Teaching teaching skills

Abstract

The paper examines concerns about the teaching profession as expressed by students in their teacher education program. Differences are analyzed between the concerns of entry‐level (second‐year) students and students in their student teaching (fifth) year. Items students chose as interview questions to ask a practicing teacher were used as measures of concerns. Using content analysis techniques, categories of concerns were developed. Findings indicate that entry‐level students were primarily concerned with their career choice and with the impact of the profession on their own lives. Fifth‐year students were more interested in technical classroom skills and in the impact they would have on their future students. Implications of these findings for teacher education programs are discussed.     

辅助线在地理等值线教学中的妙用

地理等值线是通过数字、图形来反映、揭示二维和三维地理现象或规律的一种形式,地理等值线教学历来是教学的重点和难点,把数学中数形结合的思想移植到地理教学中,即通过添加辅助线的方法来判读等值线所反映的地理事物及其演变规律是一种简便、快捷的分析问题的方法.灵活运用这一方法能加深对地理现象、地理规律的理解,能达到举一反三、触类旁通的效果,同时对知识的深化、串联、综合、运用及能力的提升起着重要的桥梁作用.     

Teaching learning disabled students goal-implementation skills

Eight learning disabled (LD) junior high school students were taught goal-setting and self-regulatory skills in a resource room setting. The training program was designed to help students set realistic goals, develop plans to achieve these goals, monitor and evaluate their own behavior, and accept responsibility for the outcome of goal-directed activities. The goal-implementation strategy was effective in increasing some students' rates of assignment completion in the resource room and the regular classroom. Following the training program, students attributed success to effort; failure was attributed to effort, luck, and task difficulty.     

Let's play: Teaching social skills

Alex is watching three other boys engage in a super-hero play act. The boys are playing Star Wars, protecting their fort from the Evil Warriors. For the past couple of days, Alex has walked near the same small group of boys and watched intently as the boys play out their drama. He moves close but says nothing.In another corner of the room, Emily and Jessica are playing house. Emily plays the mother and wants Jessica to assume the role of baby. Their play is interrupted by Jessica's refusal to be the baby. While Emily insists, Jessica refuses and soon, the play disintegrates.Steven, a new boy in the classroom, had been introduced to the class earlier in the morning. Now he is wandering from center to center, looking on as others became involved in their free choice of activity. The teacher is busy working with a small group in the science center, and Steven is on his own.Linda M. LeBlanc is Assistant Professor in the Department of Education at Whittier College in Whittier, California.     

Teaching conversation skills to behaviorally disordered children

The purpose of this study was to test the effectiveness of an instructional package designed to teach conversation skills to behaviorally disordered children. A multiple baseline design with a reversal was employed to assess the effectiveness of this package. Six children were taught in two groups of three. The teachers were taught to use the package prior to implementation to insure standardization across both groups. Data were collected in a contrived setting with a peer trained as a conversant. Observation also took place in the school cafeteria to assess generalization of the training to a naturalistic setting. Social validation data were collected from teachers and children to evaluate their impressions of the instructional package. Results indicated that the instructional package was effective in increasing conversational skills above baseline levels in all children and in both settings.     

Teaching domain-specific skills before peer assessment skills is superior to teaching them simultaneously

Instruction in peer assessment of complex task performance may cause high cognitive load, impairing learning. A stepwise instructional strategy aimed at reducing cognitive load was investigated by comparing it with a combined instructional strategy in an experiment with 128 secondary school students (mean age 14.0?years; 45.2% male) with the between-subjects factor instruction (stepwise, combined). In the stepwise condition, study tasks in Phase 1 were domain-specific and study tasks in Phase 2 had both domain-specific and peer assessment components. In the combined condition, these two components were present in all tasks in both phases. Final performance (i.e. speed and accuracy in domain-specific skills and peer assessment skills) showed no significant differences, but performance improved more from Phase 1 to Phase 2 in the stepwise condition than in the combined condition. The results suggest that, with complex study tasks, it might be beneficial to teach domain-specific skills before peer assessment skills.     

Teaching prereading skills with a talking computer

The phonological awareness skills of nonreaders were trained using an oddity task (e.g., which word in the series sit, fit, cat has the odd sound in its middle position). As training progressed, the basis of the oddity decision was shifted from rhyming, to consonant onsets, to consonant and vowel phonemes. The words were spoken by a DECtalk speech synthesizer. One of the experimental groups was given printed as well as computer generated speech feedback while the other was given just computer speech feedback. The alternative training control group based their oddity decisions on meaning rather than sound and was also given just computer speech feedback. Only children with low letter-sound knowledge showed pre-test to post-test gains in performance on a rhyming task compared to the control group, and these gains were not influenced by print feedback. In contrast, only children with high letter-sound knowledge, who were given print feedback during learning, showed pre-test to post-test gains in performance on a phoneme deletion task compared to the control group. These results indicate that a combination of high letter-sound knowledge and print feedback facilitates awareness of phonemes among children who cannot yet read or spell, but awareness of rimes is not facilitated by either high letter-sound knowledge or print feedback. Although consistent with bi-directional, causal models of phonological awareness and literacy, these results indicate that the definition of literacy employed by such models may require expansion. This new definition should include proto-literacy — knowledge of letter-sound and other print-sound relationships that are learned before becoming literate and that may influence the acquisition of awareness of some sub-syllabic units of speech.Abbreviations WPPSI Wechsler preschool and primary scale of intelligence - WRAT-R Wide range achievement test, revised     

Teaching problem-solving skills to nuclear engineering students

Problem solving is an essential skill for nuclear engineering graduates entering the workforce. Training in qualitative and quantitative aspects of problem solving allows students to conceptualise and execute solutions to complex problems. Solutions to problems in high consequence fields of study such as nuclear engineering require rapid and accurate analysis of the problems, design of solutions (focusing on public safety, environmental stewardship and ethics), solution execution and monitoring results. A three-month course in problem solving, modelling and simulation was designed and a collaborative approach was undertaken with instructors from both industry and academia. Training was optimised for the laptop-based pedagogy, which provided unique advantages for a course that includes modelling and simulation components. The concepts and tools learned as part of the training were observed to be utilised throughout the duration of student university studies and interviews with students who have entered the workforce indicate that the approaches learned and practised are retained long term.     

Teaching for transfer of core/key skills in higher education: Cognitive skills

This article is a result of a completed survey of the mainly cognitive science literature on the transferability of those skills which have been described variously as ‘core’, ‘key’, and ‘generic’. The literature reveals that those predominantly cognitive skills which have been studied thoroughly (mainly problem solving) are transferable under certain conditions. These conditions relate particularly to the methods and environment of the learning of these skills. Therefore, there are many implications for the teaching of key skills in higher education, which the article draws out, following a summary of the main findings of the research literature. Learning of principles and concepts facilitates transfer to dissimilar problems, as it creates more flexible mental representations, whereas rote learning of facts discourages transfer. Transfer is fostered when general principles of reasoning are taught together with self-monitoring practices and potential applications in varied contexts. Training in reasoning and critical thinking is only effective for transfer, when abstract principles and rules are coupled with examples. Transfer is promoted when learning takes place in a social context, which fosters generation of principles and explanations. Transfer improves when learning is through co-operative methods, and where there is feedback on performance with training examples. The specificity of the context in which principles are learned reduces their transfer. Transfer is promoted if learners are shown how problems resemble each other, if they are expected to learn to do this themselves, if they are aware of how to apply skills in different contexts, if attention is directed to the underlying goal structure of comparable problems, if examples are varied and are accompanied by rules or principles (especially if discovered by the learners), and if learners’ self-explanations are stimulated. Learning to use meta-cognitive strategies is especially important for transfer.     

论以实践技能为导向的旅游市场营销教学改革

随着社会和技术的日益进步,大学生的观念不断发生改变,由以往的＂要我学＂逐步向＂我要学＂转变。特别是大学生的实践技能已经成为用人单位的首选。文章认为旅游市场营销的教学要进行改革,首先必须提高以实践技能为导向的旅游市场营销教改重要性的认识,然后分析现行旅游市场营销教学模式所存在的问题,最后对现行旅游市场营销教学方式改革提出对策。     

The Writing skills in Teaching English as Second Language

This paper focuses on exploring the effective approaches to improve students’ writing ability.These effective ways include the basic approach(lexical choices,syntax and grammar,mechanics,organization) and the real-world communication approach(real world purpose and audience),which being explored by evaluating two writing tasks.The results indicate that although the students have learned the basic skills of writing,they need to consider the authentic writing purpose and the readers’ feeling when they are writing.