Search results for: Teaching methods
This article aims to examine specific issues arising within the environmental building disciplines at a UK university. It also explores strategies for achieving optimal research-teaching links. The results reveal that research-teaching linkages within these disciplines were interrelated and dynamic, but could be controversial, evidenced in coexisting multifaceted conflicts and complementarities.
Updated: Mar. 28, 2016
The Integration of Environmental Education into Two Elementary Preservice Science Methods Courses: A Content-Based and a Method-Based Approach
In this study, the authors were interested to examine the notion of environmental education (EE) as context for integrating the elementary curricula.
They examined preservice teachers’ understandings of EE, their ideas to incorporate EE into their future teaching, and their conceptions of EE as a context for integration.
The results support the incorporation of EE activities and instruction in science methods courses to enhance instruction in science content and teaching methods.
The authors also suggest an explicit focus in the methods course on science and engineering content, inquiry, and cross-cutting concepts as they relate to EE.
Results from this study suggest that elementary science methods instructors can include some of this content and method in elementary science method courses.
Updated: Mar. 20, 2016
This article explores an effort to rethink curricular decision-making with a group of public pre-K teachers working in a context of curriculum escalation and commitment to play-based pedagogy. Through a professional development program designed to support developmentally and culturally responsive early mathematics, the authors examine how teachers took up the idea of engaging in mathematics with 4-year-olds in a way that married content knowledge and home practices.
Updated: Feb. 29, 2016
This study focuses on the specific expertise that science teacher educators (TEs) bring into teacher education. The authors were interested to gain insight into teacher educators' aims for teaching about science teaching, and how their expertise has developed on the basis of their professional background and experiences. The findings reveal similarities among the concerns of these TEs and yet considerable diversity among their approaches.
Updated: Dec. 29, 2015
In this study, the authors inspected teachers’ online discussions of animations of classroom episodes realized with cartoon characters, looking at the difference in the content of conversation turns when members made evaluative comments and when they did not make evaluative comments. They were interested in finding out whether making evaluative comments correlated with participants’ reflection on their professional practice and proposal of alternative teaching actions. They found statistically significant evidence that the more the participants actively evaluated the teaching in the animations, the more they proposed alternative teaching actions and reflected on instructional practice.
Updated: Dec. 28, 2015
Preservice Elementary Science Teachers’ Connections among Aspects of NOS: Toward a Consistent, Overarching Framework
This research examined the connections elementary preservice science teachers made among various aspects of nature of science (NOS).
Data analysis focused on preservice teachers’ ability to connect their understandings of the various aspects of NOS to one another.
43 of preservice teachers made connections among NOS aspects and generally, these connections were emphasized at the end of the semester following the intervention.
Updated: Dec. 27, 2015
Questioning to Scaffold: An Exploration of Questions in Pre-service Teacher Training Feedback Sessions
This study explored trainer questioning strategies which aimed to scaffold development and learning in teacher training feedback sessions. Findings include a categorisation of different question types which seemed to prompt reflection and construction of knowledge. The data also suggest that trainees need varying levels of support through different question types to better scaffold their understanding of teaching.
Updated: Dec. 22, 2015
This paper outlines the diffusion of one such pedagogy from medical to teacher education. Implemented in five different teacher preparation programs, simulation data highlight design principles and resulting outcomes for general scholastic and subject-specific problems of practice.
Updated: Dec. 06, 2015
Reflections of a Peace Educator: The Power and Challenges of Peace Education With Pre-Service Teachers
The present study examines one long-standing peace and global education initiative for pre-service teacher candidates. It probes the meanings of peace education and of global education embedded in the program, as well as the program's effects on the pre-service candidates' understandings of peace education. The article discusses two main challenges faced by the core faculty in this peace education program. In particular, teacher candidates' understandings of peace education often seemed limited, especially in relation to their competence in developing curricula for other strands of global education. Second, teacher candidates often had difficulty acquiring the relevant knowledge base and teaching materials necessary for facilitating the complex pedagogies associated with peace education.
Updated: Nov. 23, 2015
In this paper, the authors review the approaches taken in several states that have already estimated the effects of teacher preparation programs (TPP) and analyze the proposals for incorporating students’ test score gains into the evaluations of TPP by states that have received federal Race to the Top funds. They developed a framework to focus on three types of decisions that are required to implement these new accountability requirements: selection, estimation and reporting.
Updated: Nov. 22, 2015