Teachers’Day

9月10日的教师节是全中国教师的节日。该节日是从1985年开始庆祝的,以表达对教师辛勤劳动以及他们对社会所做贡献的敬意。庆祝教师节的目的是为了形成尊敬老师和尊重知识的社会氛围。每年学期开始时便迎来教师节,这样可以激发教师们和学生们工作和学习的热情,使教学与学习都有一个好的开始。在教师节那一天,学生通常会送老师写满祝福的贺卡来表达他们对老师的尊重。在台湾,一年一度的教师节定在9月28日,将这一天定为教师节是为了庆祝孔子的生辰,他为中国文化做出了很大贡献。别的国家也有教师节。美国的教师节是五月的第一个星期二。印度的…     

Teachers’Day

“春蚕到死丝方尽,蜡烛成灰泪始干。”这脍炙人口的诗句歌颂了人类灵魂的工程师——教师甘当人梯、无私奉献的高贵品质。藉此一年一度的教师节来临之际,向全国所有辛勤耕耘的园丁表示最崇高的敬意!并祝愿全体教师节日快乐!     

On Teachers’ Day

栏目要求1.将学生习作根据中考分值给出成绩;2.在应该修改的地方划线并标注序号;3.根据所标序号进行修改并说明修改的理由;4.给学生习作点评<优点与不足>;5.请点评名师提供简历一份,包括:学校、职务、职称、荣誉、教研教学成果、照片一张。来稿请寄:430079华中师范大学外国语学院《中学生英语》杂志社初中部收     

Finnish Cooperating Physics Teachers’ Conceptions of Physics Teachers’ Teacher Knowledge

This article examines Finnish cooperating physics teachers’ conceptions of teacher knowledge in physics. Six experienced teachers were interviewed. The data was analyzed to form categories concerning the basis of teacher knowledge, and the tradition of German Didaktik and Shulman’s theory of teacher knowledge were used in order to understand the results. The results show that the teachers strongly emphasize knowledge related to day-to-day teaching practice. In German Didaktik, this means knowledge of the best instructional methods, while in Shulman’s categorization it belongs to the category of representations, strategies, and methods. It was also found that the teachers appear to lack some of the essential key ideas of modern physics teacher education, such as a holistic view of instructional approaches.     

Inquiry on Teachers’ Emotion

Teaching, like other caring professions, is emotional. These emotions tend to emerge as teachers’ goals, standards, and beliefs transact with other classroom stakeholders during everyday school activities. As such, for teachers, the classroom context involves both the extreme happiness and joy from a lesson that goes as planned to the intense frustration of working with a challenging student. These academic emotions have garnered the attention of a growing number of researchers, and will be the focus of this article. More specifically, my goal is to summarize and extend our thoughts about the nature of research and our program of research related to teacher emotion.     

Science Teachers’ Analogical Reasoning

Analogies can play a relevant role in students’ learning. However, for the effective use of analogies, teachers should not only have a well-prepared repertoire of validated analogies, which could serve as bridges between the students’ prior knowledge and the scientific knowledge they desire them to understand, but also know how to introduce analogies in their lessons. Both aspects have been discussed in the literature in the last few decades. However, almost nothing is known about how teachers draw their own analogies for instructional purposes or, in other words, about how they reason analogically when planning and conducting teaching. This is the focus of this paper. Six secondary teachers were individually interviewed; the aim was to characterize how they perform each of the analogical reasoning subprocesses, as well as to identify their views on analogies and their use in science teaching. The results were analyzed by considering elements of both theories about analogical reasoning: the structural mapping proposed by Gentner and the analogical mechanism described by Vosniadou. A comprehensive discussion of our results makes it evident that teachers’ content knowledge on scientific topics and on analogies as well as their pedagogical content knowledge on the use of analogies influence all their analogical reasoning subprocesses. Our results also point to the need for improving teachers’ knowledge about analogies and their ability to perform analogical reasoning.     

Pupils’ Perceptions of Teachers

Abstract

The study, with 536 second-sixth graders as subjects, attempted to investigate the relationships between teacher and “idea”-teacher discrepancies (hereafter designated as discrepancies) and six dependent variables. Results of the study were summarized as: (a) high-school achievement scorers tended to manifest low discrepancies, and vice versa; (b) boys appeared to exhibit higher discrepancies than girls did; (c) those more socially acceptable children seemed to exhibit low discrepancies, and vice versa; (d) those children who indicated higher school attitude scores had a tendency to show low discrepancies, and vice versa; (e) those children who rated themselves high on aggressiveness were inclined to show high discrepancies, and vice versa; and (f) there was no statistically significant relationship between peer-report aggressiveness and such discrepancies.     

Developing Teachers’ Decision Making

Process-product research is conceptually truncated because it ignores that teachers are cognitive beings whose behavior is mediated by decision making. This study sought to develop inservice teachers’ interactive decision making (IDM)–their ability to “think on their feet” during instruction. An experimental group of teachers was engaged in a nine-week treatment of reflection and role-taking activities focusing on their IDM. A control group read information about IDM. Both groups then conducted lessons in the natural classroom setting and data on their IDM were collected in stimulated-recall interviews. Content analyses of the protocols produced frequency distributions on four measures of IDM. One-way analyses of variance indicated a significant difference on each measure, and effect sizes were well beyond the 80th percentile of the control group.     

Teachers’ Marks and Intelligence

ABSTRACT

The authors conducted a third-party study of the student achievement effects of Struggling Schools, a user-generated approach to Comprehensive School Reform (CSR). The design was a quasiexperimental, pre–post matched sample (N = 180) with school as unit of analysis, drawing on 3 years of achievement data from standardized external assessments. Struggling Schools had a statistically significant positive effect on Grade 3 reading achievement (effect size = .48 in 2005–2006 and .60 in 2006–2007). There were enduring achievement effects 2 years after exit from the program. The outcomes indicate that CSR approaches based on capacity building, partnerships with an external agency, and accountability enhance student learning.     

Everyday Phenomena and Teachers’ Training

The Swedish curriculum for the nine-year compulsory school prescribes that the teacher shall work in an investigative way with everyday phenomena. This can be interpreted as working with simple experiments using common materials, and presupposes that teachers themselves have a good and reflected comprehension of the phenomena illustrated. In order to study the ability of our teacher students to explain everyday phenomena, we chose to ask all the students in the fourth term about phenomena where transformations of matter are involved. The students were requested to give their answers in writing and as detailed as possible. The answers have been analysed in different ways. We have categorised them and studied whether there are any systematic patterns between individuah. A very general conclusion is that there is a great need in teacher training to work with conceptual understanding and with ways of expressing oneself as a teacher.     

Teachers’ Concerns About Biotechnology Education

The impacts of biotechnology are found in nearly all sectors of society from health care and food products to environmental issues and energy sources. Despite the significance of biotechnology within the sciences, it has not become a prominent trend in science education. In this study, we seek to more fully identify biology teachers’ concerns about biotechnology instruction and their reported practices. Consistent with the Stages of Concern framework as modified by Hord et al., we investigated teachers’ awareness, informational, personal, management, consequences, collaboration, and refocusing concerns about biotechnology teaching by employing a qualitative design that allowed for the emergence of teachers’ ideas. Twenty high school life science teachers attending a biotechnology institute were interviewed using an interview protocol specifically designed to target various Stages of Concern. Although the Stages of Concern framework guided the development of interview questions in order to target a wide range of concerns, data analysis employed a grounded theory approach wherein patterns emerged from teachers’ own words and were constantly compared with each other to generate larger themes. Our results have potential to provide guidance for professional development providers and curriculum developers committed to supporting initial implementation of biotechnology education. Recommendations include supporting teacher development of biotechnology content knowledge; promoting strategies for obtaining, storing and managing biotechnology equipment and materials; providing opportunities for peer teaching as a means of building teacher confidence; and highlighting career opportunities in biotechnology and the intersections of biotechnology and everyday life.     

Teachers’ learning in school-based development

Background and purpose: Many researchers agree that teachers’ learning processes are social and that teachers need to be brought together to learn from each other. Researchers have also stated that intellectual and pedagogical change requires professional development activities that take place over a period of time in school. The purpose of the study presented in the article was to develop knowledge about the teachers’ learning when taking part in a school-based development project. Main argument: The study shows that it takes some time before the teachers identify with the work in school-based development. Even though the national authorities decided what to focus on during the development work, the participating teachers felt that they had autonomy in the work. The study presented in the article shows that it is important for the teachers’ learning culture that they are listened to and taken into consideration and that the leaders have competence in leading school-based development to support the teachers’ learning. Sources of evidence and method: The article is based on a study connected with school-based development in three lower secondary schools. Qualitative interviews were used as the data-collection strategy to capture the teachers’ and school leaders’ experiences and reflections. Conclusion: The article presents new knowledge connected with teachers’ learning in school-based development. The study presented in the article shows that schools’ learning culture can make a difference for the teachers’ learning and their job satisfaction and wellbeing.     

Preparing Teachers’ to Raise Students’ Mathematics Learning

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of the ORIGO Stepping Stones program in a large suburban school district in the Midwestern U.S.. The sample included 11 elementary schools that implemented the program during the 2013–2016 school years. Findings are presented from teacher surveys, classroom observations, and analysis of standardized student mathematics achievement scores on the Northwest Evaluation Association Measurement of Academic Progress (NWEA MAP). Using multilevel models, the program did not demonstrate a detectably larger effect on mathematics achievement than the comparison. Classroom observations and views of teachers that support program implementation were explored. In terms of fidelity of implementation, findings suggested that the program was delivered differently from how it was intended. With respect to researchers and policymakers, the approach used to evaluating mathematics program effectiveness is informative and could be used as part of larger accountability systems.     

Teachers’ Attitudes Towards Their Pupils’ Mathematical Errors

This article is mainly concerned with the didactical and the epistemological approach towards pupils’ errors in mathematics. The findings of an investigation into a representative sample of Cypriot teachers’ attitudes of errors in mathematics are presented. Although teachers draw on behaviourism as a way of understanding pupils’ errors, a considerable number of teachers seem to be influenced by both cognitive science error theory and the obstacle theory. Inferential statistical analysis revealed that teachers’ attitudes of errors are mainly associated with the attendance of a specialised INSET course in mathematics. Teachers who attended the INSET course in mathematics are generally more influenced by the cognitive science theory and the obstacle theory. Implications for the development of policy on teacher training are discussed. It is argued that with appropriate training teachers will be able to adopt a model of interpreting errors in mathematics based on the didactical and the epistemological approaches.     

Teachers’ assessments of students’ learning of mathematics

This paper reports a study of the classroom assessment practices of 12 sixth form college mathematics teachers in Malta. It explores the extent to which these teachers are knowledgeable about their students’ learning of mathematics and the implications that this has for their classroom practices. It reveals that these teachers’ knowledge of their students’ understanding of certain mathematical concepts is fairly limited. It then goes on to discuss this phenomenon in terms of a process that can hinder rather than promote learning. The research illuminates the position of teachers who appear to lack certain detailed information about their students which, it can be argued, could inform more effective teaching strategies. The paper concludes by exploring possible implications for similar situations where learning could be enhanced by more effective classroom assessment strategies and their use to inform future teaching and learning activities.     

Teachers’ Social–Emotional Capacity: Factors Associated With Teachers’ Responsiveness and Professional Commitment

Research Findings: Early care and education has pronounced implications for young children’s social-emotional learning. Although program structural and classroom process quality indicators have been widely explored, teachers’ personal social–emotional capacity has only recently been recognized as an indicator of quality. This study reviewed and identified indicators of teachers’ social-emotional capacity and established a two factor structure of psychological load and coping abilities. We also explored correlational associations between teachers’ social-emotional capacity and their professional commitment and responsiveness to children’s negative emotions. The sample consisted of 1,129 teachers in center-based child-care programs and public preschools in the US. We found that teachers’ psychological load (depression, stress and emotional exhaustion) was associated with teachers’ negative reactions to children and teachers’ professional commitment after controlling for a wide range of teacher/classroom characteristics. Conversely, teachers’ coping abilities (reappraisal emotion regulation and problem-focused coping strategies) were related to their positive reactions to children’s negative emotions. Practice or Policy: The findings suggest further studies to identify training and professional development program components that might address early childhood teachers’ psychological difficulties and coping strategies. Child-care programs may also need efforts that support teachers’ social–emotional capacity as a way to improve teachers’ responsiveness and professional commitment.     

Kindergarten Teachers’ Conceptions of Environmental Education

A written questionnaire was used to obtain information regarding Greek kindergarten teachers’ personal views on the concept of Environmental Education (EE). The questionnaire was also designed to obtain the teachers’ views relative to a series of theoretical and methodological issues concerning the application of EE. It was ascertained that the prevalent conception of the kindergarten teachers includes the following: (a) it is directed towards a knowledge-centered type of EE, (b) it is primarily centered on nature and its protection in terms of EE content, (c) it aims not only to shape citizens willing to adopt environmental measures recommended by the experts, but who will also actively participate in social actions for the protection of the environment, (d) it favors learning procedures in the environment with field study activities, (e) it must be compulsory in the kindergarten level.