language, Mexican-Americans may not succeed."
Teachers Without Borders

What Teachers Have Learned - Room for Debate Blog - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • What we need are teachers who are much more competent in their subject areas!
  • I’ve seen many teachers ‘bomb’ over the years because they knew their subject matter, but not how to interact with, or be a role model for, children.
  • I am a 21-year veteran teacher who took a whole boatload of education courses in furtherance of my BA and MS degrees. They were utterly useless. The only thing that actually prepared me for teaching was student teaching. All of the other courses taught theory, but nothing practical.
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  • In my opinion, the effectiveness of a teacher is almost impossible to predict until you see them in the classroom for quite a while. Also, a person’s educational background and pre-selection (masters/no masters/Ph.D./Teach for America/Teaching Fellows) cannot predict how they will succeed in the classroom.
  • Empathy is what enables a teacher (or any leader, in truth) to know, in every moment, what a child needs. They know when to call on a student and when not to, when a child has problems at home, when they need to raise the bar and when to lower it.
  • Watching a great teacher interact with students is as inspiring as watching an Olympic athlete. It’s an intuitive and emotional gift and it can’t be taught or instilled with any certification. The degrees mostly just enable educators to speak a common language — a necessary aspect of a profession.
  • As a former teacher I find it interesting that all the focus is on teacher preparation. Nothing was said about class size or collaboration with other teachers. It is assumed that one teacher, in front of a class, is the answer.
  • I believe that the best preparation for teaching is a combination of pedagogy and a strong apprenticeship — a marriage of traditional preparatory and alternative certification programs. All new teachers would benefit from a year of full-time work in the classroom beside an experienced and effective teacher.
  • I left the field because I couldn’t stand this version of corruption, where everyone tries to do the easiest thing instead of the right thing.
  • Pedagogy is fine and good when you’re in academia; however, most of the education school professors haven’t been in a classroom in 20 years and have no idea what works and what doesn’t.
  • That said, I have taken professional development coursework offered through local education schools that were absolutely laughable. Sitting through a 5 hour session that culminated in making a caterpillar from an egg carton is a waste of time. I went to learn how to produce higher rates of literacy in English Language Learners — not how to produce a cute craft of little practical value.
  • I was voted as “Teacher of the Year” at the High School I teach at, and I have never taken an Education course. I have a Master’s degree in Engineering. After 20 years in industry, I became a Math and Physics teacher through the alternate route to certification here in Vermont. I have written a published article comparing the difficulties and joys of teaching with those in industry (For the Love of Kids).
  • I have come to the conclusion that an Education degree for teachers and especially for administrators is a detriment to the education of students, not an asset. How much better to bring real life experience to the classroom than the rote prescriptions taught in the Education classes.
  • teachers should be given comparable credits for spending the summer interning for an NGO or a business.
  • This means that almost all schools would rather have a student right out of college with a teaching major and no real world experience than someone who has 20+ years of working in the real world.
  • I wasn’t the best at classroom management, but then I wasn’t so terrible at it either. I was turning into an automaton, and just as alarmingly, my students were too.
Teachers Without Borders

The School Leader as Bricoleur: Developing Scholarly Practitioners for Our Schools - 0 views

  • Bricoleur, as presented herein, is used metaphorically and in a postmodern or post-formal (Kincheloe & Steinberg, 1999) sense to represent methods, practices and cultural materials that the scholar-practitioner uses as s/he interacts in the complex web of relationships among knowledge, inquiry, practice, and learning
  • The result of the bricoleur’s methods of practice is a bricolage (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000), a construction that arises from the reflexive interactions of different types of knowledge, mediating artifacts, and methods in relation to the social contexts, cultural patterns, and social actions and activities that comprise the daily events of the school.
  • First, the construct of scholar-practitioner leadership is examined, providing a background for exploring the intricacies of scholarly practice through the metaphor of bricoleur.
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  • alternative epistemology of inquiry as practice, wherein the leader as scholar and his or her leadership practice are inseparable from scholarly and critically oriented inquiry.
  • not that of an aloof official imposing, authoritatively, educational ends and methods. He will be on the lookout for ways to give others intellectual and moral responsibilities, not just for ways of setting tasks for them . . .
  • More recently, efforts have been undertaken to reexamine the meaning of “scholar” within the context of educational leadership2 preparation and practice (Anderson & Jones, 2000; Jenlink, 2001b, 2001c; Riehl, et al., 2000). Preparing educational leaders as scholars invests largely in understanding a “scholar” as someone who values inquiry.
  • Relatedly, scholar-practitioner leadership, as a construct, represents a complex set of relationships among inquiry, knowledge, practice, and theory. These relationships have a critical intersect of the core value for and understanding of a “new scholarship”.3 This “new scholarship” defines practice, knowledge, and inquiry within the practice-based world of teachers and administrators, acknowledging the value of “local theory” and “knowledge-of-practice.” Also shaping the conceptual and practical meaning of scholar-practitioner leadership is a dimension of criticality that transforms leadership practice into leadership praxis.
  • In contrast, learning to lead for the scholar-practitioner is concerned less with transitional orientations of knowledge and inquiry and more with engaging in a “new epistemology” of knowledge and practice articulated through the inquiry as praxis.
  • A central element in scholar-practitioner leadership is criticality, which, depending on the degree of criticality, transforms inquiry, knowledge and practice.
  • The ideal degree of scholarly practice for school leaders seeking to create democratic learning communities would exist at a point along the primary axis, moving outward to a level of inquiry and/or knowledge-of-practice.
  • The criticalist “attempts to use his/her work as a form of social or cultural criticism” (Kincheloe & McLaren, 1994, p. 139). As a criticalist, the school leader engages in his or her work through leadership praxis5 guided by inquiry that is reflective, ethical, critical, and intentional. Praxis-oriented scholarly practice refers to “activities that combat dominance and move toward self-organization and that push toward thoroughgoing change in the practices of . . . the social formation” (Benson, 1983, p. 338).
  • A critical leadership praxis is also concerned with inequity and injustice that surface within the curricula and instructional systems of schools, as well as asymmetrical power relations that all too shape student and teacher identities along ideological lines that work to control and disadvantage some while advantaging others
  • leadership praxis is emancipatory, “grounded in a critical consciousness, which will manifest itself in action that will always be becoming emancipatory” (Grundy, 1993, p. 174). For the educational leader as criticalist, the question is not “Am I emancipated and how can I emancipate my staff?” but rather ”How can I engage in forms of critical, self-reflective and collaborative work which will create conditions so that the people with whom I work can come to control their knowledge and practice?” (p. 174).
  • The word bricoleur and its cognate bricolage come from bricole, a corruption of which is the English term brick wall. The root word of bricole means rebound. Bricoleur, as Levi-Strauss (1966) has noted, is “used with references to some extraneous movement” (p. 16)—movement in physical terms such as a ball rebounding off a wall, in sociological terms the social interaction in activities, and in psychological terms the interacting and cognitive rebounding of ideas, concepts, and feelings experienced as one individual works in relationship to others.
  • Noting the association with Baudelaire, bricolage, as Norris (1987) suggests, is a French word that refers to the “ad hoc assemblage of miscellaneous materials and signifying structures” (Levi-Strauss, quoted in Norris, p. 134). The bricoleur works in association with his or her culture and the material practices and artifacts available in the culture. Spivak (1976) says “the bricoleur makes do with things that were meant perhaps for other ends” (p. xix). Weinstein and Weinstein (1991) explain the bricoleur as a person who is “practical and gets things done” (p. 161). As Norris (1987) notes of the bricoleur, s/he is “happy to exploit the most diverse assortment of mythemes—or random combinartory elements” (p. 134).
Ben Darr

Learnlets - 0 views

shared by Ben Darr on 29 Mar 11 - Cached
  • Here, I start with the hermeneutic notion of how we act in the world and learn. We start with things well-practiced, but if we have a problem, a breakdown, we look for an answer.
    • Ben Darr
       
      Clark Quinn provides an interesting beginning to our desire to learn. When we find our usual way of doing things is not working, we attempt to learn something new.
Teachers Without Borders

INEE | Inter-Agency Network for Education in Emergencies - 0 views

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    This e-learning module uses the example of the Darfur refugee crisis to demonstrate how the Minimum Standards for Education: Preparedness, Response, Recovery-the foundational tool of the Inter-Agency Network for Education in Emergencies (INEE)-can be used as a framework for designing quality education programmes in conflict-induced situations.  Throughout this module, you will watch short video clips, look at photographs, and read relevant articles and reports.  A series of questions will help you understand how the INEE Minimum Standards can be used to improve the quality of education assistance.
Teachers Without Borders

Team Up for 21st Century Teaching and Learning - 0 views

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    What Research and Practice Reveal About Professional Learning
Teachers Without Borders

Collaborate Smart: Practical Strategies and Tools for Educators | CEC Store - 1 views

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    From Susan M. Hentz, noted educational speaker and author of Teach Smart, and Phyllis M. Jones, a teacher administrator and educator; Collaborate Smart: Practical Strategies and Tools for Educators is a masterful tool for improving co-teaching and collaborative communication among members of teaching teams. The evolving process of collaboration in the classroom involves negotiation, re-negotiation, respect, trust, and the creation of a level of comfort in the partnership that allows for risk taking in thinking and practice, which yields cohesive instruction that best impacts a student's learning experience. A "how-to" guide for every educator, Collaborate Smart enhances your resources for instruction through its fully developed, comprehensive yet practical information.
Teachers Without Borders

Standardized Test Scores Can Improve When Kids Told They Can Fail, Study Finds - 1 views

  • As it turns out, Alcala's students aren't the only ones who can benefit from exercises like "my favorite no." A new study by two French researchers published in the Journal of Psychology: General shows how telling students that failure is a natural element of learning -- instead of pressuring them to succeed -- may increase their academic performance.
  • "We wanted to show that even if you put children in a situation where there's no pressure, the simple fact that they're confronted with difficulty could trigger a disruption in their performance."
  • To verify this hypothesis, Croizet and Autin conducted three studies among sixth graders in their city, Poitiers. In one experiment, they gave 111 sixth graders an impossible set of anagrams to solve. Then Autin told one group of kids that "learning is difficult and failure is common," but hard work will help, "like riding a bicycle." Autin asked a second group of kids how they attacked the problems after the test. When both groups, plus a control group, then took an exam that measured working memory -- a capacity often used to predict IQ -- the students Autin had counseled performed "significantly better" than both groups, especially on the tougher questions.
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  • He noted that similar studies in the U.S. have found that college students perform better after reading positive messages, and that he replicated the experiment by having older students tell younger students that they should "expect middle school to be difficult but doable" -- and found that state test scores increased dramatically.
  • The researchers also found that test relaxation techniques that seem obvious to most teachers, such as telling students that they can perform well, can actually make kids more anxious -- and thus perform at lower levels. "It makes sense to me," Alcala, the Berkeley teacher, said of the study. "I've been doing it [my favorite no] for four years now, and my kids' understanding is significantly better than before, as measured by test scores."
riss leung

Collective efficacy: Theoretical development, empirical evidence, and future directions... - 3 views

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    Double looped learning
erin pizzo

Filamentality - 0 views

shared by erin pizzo on 04 Aug 10 - Cached
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    Filamentality is a fill-in-the-blank tool that guides you through picking a topic, searching the Internet, gathering good Internet links, and turning them into online learning activities. Support is built-in along the way through Mentality Tips. In the end, you'll create a web-based activity you can share with others even if you don't know anything about HTML or serving web pages
Emily Vickery

Bloom's Taxonomy - Emerging Perspectives on Learning, Teaching and Technology - 0 views

  • During the 1990's, a former student of Bloom's, Lorin Anderson, led a new assembly which met for the purpose of updating the taxonomy, hoping to add relevance for 21st century students and teachers. This time "representatives of three groups [were present]: cognitive psychologists, curriculum theorists and instructional researchers, and testing and assessment specialists" (Anderson, & Krathwohl, 2001, p. xxviii). Like the original group, they were also arduous and diligent in their pursuit of learning, spending six years to finalize their work. Published in 2001, the revision includes several seemingly minor yet actually quite significant changes. Several excellent sources are available which detail the revisions and reasons for the changes. A more concise summary appears here. The changes occur in three broad categories: terminology, structure, and emphasis.
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