Learning to Read and Learning to Teach Reading

The National Curriculum for Initial Teacher Education in English is specific and detailed about the knowledge expected of primary teachers. Shulman (1987) argued that teachers transform this sort of subject content knowledge into something accessible and meaningful to their pupils and this knowledge is described as ‘pedagogic content knowledge’. Medwell et al. (1998) found that effective literacy teachers only knew literacy in the way that they taught it. The research project underpinning this article aimed to explore student teachers' conceptions of the teaching of reading in order to find out what they thought they were teaching when they taught reading. It was thought that the personal reading histories of the students would impact on their developing conceptions of teaching reading. This article traces one student, Gordon, through the year of his PGCE course. In the form of dialogue between Gordon and the researcher developing understanding is articulated. Three different types of reading are described: decoding, making meaning and engaging. Reading is seen as a transformative process, where the reader is both within and outside the text. This has implications both for the conception of reading contained within the curriculum and the way it is implemented within the classroom. A teacher can only introduce children to experiences and ways of reading that are known to herself. It is argued, therefore, that student teachers need to extend the boundaries of their own reading and so appreciate the wide range of ways in which meaning is constructed and readers are created.     

Global/Cultural Teachers Creating Possibilities: Reading Worlds,Reading Selves,and Learning to Teach

In this article I explore the notion of a global/cultural educator, especially how we as teacher educators prepare future educators for the global communities that they might serve. I argue that our challenge is to prepare educators to work on behalf of, from, alongside, and within communities. To work globally requires educators to bridge the gap between the privileged and the marginalised, between uniformity and diversity, between local and global, across gender and races, and between indigenous and immigrant. To achieve these goals, I posit that we need to go beyond an infusion of the knowledge of various cultures in our curriculum. I suggest that we need to find spaces where the global/cultural educator can have an identity that emerges not from theory alone but from a mix of scholarship, practice, global development, and cultural critique and proceeds in a manner that is responsive, supportive, diverse, and nonoppressive. It is a journey for which we lack a map and indeed may be blinded by our own vision.     

Learning to Teach

Simon Prokhovnik retired last year after twenty‐five years as a lecturer (and ultimately Associate‐Professor) at the University of New South Wales. He suggests that University lecturing is an art whose successful practice demands imagination and scholarship, application and enthusiasm; and that the only venue for learning this art is in the University itself.     

师徒互动对实习生学做教师的影响

实习生与指导教师的互动模式对实习生学做教师有重要影响.本研究从双方建立了何种互动关系以及这些关系对实习生的知识转化与身份获得产生了何种影响两个维度,提炼出4种模式:正向促进型、正向阻抑型、反向阻抑型和反向促进型.分析这些模式的案例表现和形成条件后发现:和谐的师徒关系不必然促进实习生的知识转化和身份获得,而不和谐的师徒关系也不必然阻碍实习生的学习和成长;双方互动关系的建立主要取决于情境因素令实习生满足的程度;实习生知识转化与身份获得的效果在很大程度上依赖于指导教师的能力和方式以及实习生自己的反思意识和能力.最后的讨论指出,指导教师的能力不足和方式不当不仅仅归因于他们个人,而且受制于实习的制度安排和资源配置.     

Training Teachers to Teach Statistics

This is a report on the International Statistical Institute's Round Table Conference, 23rd-27th July, 1988, held in Hungary, and convened by Anne Hawkins.     

Learning to Teach with Mathematics Textbooks: How Preservice Teachers Interpret and Use Curriculum Materials

This study investigates how four prospective teachers interpret and use textbooks while learning to teach mathematics during university coursework and practicum teaching. Results indicate that prospective teachers had varied approaches to using textbooks ranging from adherence, elaboration, and creation. Factors influencing how they engaged with texts include their practicum classroom setting, access to resources, and their understanding of mathematics. Preservice teachers' attempts to modify textbook lessons raised pedagogical, curricular, and mathematical questions for them that were not easily answered by reference to the textbooks or teacher's guides. Findings indicate that the practicum can, however, challenge preservice teachers to be creative and flexible users of curriculum materials.     

Learning to Teach Mathematics Differently: The Interaction between Coursework and Fieldwork for Preservice Teachers

Understanding how preservice teachers integratecoursework and fieldwork as they learn to teach iscritical to understanding how to prepare teachers toimplement the kind of instruction envisioned bycurrent reforms in mathematics education. This articleexplores the connections that 3 preservice elementaryteachers made between their experiences as learners ofmathematics in a masters-level university methodscourse and their experiences as teachers ofmathematics in the fieldwork classroom. Three casestudies are presented in order to illustrate differentways that the experience of engaging in mathematicalinquiry influences the way in which elementarypreservice teachers construct their understanding ofthemselves as mathematics teachers. Taken together,the case studies suggest that we need to expand ourperspective as teacher educators to encompass learningfrom the fieldwork experience as well as preserviceteacher learning beyond the conclusion of thesemester. In particular, I conclude that the goals ofa methods course should include developing andnurturing particular habits of mind that helppreservice teachers learn from their own teaching.     

Exploring How Creating Stop-Motion Animations Supports Student Teachers in Learning to Teach Science

This article reports on an exploration of teaching and learning through creating rudimentary stop-motion animations set up to identify how learning opportunities involving stop-motion animations can support student learning and science teacher education. Participants were student teachers, volunteers representing both secondary and primary school teacher training courses, from three universities in England. Their discussions while making an animation themselves were recorded. Six of the secondary trainees were later interviewed after having taught using animation during placement in school. Thematic analysis of the content of the recordings and interviews showed that the student teachers view the opportunities that making an animation creates for peer discussion as the most likely to promote learning. Modeling was also seen as beneficial, though no one particular activity or stage in animation creation stood out as being more effective than another. It is the holistic process of representing and re-representing one's scientific knowledge in different modes that made animation creation appear to be so useful in bringing about and supporting learning. With respect to teacher education, the student science teachers reported that making animations themselves supported them in thinking through the process of how, as teachers, they would need to communicate the underpinning science to others. (Keywords: animation, teacher education, science teaching )     

Learning to Teach Mathematics: Questioning, Listening, and Responding

This paper reports a study designed to explore prospective teachers' learning to teach mathematics in the complex context of a university-based curriculum and instruction course. The course, taught with a focus on inquiry, used prospective teachers' weekly interactions with students as springboards for investigations of mathematics, teaching, and learning. A framework of questioning, listening, and responding is used to analyze prospective teachers' understandings and the tensions they experienced. The difficulties and tensions prospective teachers face in turn pose challenges and tensions for teacher educators. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

On Teaching Science Teachers to Teach

Abstract

Universities and colleges have a responsibility to help solve complex social problems. The article describes an interdisciplinary approach that integrates the diverse strengths of a research and teaching institution to address issues in one such complex problem: race, science, and health. The authors' model involved a “feedback loop” among three different and simultaneous activities: two undergraduate courses, one in biology and one open to all first-year student, and a weekly seminar that included the professors teaching these two courses, other faculty from across the university, and undergraduate and graduate student representatives. The topic and logistical strategies are discussed in detail and the value and challenges of such an integrated multilevel approach are explored.     

Genres and Learning to Read

The issue of text genre has begun to loom larger in thinking about literacy development, especially with the foregrounding of range in the latest National Curriculum orders for English. Lynne Kirk and Henry Pearson describe their investigation into the effects of text genre upon children's reading and conclude that, although story is the most immediately attractive genre, no one genre has all the qualities for helping children to learn to read.     

Changing the Subject: Retraining Teachers to Teach Science

This paper reports the experiences of teachers involved in a novel retraining scheme designed to meet a short-term crisis in numbers of teachers of physics. Teachers trained in other subject areas underwent an intensive six-month training in physics and were then placed in schools. During the first year of teaching some support for ongoing learning in science was provided. A study of these teachers' experiences found they lacked content knowledge in areas of the curriculum other than physics and were unprepared for the reality of the science classroom. Their existing classroom management skills were of only limited value in the new context. For those graduates who were supported by experienced staff in schools, the transition to science teaching was hard but ultimately worthwhile. For some, whose qualifications to teach science were never accepted by their peers, retraining was a bitter experience.