Reclaiming tutorials as learning spaces in the sciences

ABSTRACT

Tutorials/discussion classes¹ are seen as an essential part of the teaching mix in the natural sciences, because that is where problems can be solved and course content is applied. Learning support provided by teaching assistants may free up the lecturer to do research, but are these assistants sufficiently well trained and well informed? Do tutorials offer learning spaces or merely activities to engage the willing student? In this paper I report on a study conducted in a science faculty of a research intensive university in South Africa. I collected data using interviews and questionnaires which gave insight into the many variants of tutor/teaching assistant² support that exist in the faculty. Practices that seem to lead to better student learning were also foregrounded. It became evident that lecturers need to plan their tutorials as an integral part of the learning space and not as an add-on activity.     

Prospective physical sciences teachers' willingness to engage in learning communities

Teachers' professional development is a lifelong learning process that should start with teaching practice, is best developed from experience and can be promoted by socio‐professional interactions. Thus, a learning community of teachers might be a valuable environment for continuing professional development. This paper reports research carried out with 46 prospective physical sciences teachers about to graduate from a Portuguese university. The study aims at investigating their willingness to engage in learning communities. The majority of the participants stated that they would like to engage in a learning community. Therefore, actions must be taken in order to foster learning communities, including newly formed teachers.

Le développement professionnel des enseignants est un processus que doit débuter par un stage, d'avantage réalisable grâce à l'expérience acquise et qui peut être promu par les interactions sociales. Une communauté d'apprentissage peut être un milieu viable et concret afin de permettre le développement continu des enseignants. Cet article présente une recherche réalisée auprès de 46 futurs professeurs en Physique et Chimie, qui étaient sur le point d'achever leur programme de formation initial au sein d'une université Portugaise. L'objectif de cette recherche est d'étudier les intentions des futurs enseignants souhaitant ou non participer à des communautés d'apprentissage. Il en résulte que la majorité des participants a manifesté le souhait de se joindre à de tels groupes d'apprentissage. Par conséquent, il faudrait réunir les conditions nécessaires visant la création de communautés d'apprentissage qui incluraient les nouveaux enseignants.

El desarrollo profesional de los profesores es un proceso que transcurre a lo largo de la vida, pero que, a pesar de ser iniciado en un contexto de practicum, este se ve favorecido por la práctica y facilitado por las interacciones socio‐profesionales. Así, una comunidad de profesores puede ser una ambiente favorable al desarrollo profesional continuo de los mismos. Este artículo presenta una investigación realizada con 46 futuros profesores de Física y Química del último curso de licenciatura en una universidad Portuguesa. El objetivo del estudio fue investigar el interés de esos futuros profesores en participar en comunidades de aprendizaje. La mayoría de los sujetos afirmó que le gustaría participar en estas comunidades de aprendizaje y también señalaron algunas características que esas comunidades deberían tener. En este contexto, parece importante crear condiciones que hagan posible el funcionamiento de estas comunidades que incluyan profesores recién formados.

Die berufliche Entwicklung von Lehrern beginnt mit einen Praktikum und wird vervollständigt durch Erfahrung und soziale Wechselwirkung. Eine Lerngemeinschaft kann eine gute Umgebung sein für die berufliche Weiterentwicklung von Lehrern. Dieser Artikel präsentiert eine Forschung mit 46 zukünftigen Physik‐ und Chemielehrern, welche ein erstes Ausbildungsprogramm an einer portugiesischen Universität beendeten. Das Ziel dieser Forschung ist die Untersuchung des Interesses dieser zukünftigen Lehrer an der Teilnahme an Lerngemeinschaften. Die Mehrzahl der Teilnehmer auesserten den Wunsch solchen Lerngemeinschaften beizutreten. Folglich sollten die notwendigen Bedingungen für die Bildung von Lerngemeinschaften geschaffen werden, welche zukünftige Lehrer aufnehmen.     

Claiming unclaimed spaces: virtual spaces for learning

The purpose of this study was to describe and examine the environments used by teacher candidates in multi-user virtual environments. Secondary data analysis of a case study methodology was employed. Multiple data sources including interviews, surveys, observations, snapshots, course artifacts, and the researcher’s journal were used in the initial case study, while using the resulting narratives of each student’s experience for the secondary data analysis. All data were coded and reviewed iteratively to inductively deduce the key considerations for virtual world environmental design. Five assertions were derived from the data to help guide the development of virtual learning environments. These five assertions focus on: novelty, the role of realism, fantastical and outdoor environments, maneuverability, and design for movement.     

Enhancing project-oriented learning by joining communities of practice and opening spaces for relatedness

This article describes an extension to project-oriented learning to increase social construction of knowledge and learning. The focus is on: (a) maximising opportunities for students to share their knowledge with practitioners by joining communities of practice, and (b) increasing their intrinsic motivation by creating conditions for student's relatedness. The case study considers a last year capstone course in Mechanical Engineering. The work addresses innovative practices of active learning and beyond project-oriented learning through: (a) the development of a web-based decision support system, (b) meetings between the communities of students, maintenance engineers and academics, and (c) new off-campus group instances. The author hypothesises that this multi-modal approach increases deep learning and social impact of the educational process. Surveys to the actors support a successful achievement of the educational goals. The methodology can easily be extended to further improve the learning process.     

Research in Religious Education: Perspectives for the Future

The impact of committed guests in Religious Education at school is focused in this study. Ten pupils (age 17) were sampled to contribute as informants in semi-structured interviews. The data consist of eight texts (interview excerpts), which are interpreted within a hermeneutic approach, specifically by taking the formal features into consideration (cf. Ricoeur), for example, the occurrence of negations. Some of the texts illuminate I–Thou relations (Buber), whereas other texts are interpreted in relation to the effect histories of certain conceptions (Gadamer).     

Perspectives on inclusive education: learning from each other

Many courses of study are currently available that address inclusive education and, increasingly, distance education is seen as a flexible and appropriately inclusive way to deliver such courses. In this article a team of colleagues, Kieron Sheehy, Jonathan Rix, Melanie Nind and Katy Simmons, discusses the development of an Open University course, E243 Inclusive Education: Learning from Each Other, which was launched in February 2004. The team reflects on their own process of learning from each other and from the rich network of people involved, mirroring some of the course themes in their own journeys. Collaborative learning became a key theme within the course, both as a method for teaching within the ‘inclusive classroom’ and also as the process for producing a course in a contested and challenging area. This experience allowed the team to change and develop their own perspectives on important issues and, it is suggested, allowed the course to include ways in which students could be supported in having the same opportunity.     

Enlightening communities and parents for improving student learning: Evidence from Niger

Providing local communities with the authority to manage school grants is a popular education policy in the developing world. However, recent studies suggest that this type of intervention has limited impact on student learning outcomes as such communities do not have adequate capacity to utilize resources. To investigate how communities can effectively utilize school resources, we conducted a randomized experiment in Niger. Communities and parents were provided with information about student learning together with school grants. They also participated in discussions about how communities and schools can work together utilizing the grants and communities’ own resources. After the intervention, the communities increased activities that enhanced student effort, and parents increased their contribution to school activities and engagement in children's learning at home. As a result, student test scores improved by 0.43 standard deviations in math and 0.20 standard deviations in French. The impact was largest for the lowest-performing children.     

Consultee-Centered Consultation: Contemporary Perspectives and a Framework for the Future

ABSTRACT

Consultee-centered consultation (CCC) is a familiar, but historically understudied, model of consultation. This Special Issue of the Journal of Educational and Psychological Consultation summarizes, supplements, and updates the CCC research base; considers the role of CCC in contemporary school and community settings; and calls for and helps guide future CCC research and practice. This introduction to the Special Issue begins with a definition of CCC, individuates the model from its historical roots in mental health consultation, and provides a timeline of significant events in the evolution of the CCC model. Next, each article in the Special Issue is previewed in order to highlight unique contributions made to the CCC literature. Collectively, these articles provide a summary of the current state of CCC, multicultural frameworks for CCC training and practice, and multiple directions for future research.     

Innovative learning spaces: class management and universal design for learning

Learning Environments Research - Recent and important changes in pedagogy design include flexible learning methods that address student diversity (universal design for learning–UDL) and...     

Creating spaces for pedagogy: Research as learning

As teacher-educators, we designed and implemented a small study that mapped teacher-education students' understandings of their own identities and how they made sense of ethnicity and class differences among their secondary students while on teaching rounds. While we didn't set out to ‘teach’ our research participants, it was during the analysis of data from the research project, that we began to realise the potential of research to create opportunities for learning. In this paper we speculate on the ‘conditions’ of knowledge production and suggest that the dialogic nature of interviews and focus group discussions can offer pedagogical spaces for learning. Research designs that incorporate opportunities for participants to re-tell narratives over periods of time, may position participants as experts in knowledge production and may reposition them and researchers in more equitable power relations. We present an example of one participant's narrative together with our interpretations to explore how research potentially offers ‘evidence’ of learning. While this is tentative only, we suggest there is a need to create spaces for pedagogy in the design and execution of educational research.     

Fostering highly engaged knowledge building communities in socioemotional and sociocognitive hybrid learning spaces

With the aim of understanding sociocognitive and socioemotional hybridity in learning spaces, we examined a semester-long learning community where students were given the freedom to advance their epistemological and social agendas across face-to-face and online settings. We collected and analyzed 1,780 online notes written by students throughout the semester and coded them based on their sociocognitive or socioemotional values. We then examined the conversation chains that students engaged in vis-a-vis their developments as a group. In addition to showing how the group developmental stages served as a macro-level context for the socioemotional and sociocognitive spaces, the analysis highlighted how deep, rapid, community knowledge building conversations spontaneously emerged in relation to the timing of socioemotional developments. This study elucidates an important dimension of hybrid spaces, emphasizing the need to design activities to support both sociocognitive and socioemotional spaces in technology-enhanced learning communities.     

Building learning communities: foundations for good practice

The School of Health Sciences at the University of Birmingham provided opportunities for the development of student learning communities and online resources within the neurological module of the BSc Physiotherapy degree programme. These learning communities were designed to facilitate peer and independent learning in core aspects underpinning clinical practice, thus laying the foundation for the development of effective clinical reasoning. This paper examines some of the problems that staff encountered, including the lessons that they learnt through the design, development, and implementation processes of the module, and the subsequent modifications that were made. Student experiences of this course are also included, as they provided staff with further insights into the ways in which these problems impacted upon their preparation for clinical practice and how the module might be improved for future cohorts. From an analysis of the problems that staff encountered and then sought to resolve, and of student experiences of the course, this paper identifies foundations for good practice in the development and delivery of innovative learning and teaching methods.     

Designing learning experiences for outdoor hybrid learning spaces

With the support of various personal and institutional mobile technologies, numerous physical and virtual spaces can be turned into interesting and motivating hybrid learning settings. By its nature, outdoor mobile learning happens on the move is connected to specific locations and settings inviting learners to study their surroundings, inquire about natural phenomena and solve complex real-life problems. This poses challenges for teachers to design meaningful, contextualized and comprehensive learning experiences. The paper aims to explore what kind of mobile learning scenarios K-12 teachers create and what are the limitations and development perspectives of these scenarios. Content analysis of 25 location-based outdoor learning tracks with 465 questions and tasks was carried out. The results demonstrate that designing and implementing learning activities outside the safe, familiar classroom environment in new hybrid learning spaces is a challenging task for the teachers on many different levels. Taking Bloom’s revised taxonomy, types of contextualization and integrated learning models as frameworks for content analysis of the learning scenarios, the study shows that the teachers do not perceive the potential hybrid spaces and mobile technologies offer in order to design consistent learning experiences that emphasize higher order thinking levels, encompass contextual information and integrate knowledge from multiple disciplinary sources. The paper concludes that there is a need for more teacher training and systemic interventions into current teaching practices that encourage teachers to step outside of their existing teaching paradigms to acknowledge the pedagogical potential of hybrid learning spaces as well as the technological affordances.     

Establishing schools as professional learning communities: perspectives from Malta

Over the last decade, Malta has been moving away from a highly centralized and bureaucratic system to one that encourages broader involvement in policy‐making and more collaboration among stakeholders. As a result, educators and schools have greater responsibilities to determine the way forward and to develop schools as learning communities. Whilst the road towards increased collaboration amongst teachers and between the schools in which they work can be a long, arduous and tortuous journey, it can also be a vehicle for positive change and development. This paper explores a theoretical rationale for a teacher‐led approach to school improvement. It then explores the initial collaboration between the author and one local school. It presents the main findings of a strategic analysis undertaken to understand the current situation facing the school. This case study helps to highlight the importance and positive effects behind capacity building and shared leadership.

Durant les 10 dernières années, Malte s'est éloignée d'un système fortement centralisé et très bureaucratique pour tendre vers un système qui encourage un plus grand engagement dans les prises de décisions et plus de collaboration chez les participants. En conséquence, les éducateurs et les écoles ont des responsabilités plus importantes pour déterminer l'avenir à long terme et pour développer les écoles afin qu'elles deviennent des communautés d'apprentissage. Bien que le chemin menant à une collaboration croissante entre les enseignants et les écoles avec lesquelles ils travaillent puisse être long, ardu et tortueux, il est également un véhicule de changement et de développement positif. Cet article explore en premier lieu les raisons théoriques d'une approche où l'amélioration des écoles serait confiée aux enseignants; il étudie ensuite la collaboration initiale entre l'auteur et une école locale. Cet article présente enfin les principaux résultats d'une analyse stratégique entreprise pour comprendre la situation actuelle de l'école. Cette étude de cas aide à mettre en évidence l'importance et les effets positifs de la formation des aptitudes et du partage des responsabilités.

Durante la pasada década, Malta ha pasado de un sistema altamente centralizado y burocrático a otro que fomenta una mayor implicación y una mayor colaboración en materia de política educativa. Como resultado, educadores y escuelas tienen ahora una mayor responsabilidad a la hora de decidir las líneas a seguir por las escuelas y de contribuir al desarrollo de éstas como comunidades de aprendizaje. Si bien es verdad que las nuevas directrices fomentan la colaboración entre profesores y centros y esto supondrá un proceso largo y laborioso, también es cierto que conllevará cambios en positivo y un mayor desarrollo. Este estudio investiga las posibles líneas en que los profesores puedan llevar a cabo una mejora en los centros. Por ello parte de la colaboración inicial entre el autor del estudio y una escuela local. Presenta los resultados más relevantes de un análisis estratégico llevado a cabo para entender la actual situación con que se enfrenta la escuela. Este estudio de casos nos ayuda a valorar la importancia y los efectos positivos que se hallan tras el fomento de capacidades y el liderazgo compartido.

Da in den letzten Jahren die Anforderungen an Schulreformen in Malta gewachsen sind, wird, wie wir feststellen konnten, Qualitätsfragen mehr und mehr Aufmerksamkeit geschenkt. Dementsprechend fördern die Schulämter – dank hauptsächlich zweier politischen Initiativen [der Einführung eines Nationalen Kernlehrplans (NMC, National Minimal Curriculum) und der Schulentwicklungsplanung] – eine Dezentralisierung der Verantwortungsstrukturen, die vor allem die Eigenverantwortung der Lehrer in pädagogischen Entscheidungen stärkt. Der Weg hin zu einer intensiveren Zusammenarbeit unter den Lehrern und zwischen den Schulen, in denen sie arbeiten, war lang, mühsam und umständlich. Gleichwohl kann die Zusammenarbeit ein Vehikel für positive Veränderungen und Entwicklung darstellen. Dieser Artikel untersucht theoretische Grundlagen für einen lehrerzentrierten Ansatz der Schulreform. Anschließend wird die anfängliche Zusammenarbeit zwischen den Autoren dargestellt. Schließlich werden die Hauptergebnisse einer strategischen Analyse vorgestellt, die auf ein besseres Verständnis der aktuellen Situation abzielt, in der sich das Schulwesen befindet. Die vorliegende Fallstudie trägt dazu bei, die Wichtigkeit und die positiven Wirkungen herauszustellen, die von der Stärkung der Eigenverantwortung und von kooperativen Führungsstrukturen ausgehen, und welcher Maßnahmen es hierzu bedarf.     

Perspectives on learning for childbirth educators

This continuing education module reviews the uses of ways of knowing and ways of learning to assist the childbirth educator become a master teacher who facilitates the growth of the learner.     

国际视野下学校变革的未来向度

当前"未来效能"成为世界第三波学校变革的特征。如何基于未来规划、立足未来实践、面向未来思维,是一个不断考量国家教育变革能力的过程。当前世界各国推出的学校教育改革新举措,反映了出当前国际学校变革的未来发展趋向:变革立意具有战略高度;变革进程呈现渐进承接;变革途径凸显整体建构。     

Ambience in social learning: student engagement with new designs for learning spaces

An imperative to develop the social experience of learning has led to the design of informal learning spaces within libraries. Yet little is known about how these spaces are used by students or how students perceive them. Field work in one such space is reported. The general private study practice of undergraduates was captured through audio diaries, while activity in the learning space was directly observed, and students provided reflective perspectives in focus groups and through spot conversations. Results suggest such spaces are popular and yet stimulate limited group work. Yet other, less intense, forms of productive collaboration did occur and a taxonomy of four such types of encounter is offered. Of particular importance to students was access to a ‘social ambience’ for study. The results encourage institutions to design for a mixed economy of student choice over learning spaces and to consider modes of encouraging diversity in their use.