Issues in secondary teacher preparation

As teacher educators who have had extensive experience working in the field‐based secondary programs of two universities, the authors recognize the benefits, as well as the challenges, of forming partnerships with secondary educators to design and deliver collaboratively the teacher preparation program. In this article, experiences are shared and some of the major issues related to secondary teacher preparation that have been identified and contemplated are discussed.     

Making policy with ‘good ideas’: policy networks and the ‘intellectuals’ of New Labour

The educational reforms being enacted in Singapore can be considered exceptional in that they are being undertaken within a highly effective system. We explore these reforms using Brown and Lauder's ideal-typical analysis of ‘neo-Fordist’ and ‘post-Fordist’ models of national economic development. Singapore's reforms have been extensive, ranging from changes to early childhood education through to tertiary education. We examine the nature of state-market relations in education within the context of Singapore's ‘soft authoritarian’ political culture and assess the chances of success of the reforms.     

教师专业化与教师应对教育改革的能力

本文论述的是中国教育改革发展变化过程中的教师专业化问题,所以提出这一问题的背景,是联合国教科文组织讨论了“全民教育”的各项活动和中国教育改革.当前教育改革的目的,在于提高个体和全民发展的能力.因此,教育质量成为人们日益关注的重要问题.教师的工作职能是要推动教育改革的各项措施得到实施.本文认为,“信息时代”的要求和“知识经济”的兴起,使人们对人才的特点有了新的理解,也证实了在教育儿童和青少年成为未来工作者和公民方面存在的不足.综观中国教育改革,它是一个被迫出现的过程,导致学校对教育改革的反应不灵敏.教师作为专业人员,应该支持改革,但是他们的效能还是存在一定的问题.本文进一步认为,中国教师当前面临的主要问题是不具备应对改革的能力.有关研究表明,教师工作的本质及其关注的问题与教育改革的预期大相径庭.这一问题即使通过行政命令、在职培训、或者投入更多的教育资源也难以解决.本文认为,进行全面改革的同时,要改革学生评价和选拔制度,从文化和社会层面上来思考教师职业,树立新的教师专业发展理念.     

On reforming practice in mathematics education

Based on principles of constructivism, an analysis is made of how practice in mathematical education might be reformed towards a professional practice. In addition to the widespread recommendations that mathematical teaching be based on interactive communication and that mathematical learning be active, we argue that conventional school mathematics be replaced by a constructivist school mathematics. A constructivist school mathematics is based on children's use of their schemes of action and operation in learning situations, and whatever accommodation the children make in these schemes as they use them. Through examples of our learning of the numerical schemes of five year old children we illustrate what we mean by a constructivist school mathematics. In our examples, we characterize the schemes of action and operation that we attribute to children as our interpretations of the children's activities. For this reason, we define a constructivist school mathematics to be the results of the observer's experiential abstractions in the context of interacting with children mathematically. A professional teacher is cast as one with the intellectual autonomy and power to produce a constructivist school mathematics, including the involved situations of learning and interactive mathematical communication.     

DNA microarray wet lab simulation brings genomics into the high school curriculum

We have developed a wet lab DNA microarray simulation as part of a complete DNA microarray module for high school students. The wet lab simulation has been field tested with high school students in Illinois and Maryland as well as in workshops with high school teachers from across the nation. Instead of using DNA, our simulation is based on pH indicators, which offer many ideal teaching characteristics. The simulation requires no specialized equipment, is very inexpensive, is very reliable, and takes very little preparation time. Student and teacher assessment data indicate the simulation is popular with both groups, and students show significant learning gains. We include many resources with this publication, including all prelab introductory materials (e.g., a paper microarray activity), the student handouts, teachers notes, and pre- and postassessment tools. We did not test the simulation on other student populations, but based on teacher feedback, the simulation also may fit well in community college and in introductory and nonmajors' college biology curricula.