Education Commons^™

Plurilingualism In Tesl Programs? Are We There Yet?, Danielle Freitas

Publications and Scholarship

With the emergence of a plurilingual paradigm shift in language teaching, questions concerning the extent to which language teacher education programs are effectively preparing language teachers to teach in our messy, heteroglossic, and multilingual world (Pavlenko, 2005) have assumed immediate relevance in the training and education of teachers. Despite the considerable number of TESOL/TESL programs qualifying teachers around the world, little is known about how these programs have adapted their pedagogy to meet the current reality of a plurilingual paradigm shift in language teaching. This research investigated the curriculum and pedagogy of a TESL Certificate course in Canada.

A Study Of Primary School Teachers’ Professional Development Programme : The Translation Of Theory Into Practice In Schools, Tajuddin, Mohammad Khan

Institute for Educational Development, Karachi

Professional development programmes are criticized for not meeting the practical needs of teachers and teachers are blamed for going to their comfort zones despite their participations in professional development programmes. This qualitative case study explored effectiveness of the program of primary education certificate course looking into participant teachers’ new knowledge, skills and attitude gained from the programme and the implementation of their new learning into their respective classrooms. Nine teachers and 27 students participated in the study. Data was collected through semi-structured and open-ended interviews, classroom observations, documents analysis and focused group discussions with students.

The study reports a shift …

Designing Professional Development For Better Pedagogy: A Higher Education Experience In Pakistan, Imran Anjum Chaudary, Shahida Imran

Dr Imran Anjum

The mission of the Designing Professional Development for Better Pedagogy is to make a contribution to the understanding of Pakistani professional development in tertiary and higher education sectors. The inspiration for this book came from a research project on teacher development conducted by us in 2009 at the Melbourne Graduate school of Education, the University of Melbourne, Australia. This ethnographic case study, conducted in 2011, not only refreshes the results of our previous research, but also moves the debate forward by analysing the problems and practices of Pakistani professional development, cataloguing the voices of tertiary/higher education teachers, introducing a new …

Learning To Teach Mathematics With Reasoning And Sense Making, Amy L. Nebesniak

College of Education and Human Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This study uses teacher research to examine teacher learning in the context of instructional coaching. The author, a mathematics instructional coach, engaged in an intense three-week coaching relationship with a high school Algebra teacher. A detailed description of the teaching and learning of quadratics that took place during this research provide information about what and how a teacher learns to teach mathematics with reasoning and sense making. Mapping the terrain of quadratics deepened the teacher’s understanding of the mathematical content and encouraged him to adapt his textbook in order to build mathematical reasoning. Through the coaching process, the teacher also …

Teachers' Discourse On English Language Learners: Cultural Models Of Language And Learning, Amy Heineke

Education: School of Education Faculty Publications and Other Works

This qualitative case study explores teacher learning about English language learners (ELLs) in a small-group, school-based context at an urban elementary school inArizona. Sociocultural perspectives on teacher learning guided the analysis of teachers’ participation in a teacher study group over six months. The teacher study group aimed to support educators of ELLs at a time of new language policy implementation, which required ELLs to enroll in an English language development (ELD) classroom for four hours of skill-based English language instruction.

In the first semester of language policy implementation, I collected discursive data that showcased the social interaction of teachers and …