Search results for: Teaching methods

The researcher was interested to evaluate the design, implementation and effectiveness of incorporating an online learning community as part of a new-teacher induction program. The researcher focused on the conceptual framework and receptiveness of the implementation of the framework in a new-teacher induction program. The participants in the online learning community were new teachers entering as full-time employees, and contributors (administrators, veteran teachers, and professors from school of education). Data revealed positive results for new-teacher induction online learning community.

This study examined preservice teachers’ views of their own cultural values, the cultural values they believed scientists hold, and the relationships of these views to their conceptions of nature of science (NOS). The authors found that from the beginning to the end of the semester, preservice teachers perceived fewer differences between their own cultural values and those they perceived scientists held, though they did not change their own cultural values.

The author argues that a (re)turn to a focus on ‘practice’ in initial teacher education programs might allow teacher educators to start to relate and integrate the experience that their students have of their courses. He claims that the challenge for teacher educators is to find a way to allow student teachers to confront the work of teaching as something that must be practised and refined, reflected upon and tried again. The author presents a form of ‘thought experiment’ which designed at Charles Sturt University to investigate what happens when new student teachers encounter a program that focuses on studying and practising ‘core practices’ of teaching that could be practised again and again.

In this study, the authors examined teachers’ instructional moves to elicit and develop students’ ideas and questions as they orchestrated discourse with their fifth grade students during a learner-centered environmental biology unit. The authors present three contrasting cases of teachers to highlight evidence that shows teachers’ differing strategies for eliciting students’ ideas and questions, and for developing their ideas, questions and questioning skills. The authors found that teachers could readily elicit ideas and questions but experienced challenges in helping students develop them.