Teacher Education and Professional Development Commons^™

Brain-Based Learning: Revolutionary Science Or Common Sense?, Sheena Baker

Perspectives In Learning

The purpose of this article is to examine the brain-based approach to teaching and learning. The approach is defined, and common misconceptions and criticisms of brain-based learning are explored. Also presented are implications for classroom teachers striving to meet accountability demands while attending to the diverse needs of all students. Justification for implementing brain-based strategies is provided in light of the ever-changing landscape of 21^st- century learning.

Analysing The Child Development Project Using The Moral Work Of Teaching Framework, Matthew Sanger, Richard Osguthorpe

Curriculum, Instruction, and Foundational Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

This inquiry applies the Moral Work of Teaching (MWT) framework to analyse the psychological, moral and educational assumptions, and the contingent factors, that explain the basic features of the Child Development Project’s (CDP) approach to moral education. The analysis, it is suggested, not only illuminates the CDP’s approach, but the virtues and implications of using an appropriately complex, theoretically descriptive framework, such as the MWT framework, as a tool for understanding, comparing, developing and applying approaches to moral education.

Exploring Social Studies Through Multicultural Literature: Legend Of The St. Ann’S Flood, Sara Winstead Fry

Curriculum, Instruction, and Foundational Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

The search for literature that is high quality, high interest, written at age-appropriate levels for adolescent readers, addresses social studies topics, and presents multicultural perspectives can be daunting. Legend of the St Ann’s Flood is a novel that meets all of these goals. Its setting in Trinidad and Tobago provides the opportunity for students to learn about a country and region that are frequently overlooked in social studies curriculum in the United States. This article provides historical and cultural background information about Trinidad and Tobago, an overview of the novel, and specific teaching suggestions that integrate reading and writing into …

Enumclaw School District Summer Reading Program, Lea Kai Tiger

All Graduate Projects

The aim of this project is to improve the elementary summer school program currently offered by the Enumclaw School District by developing a reading program to be used by the summer school instructors. Instruction outside of the school day, characteristics of successful extracurricular programs, why reading needs to be the focus of the summer school program, and what to teach and how to teach reading were researched. Taking the information found after studying the aforementioned topics, a program to be used for the Enumclaw School District summer school was developed. The program consists of lessons, games, and strategies that can …

Thinkfinity.Org Videos, Robert Del Greco, Graduate Assistant

Cornerstone 1 Reports : Expansion and Enhancements of the Thinkfinity Platform

Follow-up reports on the integration of videos in the Thinkfinity projects.

Original Goals: • To establish a rapport with a school in which Thinkfinity.org videos could be produced. • To create a reproducible format that could be used to create future Thinkfinity.org videos. • To create a video series (no less than 5 videos) of interactive whiteboard enhanced lessons based on Thinkfinity.org lesson plans that demonstrate how teachers can utilize both resources.

Teachers’ Workplace Learning Within School Cultures Community In The United States And Lithuania, Elena Jurasaite-O'Keefe

Curriculum & Instruction Faculty Publications

The purpose of this study is to explore teachers’ workplace informal professional learning and inform educational researchers, teacher educators, administrators and teachers about ways teachers learn to improve their practice. By questioning how teachers learn on-the-job to be better teachers and how school cultures position them as learners, this work generates hypotheses about relationships between the nature of workplace informal professional learning and its content and contexts. An ethnographic design based upon a grounded theory generates analytic categories from interviews and field notes through comparison of learning environments in three contrasting schools in two countries—Lithuania and the United States. Discourse …

Influences Of Writing Project Involvement On The Professional Development Of Teachers, Barbara Dondiego Holmes

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Writing is a powerful learning tool that allows students to connect critical thinking across the curriculum. Good writing skills are necessary for students to succeed in higher education and on the job. Teachers, however, are avoiding teaching writing, in part because it has not been included until recently in high stakes testing, and in part because they may not understand how to teach writing and how to grade it. Central West Virginia Writing Project, a site of the National Writing Project, conducts an annual Invitational Summer Institute for teachers of grades K-Adult to teach teachers to teach writing across the …

A Descriptive Analysis Of Knowledge And Implementation Of 21st Century Instructional Practices Among Elementary School Teachers Whose Administrators Participated In The 2006-2007 21st Century Leadership Institute, Elisabeth Michelle Samples

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

The purpose of this study was to describe levels of knowledge and implementation of 21st century instructional practices among elementary school teachers whose administrators participated in the 2006 – 2007 21st Century Leadership Institute. A researcher-developed survey was used to collect data from 242 elementary teachers from 22 West Virginia schools. Teachers reported high or moderate knowledge and indicated they were implementing a majority of the 21st century instructional practices on a daily or weekly basis. Teacher knowledge of practices was significantly different based on school SES. Teacher implementation levels were not significantly different based on the variables investigated. The …

The Impact Of Collective Teacher Efficacy On Student Achievement In High School Science, Mark W. Burcham

Education Dissertations and Projects

This dissertation was designed to examine the impact of collective teacher efficacy on high school science achievement by looking at relationships among collective teacher efficacy, its two constructs, group competence and group task analysis, and high school science achievement scores at four rural high schools in Northwestern North Carolina.

The researcher gathered historical test data from the testing coordinator from the school system and then administered the Collective Teacher Efficacy Instrument, developed by Goddard, Hoy, and Woolfolk Hoy (2000), to 24 science teachers from the four high schools. Using this information, the researcher conducted statistical analyses to determine the relationships …

The Impact Of Teacher Self-Efficacy In Writing On Instruction And Evaluation Of Writing In A School District In Western North Carolina, Deanna Berrier

Education Dissertations and Projects

This dissertation was designed to examine the writing strategies and scoring practices of fourth-grade teachers on the North Carolina Fourth Grade Writing Assessment and local, county-wide writing assessments by collecting data from 13 elementary schools located in rural, western North Carolina.

Both qualitative and quantitative means of data collection were implemented. Inter-rater reliability was used to determine reliability of the fourth-grade teachers' scoring using the North Carolina Fourth Grade Writing Assessment Rubric. Qualitative data was collected through the use of two surveys administered to the fourth-grade teachers in the county. Interviews and a focus group were also used to determine …

A Case Study Of A High School Transition Program Into The Ninth Grade, Jamie Douglas Durant

Education Dissertations and Projects

This dissertation was designed to examine and evaluate the effectiveness of a Ninth-Grade Transition Program at a Rural High School in Central North Carolina. The ninth grade is a pivotal year that determines which students will prevail and which students will fail to finish high school (Hertzog, 2003). It is essential that schools put in place components that ease the transition into high school and provide ongoing support.

Investigation measuring instruments used by the researcher included a two-part student survey and focus groups involving students in the ninth grade and those teachers who teach in the ninth grade. The data …

Chapter 4: Teaching Civic And Governement, And Economics, Andrew P. Johnson

Elementary and Literacy Education Department Publications

This chapter examines the teaching of civics and government, and of economics. Below are listed the NCSS teacher expectations in each of these content areas as well as ideas for teaching. This chapter ends with a description of global education, a newer area of social studies that incorporates a variety of disciplines and their global impact.

This article is an excerpt from Johnson, A. (2009). Making connections in elementary and middle school social studies (2nd ed). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.

Practice Writing: Responding To The Needs Of The Bench And Bar In First-Year Writing Programs, Amy Vorenberg, Margaret Sova Mccabe

Law Faculty Scholarship

Do first year legal writing programs really prepare law students for the rigors of practice writing? This article begins to answer this question based on attorney and judge survey results, as well as interviews with judges who had also read student work in preparation for their interview. We found that while legal writing programs do provide a good foundation for legal writing skills, improvement can be made. Important changes that we have made at Pierce Law include shorter, more frequent assignments, variation/flexibility in choice of organizational paradigm, understanding the difference between settled and unsettled areas of law, and increased emphasis …

It Takes Discipline: Learning In A World Without Boundaries, Stephen Healey

Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education: Archives

As Plato suggested, pedagogy is inextricably related to the polis. The learner and teacher are constituted by social, political, and economic bounds, and yet the twenty-first century polis is increasingly a world without boundaries. This is a perilous and exciting time to teach and learn. As agents of terror have shown, political boundaries are uncomfortably permeable. Economically, culturally, and religiously, globalization has reduced the power of nation-states and threatened erasure of their boundaries. Isolated identities—nationalistic, religious, linguistic, sexual— are under siege. Nothing is immune from alteration by these large-scale forces. Plato’s insight is that the pressures and possibilities, which determine …

Anatomy Of A Scientific Explanation, Cassandra Volpe Horii

Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education: Archives

“If I’m going to explain this theory, the question is, are you going to understand it? Will you understand the theory?” - -Richard Feynman, 1979 Douglas Robb Memorial Lectures

In this way, Richard Feynman, recipient of the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics and renowned teacher, author, and bongo player, introduced scientific explanation as an interesting problem with understanding as its testable outcome. Making quantum mechanics understandable to an audience of non-specialists is no easy task. Feynman had his audience in stitches, on this occasion, after noting that advanced graduate students in physics often “do not understand it either, and that’s …

Non-Science For Majors: Reforming Courses, Programs, And Pedagogy, Jennifer Frederick

Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education: Archives

Scientific advances fill news headlines and find audiences in popular movies, legislative bodies, and courtrooms, suggesting that society is broadly engaged by scientific issues. Science students typically learn concepts and methods that ignore the social and cultural foreground as well as religious and ethical implications of science practice. These excluded factors often reappear in scientific developments such as genetic engineering of herbicide-resistant plants, environmental effects of chemical and biological waste management strategies, and medical and health implications of sequencing the human genome. Though today’s science professors are already burdened by expanded content from introductory to advanced courses, now more than …

Making Sure That Peer Review Of Teaching Works For You, Nancy Van Note Chism

Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education: Archives

Peer review of teaching: A hastily arranged visit to the classroom of a faculty member in desperate need of quick testimony on teaching effectiveness, resulting in a bland letter stating that the class is interesting and students seem engaged.

Given this prevailing practice in peer review of teaching, no wonder most faculty members fail to see its inherent usefulness. To many, this limited view and practice have rendered it a necessary evil, only to be used under duress. This essay seeks to expand both definition and practice. Let’s begin with another definition:

Peer review of teaching: Collegial efforts to understand …

Orienting Students To An “Inside-Out Course”: Establishing A Classroom Culture Of Interactive, Cooperative Learning, Karlene Ferrante

Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education: Archives

I have developed a course in communication theories that foregrounds active learning, with structured opportunities for support. The result is an “Inside-Out Course” in which students are required to turn in a “ticket” for entry to class— usually a concept map of the reading. Since the first exposure to material is through homework, class time is used for quick overviews and learning activities designed by student teaching teams. Students are motivated to create good concept maps for tickets, since they are allowed to use those maps for the case study exams, taken with open notes. Assessments require students to select …

"How Did I Spend Two Hours Grading This Paper?!" Responding To Student Writing Without Losing Your Life, Eric Lemay

Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education: Archives

The specific critical moves and writing conventions of your discipline probably differ from mine, but your discipline certainly has them and when teaching them to students becomes your aim, your responses to their writing will take less time and be more effective. No longer will you have to transform novice papers into expert ideas. Instead, you can focus on the novices themselves. You can use their writing to teach them the next thing they need to know as novice historians, philosophers, or anthropologists. Given that they’re novices and you’re an expert, that thing is almost always obvious to you, although …

Bridging The Gap Between Real World Polar Science And The Classroom, William Robertson, Vanessa Lougheed, Craig Tweedie, Aaron Velasco, Claudia Garcia

Selected Works Temporary Series

The International Polar Year - Research and Educational Opportunities in Antarctica for Minorities (IPY-ROAM) program was designed to increase minority participation in polar science by immersing participants in an academic program that included a trip to Antarctica. The IPY-ROAM program was focused on increasing the public understanding of the Polar Regions and stimulating a new interest in polar science. This effort was coordinated by faculty from the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) and was implemented to positively contribute to the intense, internationally coordinated IPY scientific campaign. Through a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), a team of …

Dr. Skateboard’S Action Science: Transforming Science Education For Middle School Students, William Robertson

Selected Works Temporary Series

The main objective of this article is to describe an example of unique and creative classroom materials that are built around a real world interest of Middle School students. Dr. Skateboard’s Action Science is a curriculum supplement that integrates both skateboarding and BMX. As an example of transformative education, it is built around student interests with a direct link to specific science knowledge and skills that need to be learned. It incorporates a four part video series and twenty classroom activities for students and teachers to use in the classroom. The video and classroom materials focus on the physical science …

Skateboard: Ciencia De Acción De Doctor Skateboard: Educacion Transformativa En Física, William Robertson

Selected Works Temporary Series

This article, written in Spanish, describes a transformative process for teaching physics in the middle school science classroom through an analysis of the use of Dr. Skateboard’s Action Science. Additionally, the article attempts to bridge efforts in the US, specifically in El Paso, Texas to opportunities that exist in Spanish speaking countries, including Mexico and Chile. The provided abstracts, in Spanish and English, describe how “action science” can be used in presenting fundamental science concepts and that this approach can be expanded from Middle schools to high schools and universities. Action science is an active learning methodology for teaching physics …

Supporting Teacher Education Through A Combined Model Of Philosophical, Collaborative And Experiential Learning, Roisin Donnelly

Journal Articles

This paper provides insights into teaching and learning based on the analysis of an accredited professional development program, entitled the Postgraduate Certificate in Third Level Learning and Teaching, aimed at lecturing staff/faculty in Irish higher education. The program has its theoretical basis in the Kolb Experiential Learning Cycle (Kolb, 1983), combined with principles of collaborative learning and a philosophical understanding of teaching in higher education. An action research study was conducted to investigate the lecturers’ perceptions of the program, with a particular focus on how support could be provided to them through a combined model of learning. As a core …

Using Rubrics To Teach Science Writing, Paul E. Bennett Jr.

Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education: Archives

An often-stated goal of education in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) fields is to teach students to communicate like professionals. In the STEM fields, the single most important thing we can do to teach our students better communication skills is to teach them how to write a lab report. The reason a lab report is so important is not just because it is the end product of a research project, but because each section of a lab report has a particular function that often correlates with different types of communication that a STEM professional needs to use. For …

The Preperation, Roles, And Responsibilities Of Teacher Educators, Robert Hite, Edward Fletcher, Paige Bruening, Anthony Durr, Brian Yontz, Rhonda Zatezalo, Nicole Williams, Kattlyn Wolf

School of Education, Counseling and Human Development

The literature in teacher education is filled with discourse around the topic of what it is that teacher candidates need to know and be able to do upon completion of their teacher preparation programs. However, a seriously under-researched area in the literature of teacher education is the task of preparing prospective teacher educators in doctoral programs across schools, departments, and colleges of education. Teacher educators must negotiate their varied roles as researchers, teachers, and service stewards without sacrificing their responsibility of modeling sound teaching practices for their teacher candidates. Further, these individuals must learn what the expectations and values are …

Listen To Me! An Exploration Of The Students' Voices Regarding Homework, Gladys Landing-Corretjer

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Research on students' voices and perspectives regarding homework is absent from the literature. This qualitative case study explored the perspectives of 5th and 6th grade students and ten teachers' perceptions regarding homework completion. The literature review revealed 3 trends in homework, including support homework, support against homework, and homework reform. However, most of this research considers the adults' perspective. The researcher administered 46 questionnaires and conducted 12 in depth interviews using a stratified purposive sample and extreme case sampling. The questionnaires and interviews educed the participants' perceptions and practices regarding homework. The students represented 4 distinct groups: English language learners, …

Effect Of Cooperative Learning And Traditional Strategies On Academic Performance In Middle School Language Arts, Susan Queen

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Research indicates that the use of cooperative learning techniques fosters higher order thinking and problem solving skills in students. However additional information is needed to determine how cooperative learning affects various groups of learners. Based in constructivist theory, this quasi-experimental study examined the effects of cooperative learning verses traditional teaching strategies on the academic performance of 216 6th grade language arts students in north central Georgia. The single stage convenience sample was divided into a control group that was instructed using traditional strategies; and a treatment group that was instructed using cooperative learning strategies. Pre and posttest scores from a …

Bridging The Gap Between Real World Polar Science And The Classroom, William Robertson, Vanessa Lougheed, Craig Tweedie, Aaron Velasco, Claudia Garcia

Departmental Papers (TE)

The International Polar Year - Research and Educational Opportunities in Antarctica for Minorities (IPY-ROAM) program was designed to increase minority participation in polar science by immersing participants in an academic program that included a trip to Antarctica. The IPY-ROAM program was focused on increasing the public understanding of the Polar Regions and stimulating a new interest in polar science. This effort was coordinated by faculty from the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) and was implemented to positively contribute to the intense, internationally coordinated IPY scientific campaign. Through a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), a team of …

Dr. Skateboard’S Action Science: Transforming Science Education For Middle School Students, William Robertson

Departmental Papers (TE)

The main objective of this article is to describe an example of unique and creative classroom materials that are built around a real world interest of Middle School students. Dr. Skateboard’s Action Science is a curriculum supplement that integrates both skateboarding and BMX. As an example of transformative education, it is built around student interests with a direct link to specific science knowledge and skills that need to be learned. It incorporates a four part video series and twenty classroom activities for students and teachers to use in the classroom. The video and classroom materials focus on the physical science …

Skateboard: Ciencia De Acción De Doctor Skateboard: Educacion Transformativa En Física, William Robertson

Departmental Papers (TE)

This article, written in Spanish, describes a transformative process for teaching physics in the middle school science classroom through an analysis of the use of Dr. Skateboard’s Action Science. Additionally, the article attempts to bridge efforts in the US, specifically in El Paso, Texas to opportunities that exist in Spanish speaking countries, including Mexico and Chile. The provided abstracts, in Spanish and English, describe how “action science” can be used in presenting fundamental science concepts and that this approach can be expanded from Middle schools to high schools and universities. Action science is an active learning methodology for teaching physics …