Reflective Teachers and Teacher Educators in the Pacific Region: Conversations with us not about us

This article reports on a study of Pacific primary school teachers’ and university lecturers’ reflections on their involvement in the in-service Bachelor of Education degree programme offered at the regional University of the South Pacific (USP) in Fiji. Two rich sets of data have emerged from this study. Firstly, there are a number of critical reflections by ourselves as teacher educators concerning levels of equitable student access and participation in our degree as it is reconceptualised for distance and flexible delivery to increase levels of teacher professionalism across the Pacific region. Secondly, there has emerged a set of statements from teachers themselves about: teaching and learning; professional development opportunities; and what it means to be a professional educator in the Pacific region. This later data suggests an alternative set of voices in what has largely been a “conversation between us about them” conducted by Ministries of Education, Curriculum Development Units, USP, other educational bodies and the media in the Pacific, but particularly Fiji, about teachers and teachers’ work. Critical reflection upon our own practice as teacher educators and the voices of experienced teachers are particularly pertinent not only as we seek to reshape a degree programme to suit the needs of the region’s primary school teachers but also as “rethinking” debates about the purposes of education in the Pacific region are on-going yet exclusive.     

Conversations With Environmental Educators: A Conversation With Four Classroom Teachers

Abstract

With the ultimate goal of providing safe, high-quality experiential educational opportunities, decision making on the part of the outdoor instructor has become a critical component in successful programming. Within the outdoor pursuits setting, decisions can be categorized by specific situations and by the person or group affected by the decisions. In addition, decisions can be classified according to the frequency and severity of the consequences of a wrong choice. Correct decision making can be hindered by a variety of situations, such as stress and adversity, which are often present in the outdoor setting. Despite these problems, a number of techniques, such as consensus decision making, can aid the outdoor instructor in making correct decisions.     

Troops to Teachers: Future Implications for Teacher Educators

Teacher educators will soon be confronted with the prospect of a relatively large number of former members of the United States Armed Forces seeking to make a transition to the profession of education. With support from the federal government in the form of the Troops-to-Teachers program as well as various state supplements, America's colleges and universities will be charged with ensuring that these aspiring teachers will be trained properly. It will soon be imperative that teacher education professionals recognize and effectively deal with the unique challenges related to this coming reality.     

培养反思-探究型教师:芬兰研究取向教师教育探析

芬兰研究取向的教师教育把教学视为一种基于研究的思维活动,认为教师所做的研究是一种实践探究.这种教师教育模式将发展师范生的教学思维确定为培养目标,将教师培养过程设计为从基础阶段向概念化阶段的发展,把实践设计为教学实践和研究实践两部分内容.在培养过程中具体采用理论学习—实践—研究的整合模式实施,师范生研究方法的学习贯穿计划始终,教学实践分三个阶段、三种水平循序渐进地开展.     

创新教师教育,造就优秀教师和教育家

本文指出我国教育进入全面提高质量新的历史阶段,教师成为核心要素,建设高素质教师队伍将是今后教育改革发展的重点;并就学科教师教育的发展与创新问题,提出开展教师教育创新实践、探索学科教师教育改革、处理好教育理论研究与学科教育研究关系、形成合作共同体等观点。     

国际汉语教师教育课程与反思性教学能力的培养

借鉴反思性教学理论,运用质性研究方法,分析国际汉语教师教育课程应如何培养职前教师进行反思性教学.从反思内容、反思层次、反思过程的视角,重点深入考察一门语言教学类国际汉语教师教育课程中的反思性教学环节.研究发现,国际汉语教师教育课程应从促进职前教师学习、科学规划课程设置、对教师教育者的要求三个方面,培养职前教师的反思性教学能力.     

Teacher Educators,Student Teachers and Biographical Influences: implications for teacher education

The importance of acknowledging the influence of biography in understanding teachers’ work is well established in recent literature. Drawing upon data arising from a study of teacher educators and their students, we consider the influence of biography on the work of teacher educators and student teachers. We draw comparisons between the ways in which they make connections with their demographic characteristics, their personal and educational histories and their understanding of their work. We evaluate the data against two major positions in the literature on biography and draw some implications for teacher education.     

Systematically Improving Lessons in Teacher Education: What's Good for Prospective Teachers is Good for Teacher Educators

Researchers have advocated building a knowledge base for teacher education based on practitioner knowledge. In this article, the authors, two teacher educators, present knowledge gained from their systematic study of two lessons to help prospective teachers learn to study teaching. They offer a detailed look at the lessons' successes and shortcomings as well as potential revisions. They also reflect on their use of a model for systematically studying lessons, sharing details about their learning during this process. This article attempts to provide a visible, tangible product for other teacher educators interested in helping prospective teachers examine evidence of student learning.     

Understanding Teacher Educators and Their Pre-Service Teachers through Multi-Media Case Studies of Practice

The challenges facing those who seek to prepare mathematics teachers are well established in the literature. Most of the research to date has focused on the perceptions and understandings of pre-service teachers, but not on the perceptions and understandings of teacher educators. In this study, we explore how four teacher educators understand their pre-service secondary teachers as the pre-service teachers attempt to make sense of teaching through the investigation of a multimedia case study of practice. We found that the teacher educators adopted two different implementation strategies: one strategy tended to be open-ended and exploratory; the other was more focused on the teacher educators' goals of anticipating student understanding and developing mathematical content knowledge for teaching. We also found that, in using the case study, teacher educators elicited pre-service teachers' thinking about the complexities of the teacher's role in small group work, about the value of explicitly revealing the teacher's reflections on the lessons, about the role of planning and preparation, and about the limits of pre-service teachers' abilities to understand and appreciate students' thinking and to extend lesson ideas. Both teacher educators and their pre-service teachers gained perspectives on the role of a teacher's mathematical content knowledge. These results imply that multimedia case studies of practice can serve as vehicles for revealing the knowledge and practice of teacher educators, as they engage in supporting the professional development of pre-service teachers.     

Teaching about Diversity in Black and White: Reflections and Recommendations from Two Teacher Educators

In this article, two teacher educators reflect on their experiences teaching a diversity course for preservice middle-school teachers. The first author is an African American male teacher educator, and the second author is a White female teacher educator. While the authors bring distinct experiences, backgrounds, and epistemologies to this work, both seek to prepare preservice teachers with the skills and dispositions needed to meet the needs of culturally diverse students. Including their narratives in their own words, the authors share their experiences teaching this course and make recommendations for those doing this work in their respective spaces.     

Using Community Artifacts to Support Novice Math Teacher Educators in Teaching Prospective Teachers

Despite the centrality of math teacher educators (MTEs) in teacher education, we know little about the nature of professional learning opportunities for MTEs to develop and enhance the knowledge needed to teach prospective teachers. Existing models for supporting MTEs in developing their knowledge and practice do not address how to prepare novice MTEs in initially learning to teach prospective teachers. We present a professional learning model we have been pursuing for supporting novice MTEs and the generation of and role for community artifacts, namely lesson plans, in that model. We outline the process by which we implement, analyze, and collectively revise lesson plans so that they are continually improved over time to serve as artifacts that better instantiate what members of the local community are learning about how to support novice MTEs through identification of their problems of practice. Finally, we problematize the model we are investigating and propose implications of this model and questions raised by our work with the goal of inviting further discussion about supporting novice MTEs.

     

培养反思型教师:从教育实习开始

从教育实习开始 ,培养反思型教师 ,是教师专业成长的需要。和学校教师反思不同 ,教育实习中的反思主要借助作为学习者的自传经历、教育理论和短暂的教学经验等 ,它所反思的内容和途径包括教学中的角色、教学常规、课程与教学、教学技能和教学策略 ,以及是否培养了学生的反思意识。教育实习中的反思含有批判 ,但不是颠覆性的。在教学中 ,它与认同、建构和发展是相互统一的。     

Conversations with Technical Writing Teachers: Defining a Problem

This article brings to light a topic that surfaces regularly among technical writing practitioners and theorists but is rarely addressed in the literature of the field. Stuart Selber deals with it in his 1997 essay “Hypertext Spheres of Influence” (see especially page 30), but a check of the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing (ATTW) Bibliography for the last two years produced only one recent article obviously devoted to it (see Mitra). The topic centers around this question: Is teaching technology problematic for technical writing instructors? Voices are heard here of 64 ATTW members who were queried on their roles as teachers of technical writing in relation to the demands made upon them to also be teachers of technology skills. Answers are presented and examined in terms of “teacher lore”, the informal sharing of teacher experiences and opinion/feeling about those experiences. The article concludes with a call for more research to clarify the roles teachers of technical writing should be playing in an age where technological determinism—shown by a tendency to turn a technical communication course into a software tools course—can be seen as a threat to effective teaching of complex workplace rhetoric.     

合作学习校本培训与培养教师反思能力的实验研究

本研究主要探讨合作学习校本培训与教师反思能力的相关性。研究结果表明,合作学习校本教师培训为教师的教学反思提供了动力和支持,对教师反思能力的发展起到了促进作用。     

Preparing the Next Generation of Science Teacher Educators: A Model for Developing PCK for Teaching Science Teachers

Science education doctoral programs often fail to address a critical piece—the explicit attention to the preparation of future science teacher educators. In this article, we argue that, in addition to developing skills and a knowledge base for research, doctoral students must be given the opportunity to observe, practice, and reflect on the pedagogical knowledge necessary to instruct science teachers. In particular, we contend that the construct of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) can be adapted to the context of knowledge for teaching science teachers. We use the PCK construct to propose a model for the development of knowledge for teaching science teachers, grounded in our experiences as doctoral students and faculty mentors. We end by recommending a vision for doctoral preparation and a new standard to be included in the ASTE Professional Knowledge Standards for Science Teacher Educators.