Lecturers on teaching within the ‘supercomplexity’ of Higher Education

While a vast literature exists on students and their learning, work on lecturers and their teaching continues to lag some way behind. This paper explores the notion that the complexity of Higher Education (HE) today significantly impacts upon what goes on in the classroom through a two-tiered study. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to explore lecturers’ perceptions and experiences of teaching a specific module. Interviewees raised issues pertaining to the wider departmental, institutional and socio-political context. Consequently, focus groups were run with key people in the University to explore their perceptions of teaching and learning within the current HE climate. The findings suggest that lecturers perceive numerous external factors to impinge upon their teaching and attempt to militate against these in various ways in order to achieve ongoing enhancement of learning for students.

Making the Hidden Explicit: Learning About Equity in K-8 Preservice Science Education

Preservice teachers in a K–8 science methods course used guided video reflection to examine their interactions with children during science teaching. This inquiry approach helped preservice teachers identify and respond to gaps between their beliefs and intentions about teaching all children and their enactment of those beliefs. The experience of teaching a science lesson and then viewing it multiple times through a critical framework provided an opportunity for preservice teachers to recognize hidden assumptions, unexamined behaviors, and the unintentional meanings they may have conveyed to children. This encouraged them to think more critically about their roles as teachers in creating spaces where all children have access to quality science learning experiences.

Understanding conceptual change: connecting and questioning

We engage in a metalogue based on eight papers in this issue of Cultural Studies of Science Education that review the state of conceptual change research and its possible affect on the teaching and learning of science. Our discussion addresses three aspects of conceptual change research: theoretical, methodological, and practical, as we discuss conceptual change research in light of our experiences as science educators. Finally, we examine the implications of conceptual change research for the teachers and students with whom we work.

Socio-emotional orientations and teacher change

In this article we consider how elementary education students’ views of mathematics changed during their mathematics methods course. We focus on four female students: two started the course with mainly positive views of mathematics and a task orientation, two with negative views of the subject and an ego-defensive orientation. The biggest change observed was that the trainees’ views of teaching and learning mathematics became more positive. Moreover, what had been an ego-defensive orientation changed towards a social-dependence orientation. The crucial facilitators of change seemed to be (1) handling of and reflection on one’s experiences of learning and teaching mathematics, (2) exploring content with concrete materials, and (3) collaboration with a partner or working as a tutor of mathematics.

Using interpretative meta-ethnography to explore the relationship between innovative approaches to learning and their influence on faculty understanding of teaching

Faculty experiences of innovative approaches to learning and the changes to their knowledge emerging from such experiences constitute an important area of inquiry that has to date largely been ignored or has been approached with research methods ill-suited to examining such experiences. This paper adopts interpretative meta-ethnography as its research framework to investigate the changes to faculty knowledge that occur when they adopt problem-based learning (PBL). The paper presents themes that emerged through the analysis and argues for future inquiry.

Preparing Elementary Preservice Teachers for Urban Elementary Science Classrooms: Challenging Cultural Biases Toward Diverse Students

This study reports the learning of elementary preservice teachers regarding diversity and teaching science in diverse urban elementary classrooms. From participating in a semester-long book club, the preservice teachers reveal their cultural biases, connect and apply their knowledge of diversity, and understand that getting to know their students are important elements for teaching science in diverse classrooms. These 3 things connect in ways that allow the preservice teachers to understand how their cultural biases impede student learning and gain new knowledge of diversity as they change their cultural biases. Implications of this study reveal that preservice teachers need opportunities to reveal, confront, challenge, and change their cultural models and to develop new models for teaching science in urban elementary classrooms.

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More than a conversation: using cogenerative dialogues in the professional development of high school chemistry teachers

This paper focuses on content-based and pedagogical instructors’ use of cogenerative dialogues to improve instructional practice and to evaluate program effectiveness in a professional development program for high school chemistry teachers. We share our research findings from using cogenerative dialogues as an evaluative tool for general assessment of various program-related issues. We discuss how engaging students in cogenerative dialogues improved teaching and learning in chemistry and chemistry education courses. This research provides insights and direction for improving content-based professional development programs for science teachers and the learning experiences of high school science students. Cogenerative dialogue has the potential to expand evaluation methodologies that will position participants more centrally in not only the collection of data, but also the analysis of these data to catalyze transformative practices in educational programs.

The Importance of Art Viewing Experiences in Early Childhood Visual Arts: The Exploration of a Master Art Teacher’s Strategies for Meaningful Early Arts Experiences

The visual arts can be an important and rich domain of learning for young children. In PreK education, The Task Force on Children’s Learning and the Arts: Birth to Age Eight (Young children and the arts: Making creative connections, Washington, DC: Arts Education Partnership, 1998) recommends that art experiences for young children include activities designed to introduce children to works of art that are high quality and developmentally appropriate in both content and presentation. This paper documents the teaching strategies utilized by a master art teacher at the Denver Art Museum to engage preschool-age students in art viewing experiences which were part of a museum-based art program. This research provides support for integrating rich, meaningful art viewing experiences as a regular part of young children’s arts experiences while offering early childhood educators teaching strategies for early art viewing experiences.

The effects of portfolio-based advice on the development of self-directed learning skills in secondary vocational education

This experimental study was designed to investigate whether supervision meetings, in which students receive specific advice on how to use a development portfolio to monitor their progress and plan their future learning, helps them to develop self-directed learning skills and improve their learning in the domain. In the first year of a hairdressing program in vocational education, supervision meetings were used to provide students with either specific advice or not. Students in the advice group (n = 21) formulated better learning needs, selected more suitable learning tasks, completed more practical assignments, and acquired more certificates than students in the feedback-only group (n = 22). Interviews also showed that students in the advice group appreciated the supervision meeting more and perceived them as more effective than students in the feedback-only group. Guidelines are provided for the use of development portfolios and the organization of supervision meetings in on-demand vocational education.

Learning mathematics for teaching in the student teaching experience: two contrasting cases

Student teaching (guided teaching by a prospective teacher under the supervision of an experienced “cooperating” teacher) provides an important opportunity for prospective teachers to increase their understanding of mathematics in and for teaching. The interactions between a student teacher and cooperating teacher provide an obvious mechanism for such learning to occur. We report here on data that is part of a larger study of eight student teacher/cooperating teacher pairs, and the core themes that emerged from their conversations. We focus on two pairs for whom the core conversational themes represent disparate approaches to mathematics in and for teaching. One pair, Blake and Mr. B., focused on controlling student behavior and rarely talked about mathematics for teaching. The other pair, Tara and Mr. T., focused on having students actively participating in the lesson and on mathematics from the students’ point of view. These contrasting experiences suggest that student teaching can have a profound effect on prospective teachers’ understanding of mathematics in and for teaching.

Mary Budd Rowe: a storyteller of science

This article examines Mary Budd Rowe’s groundbreaking and far-reaching contributions to science education. Rowe is best known for her research on wait-time: the idea that teachers can improve the quality and length of classroom discussions by waiting at least 3 s before and after student responses. Her wait-time research grew from and helped inform her staunch advocacy of science education as inquiry; Rowe saw wonder and excitement as central to the teaching and learning of science. She spent much of her professional life designing professional development experiences and innovative curriculum materials to help teachers, particularly elementary school teachers, enact inquiry in their classrooms.

Aesthetic principles for instructional design

This article offers principles that contribute to developing the aesthetics of instructional design. Rather than describing merely the surface qualities of things and events, the concept of aesthetics as applied here pertains to heightened, integral experience. Aesthetic experiences are those that are immersive, infused with meaning, and felt as coherent and complete. Any transformative learning experience will have significant aesthetic qualities, and all instructional situations can benefit from attention to these qualities. Drawn from aesthetics theory and research and informed by current ID and learning theories, a set of five first principles and twelve guidelines for their application are described. The principles are not only compatible with existing ID theory bases but can complement and support that theory by offering ways to embody it in engaging learning experiences.

Movement expressiveness, solidarity and the (re)shaping of African American students’ scientific identities

Science educators have yet to identify ways to enable inner city African American high school students to experience success in science. In this paper, we argue that understanding the ways in which cultural practices from fields outside of school mediate what happens inside classrooms and contribute to the learning of students is crucial to addressing current disparities in science performance. Specifically, we explore the significance of movement expressiveness dispositions to the lives and the learning of economically disadvantaged African American youth. These particular dispositions have been repeatedly observed in our research, and they can be important resources for the creation of individual emotional energy, collective solidarity, and heightened engagement in learning activities since they provide resources for the (re)shaping of identity. Thus movement expressiveness dispositions hold potential for transforming the teaching and learning of these students.

Parents’ Perceptions of Child Care for Children with Disabilities

Sixteen Minnesota families with children with disabilities participated in a 2-year interview study of their care experiences. Findings show that families developed a network of care providers, struggled to pay additional costs for care, were not informed of community services and programs, and believed that their children received adequate child care. This study highlights the need to provide information to families and providers and to link services in both rural and urban communities.

Bringing the Classroom to the Web: Effects of Using New Technologies to Capture and Deliver Lectures

Technology expands instructional options for faculty, and this study examines the differential learning effects of offering a lecture on physics to students in a traditional classroom versus internet video formats. Based on an experiment conducted in a natural educational context, results indicate enhanced transfer of lecture information in the video formats relative to the live condition, with students also responding more positively to personalized video presentation.

Classroom learning experiences and students’ perceptions of quality of school life

It is generally believed that classroom learning experiences very much influence students’ academic development. However, relatively little is known about whether classroom learning experiences have much effect on students’ affective and social development. In this study, we argued for the importance of learning experiences on students’ affective and social development. From research on Accelerated Schools Project and active learning, we conceptualised Positive Learning Experiences, Teacher Support in Learning, and Active Learning Experiences as three components of learning experiences and developed relevant measures to tap these learning experiences. Using research data from a large-scale student survey in Hong Kong (N = 19,477), we examined the construct validity of learning experiences and quality of school life. Confirmatory factor analysis provided very strong support for the measures and the underlying constructs that they tap. In two-way analysis of variance, the effects of gender and school level (secondary versus primary) on learning experiences and quality of school life were examined. Significant gender and school-level main effects, as well as gender by school-level interaction effects, were found for students’ ratings of their learning experiences and quality of school life. Female students gave more favourable ratings than male students, and primary students gave more favourable ratings than secondary students. In addition, gender differences in these ratings in secondary schools were relatively smaller than in primary schools. In subsequent multilevel modelling, learning experiences were strong predictors of quality of school life after controlling for the effects of gender, school level and average school achievement. These findings provide strong empirical support for the significance of classroom learning experiences for students’ social and affective development.

Implementing a Physical Activity Curriculum into the School Day: Helping Early Childhood Teachers Meet the Challenge

In Fall 2006, North Carolina kindergarten teachers were charged with the task of meeting the NASPE guidelines for providing daily physical activity to their kindergarten students. In turn, the teachers researched resources and consulted experts to design and develop a developmentally appropriate physical activity and physical play environment for their students. The purpose of this article is to disseminate useful information one group of kindergarten teachers believed would help other teachers in similar situations. The article discusses the planning process, suggestions for activities and necessary equipment for program implementation, and vignettes regarding the experiences the teachers and students have had during the physical activity and physical play program’s inaugural year.

Negotiating the transition between different teaching contexts through shared responsibility and shared reflection

This paper draws on my personal experiences with coteaching and my participation in the research described by Wassell and LaVan (2009). It examines the role of coteaching in the development of structures that afforded opportunities for shared reflection and shared responsibility between stakeholders in the classroom. It also describes how the schema and practices developed through coteaching and cogenerative dialogue helped mediate the transition between my preservice and inservice teaching experiences.

Reliability and agreement of student ratings of the classroom environment: A reanalysis of TIMSS data

In educational research, characteristics of the learning environment are generally assessed by asking students to evaluate features of their lessons. The student ratings produced by this simple and efficient research strategy can be analysed from two different perspectives. At the individual level, they represent the individual student’s perception of the learning environment. Scores aggregated to the classroom level reflect perceptions of the shared learning environment, corrected for individual idiosyncrasies. This second approach is often pursued in studies on teaching quality and effectiveness, where student-level ratings are aggregated to the class level to obtain general information about the learning environment. Although this strategy is widely applied in educational research, neither the reliability of aggregated student ratings nor the within-group agreement between the students in a class has been subject to much investigation. The present study introduces and discusses different procedures that have been proposed in the field of organisational psychology to assess the reliability and agreement of students’ ratings of their instruction. The application of the proposed indexes is demonstrated by a reanalysis of student ratings of mathematics instruction obtained in the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (N = 2,064 students in 100 classes).