Implementing Student‐Centered Learning Practices in a Large Enrollment,Introductory Food Science and Human Nutrition Course

Informed by the latest research on how people learn, effective teachers address both aspects of the teaching–learning equation—they engage students in the course material by implementing best teaching practices and they prepare students for learning by sharing best learning practices. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the impact of student‐centered learning practices on students’ perceptions of their ability to learn, specifically in a large enrollment, introductory food science and human nutrition course. Featured student‐centered learning practices included required assignments, optional study tools, and supplemental learning resources. A mixed method survey instrument with 5‐point Likert scales and qualitative, open‐ended questions was used to determine students’ (1) use of optional study tools and supplemental learning resources; (2) perceptions as to the quality and impact of required assignments, optional study tools, and supplemental learning resources to enhance their ability to learn; (3) perceptions as to the usefulness of required assignments, optional study tools, and supplemental learning resources to help them perform better in this course; and (4) overall satisfaction, as a learner, in this course. Overall, students identified study guides (developed using Bloom's taxonomy action verbs) (Mean = 4.34), microthemes (Mean = 4.27), and quizzes (Mean = 4.11) as the most beneficial resources to enhance their learning of the course material. Overall, 85% of students said they were extremely or very satisfied as learners in the course and nearly 75% of the students said the student‐centered learning practices should be offered to future FSHN 101 students.     

The role of non-formal contexts in teacher education for STEM: the case of horno3 science and technology interactive centre

Abstract

Teacher education can benefit directly from experiences in non-formal settings. This article presents a research study with elementary teachers who were teaching in public schools in the state of Nuevo León, México, and participated in a STEM Continuous Professional Development (CPD) workshop. The workshop provided a platform for teachers to interact with scientists and disseminators of science, allowing the appropriation of scientific knowledge applied to everyday activities and settings. Participants improved the quality of their teaching practices in classrooms and gained a new understanding of STEM subjects, enabling them to promote inspiring learning experiences with their students, where dialogue, experimentation and elucidation became an important part of their lessons. The study was carried out using ethnographic tools for analysing recorded videos, 15 sets of field notes, and 49 questionnaires. The sequential analysis of talk and gestures in their participation in the CPD workshop demonstrated high levels of involvement, creativity, and collaborative solution of STEM problems.     

Straddling Teacher Candidates’ Two Worlds to Link Practice and Theory: A Self-Study of Successful and Unsuccessful Efforts

Abstract

This self-study examines a teacher educator’s quest to provide an integrated practice-and-theory approach to learning to teach that places the experiences of the teacher candidates at the centre of the curriculum by focussing on their developing questions, challenges and issues through socio-constructivist discussions of their emerging practices. Constraints of university structures with regards to offering such an approach are discussed, including the impact that offering seminars on the university campus rather than in schools has on teacher candidates’ ability to integrate theories and practices of learning to teach. The research questions guiding this study include: How can I understand what process candidates actually undergo during practicum in the development of their ability as teachers vis-à-vis my course?, and How can I re-structure and re-organize my course to enhance the development of candidates’ practice as teachers? Data include interviews with volunteer student participants before and after observations made during classroom visits as well as discussions with groups of students. Analysis is based on reading and rereading the data as well as discussing it with the larger research team. The findings include the realization of how little of my course is integrated into my teacher candidates’ teaching, how much greater the influence of their mentor teacher is, and the extent to which teacher candidates need explicit help and guidance to transform or reframe their teaching. The article concludes with specific suggestions for adjusting a seminar associated with the practicum to enhance the development of a practice-and-theory approach to teaching.     

Developing a science teacher education course that supports student teachers’ thinking and teaching about the nature of science

This paper reports on part of an ongoing research project in England concerning the Nature of Science (NOS). The particular focus is on the initial thinking of the graduate scientists starting a one-year, Postgraduate Certificate of Education (PGCE) course and the way the course approaches adopted influence their views and understanding of NOS and their teaching. The research is set against a wealth of literature indicating that teachers find it difficult to teach curricula that emphasise NOS. Thus a key impetus for research in this area has been to look for ways that beginning teachers might be better prepared to face such challenges.

Sample

The paper draws on data from three cohorts of secondary PGCE students in a university–schools partnership, involving a total of 169 students.

Design and method

The research lies within a design research tradition. It has used mixed methods, involving written tasks, interviews and focus groups, with an iterative approach where the outcomes from one cohort have been used to inform course developments in successive years.

Results

The results from these cohorts suggest that, while the students starting the course have a less restricted view of NOS than indicated by some other studies, in most cases there is a lack of breadth and depth to their understanding. There is some evidence that the use of specific tasks focusing on NOS in university-based sessions may be helping to develop and deepen understanding. However, the impact of current approaches remains fairly limited and attempts to develop teaching practices often face considerable barriers in the school-based practicum.

Conclusions

Graduate science students’ understanding of NOS as they embark on the PGCE is not highly developed. Hence, the emphasis on aspects of NOS in the school curriculum presents a considerable challenge. This study suggests that there is a need to both further develop an explicit focus on NOS in university-based sessions and to develop closer relationships between schools and university faculty in seeking to support developments in classroom practice in this difficult area.     

Botany and environmental education in elementary school in Brazil: articulating knowledge,values, and procedures

Abstract

The increasing urbanization and alienation from nature reduce children’s opportunities to interact with plants and challenge teachers to devise educational practices that contribute to learning botany. This study presents the results of activities developed in a Brazilian school through explorations, drawings, dried and pressed specimens, and semi-structured interviews. The data were evaluated using mixed methods analysis. Leaves were the structure that was most frequently drawn by 1st- and 2nd-year students, followed by stems. Among students in their 3rd, 4th, and 5th years, more emphasis was on flowers and their detailed morphological structures. The 1st- and 2nd-year students included non-living elements and the surrounding environment in their drawings, whereas the older students focused on the plant itself. These particularities point to methods of teaching botany in context and link students’ specific knowledge to values and practices that contribute to an environmental education that aims to minimize the utilitarian view of nature and move towards a view of human beings as integrated and interdependent with other living and non-living elements.     

Learning from the Past: An account of an oral history project for students in an early childhood teacher education program

Engagement of student-teachers with the community of practice they are entering is central to the formation of their identity as an educator. This paper outlines a teaching and research project that enabled early childhood student-teachers to gain insights into the field through interviewing past teachers and reflecting on their practices. In the process, students became aware of the complexities of their chosen profession, alternative teaching practices and different ways of relating with families. Their responses indicated that the experience had an impact on their identity with the profession, their learning about the nature of history and their understanding of research processes.     

The classroom observation protocol for socioscientific issue-based instruction: development and implementation of a new research tool

Background: For the past decade, science educators have been exploring the use of Socio-scientific Issues (SSI) as contexts for science teaching and learning, and research indicates that doing so can support significant learning gains. However, research related to how teachers take up the practice of SSI-based instruction is far more limited, due in part to a lack of tools for use in this kind of research.

Purpose: The focus of this research is development and testing of a new classroom observation protocol specifically designed for SSI-based instructional contexts.

Design and methods: Development of this SSI-Observation Protocol (SSI-OP) took place in four distinct phases: review of existing protocols and SSI-based instruction frameworks, writing and revision of protocol items, initial testing of the draft protocol, and soliciting feedback from SSI experts.

Sample: Following the four stages of SSI-OP development, we progressed to a series of field tests. The field tests were conducted with three different samples. The first sample was an experienced (10 + years) high school biology teacher and one of her honors biology classes. The second sample consisted of seven Turkish Pre-service Science Teachers (PST) participating in a science methods course. The third sample included two Thai PST from a field experience course embedded within a teacher education program.

Results: The final version of the protocol addressed five dimensions of SSI-based instructional activities: focus of instruction, teaching moves, role of teacher, role of students, and classroom environment.

Conclusions: The SSI-OP could be used in a variety of ways for research including documentation of current practices, impacts of professional development and/or curricula on teaching practices, and changes in teaching over time. We offer the SSI-OP as a new tool with the potential to contribute to science teacher education and research that may advance the teaching and learning of science through SSI.     

“I thought we were supposed to learn how to become better coaches”: developing coach education through action research

ABSTRACT

Youth coaches play a crucial role in the development of young athletes and their physical, psychological and social well-being. Therefore, it is important to foster and develop youth coaches’ ability to govern and act effectively in their coaching practices. Sports organisations facilitate the development of youth coaches through formal coach education. However, research has shown this to be with limited effect. The purpose of this action research study was to involve youth coaches in developing a new and more effective coach education practice.

The coaches developed their practices through both dialogue and reflection with each other. A shift in the mindset of the coaches resulted in a more reflective and analytical approach in their way of thinking and talking about their practices. The most effective tools for improving the coach educational practice was the active management of the relations between the participating coaches and assisting the coaches’ reflection and dialogue through the use of scaffolding. In order to engage coaches in the educational practice, alignment between coaches’ expectations and both course content and form was crucial. These findings provide further insight into how coaches can develop their practices and how sports organisations can develop more effective coach education practices.     

Ethical Reasoning and the Craft of Moral Practice

Abstract

Non-indoctrinational moral education involves teaching children to engage in ethical inquiry. This means that, since ethical inquiry has the status of a craft, the students will be apprentices in that craft. The classroom becomes, for this purpose, a community of ethical inquiry — an ethical atelier where students learn the tools, methods, practices and procedures which craftsmen associated with that tradition customarily utilize. It is only when one is adept at the generic procedures of reasoning that one can be adept at specifically moral reasoning, but to make the transition possible, the generic procedures should be taught within the humanistic and critical context of philosophy, and within the setting of a community of ethical inquiry.     

An Exploratory Study Evaluating the Effectiveness of an Innovative Model for Teaching Multicultural Social Work Education

Abstract

Effective social work practice with diverse populations requires the successful incorporation of multicultural knowledge, awareness, and skills.As a result, there is a pressing need for innovative and evidencebased teaching strategies and methods that provide social work students with these key multicultural tools. This paper describes one such teachingmodel and presents the findings of an exploratory study to empirically evaluate its effectiveness with undergraduate social work students (N =23) enrolled in a multicultural social work course. Based on pre-and post-test composite scores, the findings suggest that this new model of multicultural instruction and assignments increases students' multicultural awareness andknowledge.     

Gross motor teaching in preschool education: where,what and how do Singapore educators teach? (Enseñanza de la motricidad gruesa en educación infantil: ¿dónde,qué y cómo enseñan las maestras en Singapur?)

ABSTRACT

Fostering the development of gross motor (GM) skills is important in itself and beneficial for the holistic development of children. While early childhood curriculum frameworks for GM teaching have been recently articulated, there is limited research on actual pedagogical practices. This study explored GM teaching practices in Singapore Kindergarten 1 classrooms (4–5 years), focusing on where (indoors vs outdoors), what (types of GM skills) and how (teaching strategies and opportunities for practice) preschool educators teach. The study is part of a longitudinal project in which 108 Kindergarten 1 classrooms were observed and videotaped during a full ‘typical day’ (3–4 hours). GM teaching was observed to occur predominantly indoors. Non-locomotor skills were the most frequently taught to children, followed by locomotor and manipulative skills. Many educators were observed using explicit teaching strategies before and during GM activities, with low involvement after activities had been completed. While GM teaching was predominantly teacher-led, opportunities for unguided practice and play were more frequent outdoors. We conclude that Singapore preschool educators need support to better enact the guidelines of the GM curriculum framework. The study enriches the thin classroom-based international literature on GM education.     

Vicarious Education,Dialogue Education and Self-Efficacy among Indian Female Students in a Diversity Management Course

Abstract

Teaching, learning and assessment methods for teaching students about diversity should be transformative and achieve lasting changes in students’ attitudes and behaviours towards diverse individuals. Therefore, dialogue education in the teaching and learning of an undergraduate course in diversity management at a higher education institution was considered as an alternative to existing practices. This article reports on a mixed method study that was conducted to gather data from students over a period of three years. The results of the study indicated that the majority of students did well with the dialogue approach to education except for a small underrepresented group of Indian females: they experienced low levels of self-efficacy in class discussions and presentations, thereby preventing them from benefitting from the educational opportunity offered.     

Facilitating a culture of relational trust in school-based action research: recognising the role of middle leaders

Abstract

Practices such as formal focused professional dialogue groups, coaching conversations, mentoring conversations and professional learning staff meetings have been taken up in schools and pre-schools as part of long-term action research and development activities to improve the learning and teaching practices. The development of relational trust has long been described in the literature as pivotal for the ongoing ‘success’ of such research and development in sites. In this article, we attempt to re-characterise relational trust as it is accounted for by participants in action research. We present data from a cross-nation study of middle leaders from Australian primary schools and Swedish pre-schools. Middle leaders are those teachers who ‘lead across’; they have both an acknowledged position of leadership or responsibility for the practice development of colleagues and a significant teaching role. The larger study examined the practices of middle leaders; and in this article we draw on interview data from one of the case-study sites that illustrate how colleagues in schools recognise the role middle leaders have for facilitating action research and teaching development. This article specifically presents excerpts from semi-structured interviews with 25 teachers, three principals, three executive teachers and three district consultants. Interviewees described how nourishing a culture of relational trust and mutual respect are critical features in the change endeavour. For them, the practices of the middle leader who facilitated the action research were instrumental in developing trust for teacher development. Analysis of participant accounts revealed five dimensions of trust: interpersonal trust, interactional trust, intersubjective trust, intellectual trust, and pragmatic trust.     

It is All About Inquiry: A Cross-Disciplinary Conversation About the Shared Foundations for Teaching

Abstract

This paper brings together general principles for teaching inquiry across disciplines with those generally employed in mathematics classrooms. It describes some broad principles of teaching inquiry to first-year writing students and shows how these can be employed in the context of a course on game theory in popular culture. Although undergraduate mathematics may seem miles away from undergraduate writing, especially in first-year courses, we show how common educational practices in inquiry-based mathematics courses are easily adapted to teaching a writing course and how these pedagogical methods can be used to encourage students to develop habits of inquiry.     

Case studies in history education: thinking action research through an epistemological framework

ABSTRACT

Key studies in history education (from France and the USA) are discussed and compared in order to explore their methodological issues in terms of the types of knowledge they can generate about teaching and learning. An epistemological framework that relates the history of historians as an inquiry to that of the classroom provides the criteria for this comparative analysis, which is inscribed in Abbott’s epistemologico-institutional social sciences analysis through the identification of two basic debates that structure history education research, namely subject-matter knowledge vs pedagogical practices, and teaching and learning rules of methods vs habits of thinking. This analysis points out the conditions for the development of a formative school history inquiry (to have students work on their own explanations, to put into play their set of beliefs about history), which determine the modalities of a specific action research. These modalities are detailed by the example of an action research on the case of the teaching of the French Revolution in the last grade of primary school: the sharing of pedagogical (by the professor) and academic (by the researchers) decisions, the collective production of data throughout the process.     

Prospective teachers’ teaching experience: teacher learning through the use of video

Background: Future teachers need to observe, interpret and analyse teaching during the initial teacher education period. The use of videoed teaching and learning in teacher education promotes reflection, and analysing videos of teaching is helpful in learning effective classroom practices that prospective teachers mostly do not have the chance to observe during fieldwork experiences. The analysis of videos of teaching can be seen as a way to enhance the development of prospective teachers’ professional vision, which, in turn, improves instruction. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine prospective teachers’ reflections on video examples depicting their own teaching experiences. It aimed to create a professional development environment to facilitate the prospective teachers’ reflection on their own videos and those of their peers to improve their professional vision. Sample: This study was conducted with over 200 (in 31 groups) third-year prospective mathematics teachers in a university in Western Turkey. The student teachers, receiving training to teach first- to fourth-grade elementary school pupils, were taking a teaching methods course. Design and methods: In the first week of the semester, the student teachers, working in groups, were assigned mathematics topics to teach the elementary school pupils. During the semester, each group prepared by trying out their activities in front of other student teachers in other groups. At the end of the semester, one student teacher from each group presented a short lesson related to their mathematical topic to the elementary school pupils. This lesson was videotaped, then later it was watched and discussed by the student teachers. Of the student teachers who undertook the teaching in the videos, 22 volunteers agreed to be interviewed. All groups of student teachers provided written reflections on their experience. Selected videos of the class discussions about the videos of teaching were also used for triangulation. The data were analysed to identify the issues the prospective teachers reflected upon. A content analysis technique was employed. Results: The data indicated that the prospective teachers were able to reflect on several issues related to effective teaching, connect their theoretical knowledge to their practice and consider issues related to pupil learning and difficulties. Conclusion: The findings suggested that the use of video, together with discussions between the student teachers, had the potential to create promising learning opportunities for prospective teachers.