形成性评价在英文报刊阅读教学中的实践探讨

英文报刊阅读课程主要针对学生的阅读、翻译和语言综合运用能力进行培养.形成性评价运用于英文报刊阅读课程中,可以通过跟踪学习过程有效整合语言知识技能目标、文化目标和人文素养目标三者的达成度评价,这样不仅能够弥补以书面考试为主的终结性评价方式的不足,而且也有利于充分激发和维持学生的英语学习热情,培养学生的自我评价能力,发挥学生学习的主观能动性,培养学生的思辨能力、自主学习能力、自我管理能力和自我约束能力,在获得成就感的同时增强学习英语的自信心.教学实践证明,在英文报刊阅读教学中采用教师观察、自评互评、学习档案、访谈等形成性评价手段,能够充分尊重学生个体差异和学习优势,提升学习效果.与此同时授课教师可以及时发现英文报刊阅读教学中存在的问题,及时改进教学,提升教学效果.     

What and how teacher educators prefer to learn

In which areas and domains do individual teacher educators prefer to work on their professional development? What kind of learning activities do they want to take on and with whom? Are there significant differences in these preferences between teacher educators? This article reports on a recent survey (N = 268) about the professional development of teacher educators and differences in learning preferences between less and more experienced teacher educators and between university-based and school-based teacher educators. Findings show, for example, that while most university-based teacher educators were mainly interested in improving their teaching, less experienced school-based teacher educators were more focussed on aspects such as coaching skills. In this study, ‘learning profiles’ have been developed for four categories of teacher educators. These profiles may help to create more meaningful arrangements for teacher educators’ initial education and further professional development in a context where teacher education is required to have a more school-based as well as a more research-based orientation.     

Constructing the academic category of teacher educator in universities’ recruitment processes in Aotearoa,New Zealand

An examination of recruitment materials and interviews with personnel involved in the employment of teacher educators to positions in university-based New Zealand initial teacher education (ITE) courses reveals three constructions of teacher educator as academic worker: the professional expert, the dually qualified, and the traditional academic. However, this study’s analysis shows how these constructions allow universities to pursue a bifurcated approach for the employment of teacher educators, an approach that maintains binaries within teacher education and hinders development in the field. Furthermore, as the spectre of a major cultural shift in the provision of New Zealand ITE arises, the extent to which the professional expert and traditional academic constructions of teacher educator might serve the scope of work required of postgraduate ITE going forth is questioned.     

Using one’s own professional activities to promote research and publishing

This paper explores issues related to teacher educators publishing in journals. They do so for obvious reasons such as tenure, career advancement, personal satisfaction and university prestige. In order to offer an extra means of helping teacher educators achieve these publishing goals, the paper explores how using one’s own professional experiences in a number of spheres may offer substantial opportunities for publishing. Using a Grounded Theory analysis, the author presents an analysis of his own publications. These are laid out in five categories in which his professional pursuits with teacher trainees have led to a considerable number of publications, 34 of which have appeared in international journals, 25 of them in international Grade A and B journals. The author calls for academics to examine their own practices, suggesting that there is much in one’s own professional experiences that can be of worth to the international community.     

‘It’s very much taken as an insult if I say anything’: do new educators have a right to speak their mind?

This article describes the challenges beginning teachers face in schooling contexts that have become increasingly subject to direct political intervention. To tell the story it focuses on the experiences of five teachers in their first year of teaching in an urban jurisdiction in Australia, examining the ways in which they taught literacy, and were required to teach literacy. Government-driven political agendas of national testing, teacher standards and performance pay were all gaining traction as they commenced their first year of teaching. The ways in which these new educators felt they were discouraged from voicing their own opinions about these issues are examined and the consequences of silencing new educators are considered. The article concludes with recommendations for teacher education programmes to better prepare teachers for the politics of teaching.     

Teacher perspectives on partnerships on families of children with autism

The success of students with disabilities in school and community largely relies on productive family professional partnerships (FPPs). The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA, 2004) recognises the importance of family collaboration to student success by mandating that parents be involved in the Individualised Education Plan (IEP) process as full team members. While several previous studies examined the perspectives of parents of children with disabilities on partnerships with educators, less research exists on teacher perspectives on family professional collaborations. Additionally, there are even fewer studies that focus on teacher perspectives on partnerships with parents of children with autism, a disability category which continues to increase in prevalence. The present study contributes to the literature by examining teacher perspectives on factors that build and hinder positive partnerships with families of children with autism. Researchers surveyed 25 Special Education teachers and conducted additional individual interviews and open-ended questionnaires to examine teachers' first-hand experiences. Findings identified four common themes that educators felt helped and hindered collaborative relationships with families. Study results may lead to the development of specific family professional collaboration strategies that can be implemented and discussed in school districts, teacher trainings, pre-service teacher education programs and family workshops.     

Building the expert teacher prototype: A metasummary of teacher expertise studies in primary and secondary education

While expert teachers remain a frequent focus of research in education, to date there have been very few attempts to conduct systematic reviews of this literature. This paper presents the findings of the first systematic metasummary of research on teacher expertise in K12 education (primary/elementary and secondary levels), based on analysis of 106 empirical studies from 16 countries involving 1124 teachers identified as experts. The inductively-developed coding framework was applied independently by both authors to the dataset to generate agreement counts for specific coding themes, firstly for specific domains of teacher expertise, and then stratified to compare primary and secondary studies. We present 73 specific features organised into six domains in our expert teacher prototype. Salient findings indicate that, with regard to professional practice, expert teachers reflect extensively and often critically on their practice, help their colleagues frequently, and are continuous learners throughout their careers. Concerning knowledge, we find that expert teachers have well-developed pedagogical content knowledge and knowledge about their learners. In the domain of pedagogic practice, we observe that expert teachers display flexibility in the classroom, build strong interpersonal relationships with their learners, whom they engage through their choice of activities and content, and frequently make use of strategies typically emphasised in both constructivist and learner-centred education literatures. We offer our prototype as a useful initial sketch of family resemblance among expert teachers rather than a checklist of necessary or expected features of expertise, also cautioning that the prototype remains far from complete.     

The Domain-Specificity of Elementary School Teachers’ Judgment Accuracy

Teachers’ diagnostic competence for accurately judging students’ achievement is essential for instructional practice and professional decisions. To promote their judgment accuracy, it is important to know if this is a general or domain-specific skill. We investigated teachers’ judgment accuracy in German language (one subdomain: reading) and mathematics (two subdomains: geometry; stochastics) and examined differences across domains (i.e., German and mathematics) and across subdomains (reading; geometry; stochastics). We examined the judgment accuracy of 59 German elementary school teachers who teach both German and mathematics, judging the achievement of 1227 students in the three subdomains. We conducted multilevel analyses with a subsample of 39 teachers and 787 students and calculated different accuracy components (i.e., rank, level, and differentiation) to examine the comparability of our results. In line with prior research, findings revealed that teachers’ judgments were fairly accurate. However, there were significant differences between teachers’ average judgment accuracy in different subdomains (between-person comparisons) and no or only a weak relation between individual teachers’ judgment accuracy in different subdomains (within-person comparisons). Findings support the notion that teachers’ judgment accuracy of student achievement is domain-specific with respect to the investigated subdomains. Practical implications for the promotion of teacher judgment accuracy are discussed.     

教师发展对转变教师教学方式的影响

生物教师发展是指生物教师在知识、教学经验以及理念上不断成长的过程。文章分析了生物教师发展的内涵所包含的三个方面,以及生物教师在这三个方面的发展对转变生物教师的教学方式的重要影响,并提出了促进生物教师发展的方法。