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Teachers Without Borders

How Blogs, Social Media, and Video Games Improve Education - Brookings Institution - 2 views

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    The appearance of collaboration tools such as blogs, wikis, social media, and video games has altered the way individuals and organizations relate to one another.[i] There is no longer any need to wait on professionals to share material and report on new developments.  Today, people communicate directly in an unmediated and unfiltered manner.
Teachers Without Borders

Shortage of Special Education Teachers Includes Their Teachers - On Special Education -... - 1 views

  • Four years of study by the organization found that job prospects and job security for special education doctorates remain high and stable. But despite the economy and the outlook for jobs in other fields, the demand for special education faculty continues to outstrip the supply. Aside from training new special education teachers, special education faculty conduct the kind of research that informs instruction, so the lack of faculty is a double whammy, the study found. in addition, the training of special education teachers is becoming more complex. Some programs now include instruction about multitiered interventions, such as response to intervention; differentiated instruction; and universal design for learning.
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

"Teacher training in climate change education is in its infancy" | Education | United N... - 0 views

  • UNESCO is launching a Teacher Education Course on Climate Change Education for Sustainable Development (CCESD) in late 2011
  • In a nutshell, the course is designed to give teachers confidence in facilitating  CCESD inside and outside the classroom so that they can help young people understand the causes and consequences of climate change, bring about changes in attitudes and behaviors to reduce the severity of future climate change, and build resilience  in the face of climate change that are already present.
  • First, it helps teachers to understand the causes, dynamics and impacts of climate change through a holistic lens. Second, teachers are exposed to a range of pedagogical approaches that they can use in their own school environment. This includes engagement in whole school and school-in-community approaches. Third, teachers can develop their capacities to facilitate students’ community based learning.  Fourth, teachers can develop future oriented and transformative capacities in facilitating climate change mitigation, adaptation, and disaster risk reduction learning..    
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  • The course is needed precisely because teaching about climate change is such a demanding task. Teachers need to understand what and how to teach about the forces driving climate change as well as its impacts on culture, security, well-being and development prospects. Their role is to show young people how they and their communities can respond to the threat.
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    "Teacher training in climate change education is in its infancy" ©Fumiyo Kagawa In advance of the tenth anniversary of the Rio Earth Summit (Rio+20), UNESCO is launching a Teacher Education Course on Climate Change Education for Sustainable Development (CCESD) in late 2011.
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).
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