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.

     

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.     

情感：联结师生心灵的纽带

本文着重论述情感对于师生心灵交往的作用及教育涵义，指出通过情感，师生确认存在，从而使教育成为可能；通过情感，师生共享世界，从而焕发出生命活力；通过情感，师生对话人生，从而引起师生同往。     

Disconnecting to Connect: Developing Postconnectivist Tactics for Mobile and Networked Technical Communication

ABSTRACT

In a networked society, humans are connected through mobile devices to always-on networks, and these technologies merge with us in new ways. In this environment, studying human-networked interactions involves an expanded type of usability. In this article, we argue that a key component of usability is how humans connect and disconnect from these networks. For this reason, the authors advocate studying how users connect and disconnect between online and offline contexts in their everyday life. Such an effort involves questioning our assumptions about the role of connection in usability and introduces methodological issues in studying these processes. These shifts require our research to be more multidisciplinary and more methodologically demanding, with major implications for the portability and durability of technical communication research.     

Wiki: Using the Web Connections to Connect Students

The present study reports on action research conducted using a resource wiki. Participants included 48 certified teachers and pre-service teachers enrolled in a face-to-face graduate course supplemented with online activities. Data collected include student reflections that indicate the use of a wiki at the university level is a feasible means of online collaboration, facilitates constructing new knowledge, and provides a medium of modeling technology integration into the classroom.     

高师教育与基础教育联袂培养精于素质教育的合格师资

基础教育改革是一项系统工程，高师教育为基础教育培养精于素质教育的合格师资。所以两种教育应该紧紧相联，这样才能达到供需相宜。然而就目前现状而言，两种教育存在着脱节的现象，为了缩短师范院校毕业生将来从教的适应期，不让更多的中学生成为试验品，高师教育应该与基础教育联袂，寻找有效的途径和方法，培养精于素质教育的合格师资。     

Using Mentoring,Coaching, and Self-Mentoring to Support Public School Educators

Assimilating new teachers into schools is a critical component of administrative responsibility and sustainability. About 580 000 teachers (17% of all teachers) were newly hired at their school, according to the US Department of Education. Most of these positions were created because of “teacher turnover.” Some of these newly hired teachers filled new teaching positions in the workforce as well—which grew by three percent over the previous two years. As this number rises, there is a concentrated effort by building administrators to provide support and resources for beginning teachers to help eliminate teacher turnover and strengthen staffing at schools. Support for new teachers varies from district to district and even from school to school. Traditional induction programs offer mentoring and coaching methods. More recently, the concept of self-mentoring emerged. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the concept of self-mentoring as a tool for beginning teachers.     

Socially Mobile Teachers and Classroom Atmosphere

Abstract

This is a study of a group of 628 new freshman high aptitude students (308 M, 320 F) who participated in an orientation and testing program in the summer of 1959, and who have since either graduated or withdrawn from The University of Texas. Responses to a questionnaire showed sex differences, and differences between voluntary and enforced withdrawals in reasons given for withdrawal, current status, and future plans. Analyses of variance by sex of psychometric data on graduates and the two withdrawal groups showed significant sex differences in the variables associated with success. These ranged through measures of aptitude, achievement, creativity, personality and interest. The desirability of classifying dropouts by sex and by whether they withdrew of their own accord or were dismissed is emphasized.     

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。     

Teachers and Students Poised to Use Mobile Phones in the Classroom

This study examined the perceptions of 15 teachers and 103 middle school students at a progressive private school located in Mumbai, India to determine their support for the use of mobile phones in the classroom, their perceptions of the mobile phone features that are beneficial for school-related work, and the instructional benefits and barriers to mobile phone use prior to beginning a mobile phone pilot program. The results indicated that most teachers (86%) and students (92%) supported the use of mobile phones in the classroom while those remaining voiced uncertainties. The participants perceived many mobile phone features as being useful in the classroom, but the teachers and students significantly differed in their views. Participant responses revealed little concern about most of the barriers reported in the literature; both teachers and students were least concerned about the use of mobile phones causing a disruption to learning.     

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.     

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.     

Mobile Devices and Apps as Scaffolds to Science Learning in the Primary Classroom

Considerable work over many years has explored the contribution technology can make to science learning, at all levels of education. In the school sector, historically this has focused on the use of fixed, desktop-based or semi-mobile laptop systems for purposes such as experiment data collection or analysis, or as a means of engaging or motivating interest in science. However, the advent of mobile devices such as iPads supported by a huge array of low or no cost apps, means that new opportunities are becoming available for teachers to explore how these resources may be useful for supporting ‘hands on’ science learning. This article reports outcomes from a study of primary (elementary) school students’ use of a series of apps integrated with practical science activities, in a topic exploring Energy concepts. It used an innovative display capture tool to examine how the students used the apps and features of their iPads to scaffold their practical work at different stages during the experiments. Results identify device functions and app-based scaffolds that assisted these students to structure their experiments, understand procedures, think about the influence of variables and communicate and share outcomes. However, they also discovered limitations in the apps’ ability to support conceptual knowledge development, identifying the critical role of teachers and the importance of task structure and design to ensuring conceptual knowledge objectives are met.