Education Commons^™

An Online Mentoring Practicum In Physical And Health Education Teacher Preparation: Preliminary Findings And Future Directions, Douglas Hearne, Lori Lockyer, Gregg S. Rowland, John W. Patterson

Faculty of Education - Papers (Archive)

An important aspect of any professional education is the opportunity for students to engage in meaningful practical experiences. In pre-service teacher education, this vital practicum component has undergone challenges in recent years due to increasing student numbers (due to the increasing demand for new teachers) and limited resources in university and school sectors. As a result, new innovations to enhance the practical component of this professional degree have been sought.

This paper highlights preliminary findings of one aspect of a larger study that used asynchronous Web-based communication tools to facilitate mentoring and peer support through the practice teaching experience. Analysis …

Replacing Traditional Lectures, Tutorials And Exams With A Knowledge Building Community (Kbc): A Constructivist, Problem-Based Approach To Pre-Service Primary Teacher Education, Brian L. Cambourne, Julie Kiggins, Brian Ferry

Faculty of Social Sciences - Papers (Archive)

This paper reports on a journey that begun in 1997 when a small group in the Faculty of Education at the University of Wollongong agreed to trial an alternative model of teacher education known as the Knowledge Building Community (KBC) Project. This alternative model of teacher education was based upon three learning principles, community learning, school-based learning and problem-based learning. Since the first students began in 1999 the original model has undergone several revisions and is now best described as a ?negotiated-evaluation-of-a-non-negotiable-curriculum-based-on-a-constructivist-model-of-learning-and-knowledge-building?. The aim of the KBC Program has been to deal with the perennial problem of contextualising students' professional …

Professional Learning In Different Contexts Of Mathematics Teacher Education, Ian Putt, Elizabeth Warren, Anthony Herrington

Faculty of Social Sciences - Papers (Archive)

Editorial

Teacher Use Of High-Stakes Test Score Data To Improve Instruction, James H. Mcmillan, Susan P. Mckelvey

MERC Publications

Across the United States most school districts and state departments of education have embraced high-stakes testing for their public schools and students. This has led to widespread school reform since many students have not reached the standards that the states and/or districts have set. Teachers increasingly focus on making sure that their students have enough knowledge to pass these tests, and some states and districts have made passing scores a requirement for graduation. Many states and districts have invested considerable time aligning their standardized tests with the objectives of the curriculum.

One of the consequences of high-stakes testing is that …