Skip to main content

Home/ Teacher Professional Development/ Group items tagged practice

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Teachers Without Borders

open thinking » Visualizing Open/Networked Teaching - 0 views

educationaltechnology.ca/...1335

communities of practice practitioner inquiry professional identity teacher education pd

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 19 Feb 09 - Cached
  • Open teaching is described as the facilitation of learning experiences that are open, transparent, collaborative, and social. Open teachers are advocates of a free and open knowledge society, and support their students in the critical consumption, production, connection, and synthesis of knowledge through the shared development of learning networks.
  • Through the guiding principles of open teaching, students are able to gain requisite skills, self-efficacy, and knowledge as they develop their own personal learning networks (PLNs). Educators guide the process using their own PLNs, with a variety of teaching/learning experiences, and via (distributed) scaffolding.
  • This metaphor projects the role of teacher as one who “knows the terrain”, helps to guide students around obstacles, but who is also led by student interests, objectives, and knowledge. The terrain in this case consists of the development of media literacy (critique & awareness), social networks (connections), and connected/connective knowledge
Teachers Without Borders

middleclassgirl.com » The concept - 0 views

middleclassgirl.com/?p=73

virtualclassroomproject VCP sleducation second life

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 17 Feb 09 - Cached
  • One of the reasons I think I became a little disengaged at the end of last year with Second Life was because I had reached a ‘now what?’ stage. Having been part of the community of learners on the Islands of Jokaydia was great, but personally I felt I had plateaued in what I could offer or do.
  • ut what I began to obsess over was this: if anyone came to my plot .. why would they? Why would they come into Second Life merely to click on a few urls that would take them to the internet? To me, that wasn;t a good use of the platform.
  • How could Second Life compliment some of the traditional practices that exist at the moment? These are characteristics of the space I would like to create: Low skill level required for a new user or visitor to the space. Basic knowledge of moving, collecting and navigation required. One of the biggest obstacles is *time* - I don’t want visitors first experiences to be one of frustration or pitched at a level that they won’t be able to enjoy the experience. I want it to be ‘interactive’ by which, of course, I don’t want it to be merely a space where someone clicks on a scripted board merely to be taken to a 2D URL. Documents may be a feature, not necessarily the primary feature of the build. I would hope the space could interactive for whomever visited it. Invite collaboration, strategizing and provide points for debate.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • However, considering the knowledge that I have on Australian History and the fact that this is one area of history that students find ‘boring’, I have decided to make this a space for Australian History. Particularly focusing on Frontier Life.
  • My idea is that when someone first visited the site they would be faced with a simulation of the Australian bush either as it appeared pre settlement. Uncleared. Perhaps with evidence of Indigenous inhabitants. Features of the natural Landscape.
  • Once armed with some of this foreknowledge, visitors would be invited to clear the land themselves taking into account the topography, geography and physical elements of the landscape. Provided with a ‘box’ visitors would be invited to build their own hut, or settlement. Here is where the strategizing and foreknowledge will come into play. Some of the objects provided in the box will not be historically accurate, so first the visitor will have to discern which objects are a)historically representative of the period and b) whether those objects are going to be of any use.
  • I think that there is room for, later on, for another ‘box of stuff’ which would include material and cultural objects of indigenous people. What aspects of their lives changed? What was the impact of European settlement on their land?
  • When people change or clear the land (if this is possible) they will do it differently. If anything, apart from being immersed in the new learning space, we want to show that historical inquiry is often open ended – sometimes there is not one neat story that has all of the loose ends tied up.
Teachers Without Borders

A Push to Improve Teachers' Colleges - WSJ.com - 1 views

online.wsj.com/...4138204576602992880869786.html

teacher education pre-service teachers evaluation standardized tests

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 08 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • The Obama administration announced a new $185 million competition Friday that would reward colleges for producing teachers whose students perform well on standardized tests. The competition would require states to provide data linking collegiate teaching programs inside their borders to the test scores of their graduates' students. Under the proposal, to be eligible for the money, states would have to ratchet up teacher-licensing exams and close persistently low-performing teacher-training programs.
  • In a news conference Friday, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan noted that that nearly two-thirds of new teachers report feeling unprepared to run classes. "What if 62% of our new doctors felt unprepared to practice medicine?" said Mr. Duncan, adding that "the status quo is unacceptable."
  • Evidence is mounting that teacher quality is the biggest in-school determinant of student achievement. Yet the nation's colleges of education are a patchwork of programs that vary in quality. Each state sets its own admissions, graduation and licensing requirements.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Recruiting and training a strong teaching force has been a main priority of Mr. Duncan, and he has chided teacher-prep programs for their failure to produce high-quality instructors. The U.S. requires states to identify low-performing teacher-prep programs. But in the past 12 years, 27 states haven't found even one program lacking in quality, Mr. Duncan said.
Teachers Without Borders

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

blogs.edweek.org/...ing_in_touch_with_culture.html

ELLs immigration education Mexico minorities

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 09 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • 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

New York Regents May Expand Ways to Certify Teachers - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...16teach.html

pd teacher education certification

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 16 Nov 09 - Cached
  • The State Board of Regents will consider letting alternative teacher training programs certify teachers, expanding the role that for decades has been exclusively performed by education schools
  • Another would change the requirements for teacher certification, like having more difficult content exams and classroom demonstrations.
  • While New York has had some alternative certification programs in place for years, like Teach for America and New York City Teaching Fellows, students are still required to take classes at education schools during the summer, nights and weekends to earn a teaching certificate.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Arne Duncan said that schools should focus more on hands-on classroom work, similar to medical residencies that aspiring doctors must complete.
  • “Upwards of 90 percent of teachers pass the test for certification, they go on to course work and very, very few don’t make it through,” Dr. Steiner said. “I don’t think anybody thinks that’s the right model. It’s very focused on course work and the quality is varied.” The idea, he said, is to focus the core of preparation on practice teaching.
  • “It enables us to have a complete paradigm shift, where we go from passive learned knowledge that is received from a university to active absorbed knowledge that is seen and experienced in the classroom,” he said.
  • William J. Baldwin, the vice provost at Teachers College, said that in expanding the certification process, the state would be treating teaching as something to be trained for, rather than a sophisticated profession.
  • The commissioner is also proposing to develop a new assessment for professional certification, which teachers receive after at least three years in the classroom. The new assessment could also include a way to measure teacher effectiveness based on student test scores.
Ben Darr

Learnlets - 0 views

blog.learnlets.com

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
      Ben Darr on 29 Mar 11
       
      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.
‹ Previous 21 - 31 of 31
Showing 20▼ items per page