Teacher Education and Professional Development Commons^™

Teaching Writing Together: Joining Stories, Joining Voices, Kirk Branch, Lisa Eckert

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

This article considers the relationships and common bonds that helps composition specialists and English educators find opportunities for mutually supportive professional relationships and collaboration.

The Future Of Writing Teacher Education, Kia Jane Richmond, M. Kilian Mccurrie

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

This article provides background for the creation of the journal and suggestions for future submissions and directions.

Opening Editorial: The Next Step In A Disciplinary Journey, Jonathan Bush

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

The opening editorial provides context for the journal.

Writing Teacher Education: Past And Present, Michelle Tremmel, Robert Tremmel

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

This article provides an overview of some of the recent developments in writing teacher education and considers how the journal can add to this community,.

Inaugural Issue (Spring 2012): Full Issue

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

The inaugural issue of Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education includes invited articles by key figures within writing teacher education.

Women @ Work Program, Eleanor Brown, Raymond Tse, Apurva Mehta

Office of Community Partnerships Posters

The St. Mary’s Women @ Work program partners with the Department of IT at UMass Boston to provide young women with a path to self sufficiency. It does so by placing these youth for a 3 month period, in a real-work environment where they get paid and receive hands-on practical training.

The Mathematics Portfolio: An Alternative Tool To Evaluate Students’ Progress, Marla A. Sole

Publications and Research

This article describes the need for more thorough and varied forms of assessment to evaluate students’ level of understanding in mathematics. Portfolios are one type of assessment tool that, when added to a teacher’s repertoire can improve students’ comprehension and retention and enable students to monitor their own progress and to take more responsibility for their own learning. Portfolio assignments can also help students and teachers to detect and remedy weaknesses and misunderstandings and can increase students’ self-confidence in mathematics. This article discusses what a portfolio is, gives an example of a unit portfolio used in an undergraduate Finite Mathematics …

“Everybody Is Their Own Island”: Teacher Disconnection In A Virtual School, Abigail Hawkins, Charles R. Graham, Michael K. Barbour

Education Faculty Publications

Virtual schooling is a recent phenomenon in K-12 online learning. As such, the roles of the online teachers are emerging and differ from those of the traditional classroom teacher. Using qualitative interviews of eight virtual high school teachers, this study explored teachers’ perceptions of their online teaching role. Teachers expressed a sense of disconnection from their students, the profession, and their peers as a result of limited interactions due to significant institutional barriers. Researchers discuss the implications of this disconnection as well as future avenues for research.

Teaching About Global Debt In Social Studies Classrooms, Anand Marri, Timothy Patterson, Scott Wylie

Education Faculty Publications

The article offers guidelines in teaching high school students about global debt in their social studies class in the U.S. It outlines various ways on how to infuse discussions about global debt into social studies classrooms which include connecting the topic of global debt on a student's personal finance, providing of instructional materials, and focusing on public policy dilemmas. The author suggests teaching students about global debt through student-centered pedagogy.

How To Become A Good Business Teacher: Developing Competences Of Prospective Business Education Teachers, Elisabeth Riebenbauer, Michaela Stock

International Journal for Business Education

The mission of teacher education is to equip prospective teachers with the knowledge, skills, attitude and behaviour they need to deliver their best performance in the classroom and at school. This paper presents ideas for optimizing teacher education using the example of the master's program of Business Education and Development at the University of Graz, placing a special focus on the acquisition of teacher competences. The biggest milestone in the curriculum is the teaching practice, the success of which strongly depends on good cooperation among students, teachers, schools, university, and school authorities. The second part of this article will be …

2012 Ijbe Front Matter, Tamra Connor

International Journal for Business Education

1. Editorial Board
2. President's Letter
3. SIEC-ISBE International

Is It The Way To Teach Language The Way We Teach Language? English Language Teaching In Rural Pakistan, Ali Nawab

Professional Development Centre, Chitral

With the growing importance and need of English language in the global context, efforts are being made in the developing context to improve the quality of teaching English with the assumption that teaching of English facilitates the acquisition of English Language. What is Pakistani teachers approach to the teaching of English language and does the way they teach English facilitate the language acquisition? The current study explores this question at secondary level in the context of Chitral, a remote district of Khyber Pukhtunkhwa province Pakistan. The researcher visited the randomly selected secondary schools and consulted English teachers interviewing them and …

The Effects Of Teacher And Student Satisfaction On Student Achievement, Sean Mcwherter

Education Dissertations and Projects

This dissertation was designed to examine factors contributing to both teacher and student satisfaction and to determine if a relationship existed between the satisfaction levels and student achievement. The contributing factors identified in this study consisted of items that could be influenced or controlled in the school environment. Maslow's (1943) hierarchy of needs was used to help identify factors that could contribute to teacher and student satisfaction.

The subjects for this quantitative study came from a rural high school in the southern part of the United States. The participants in this study were analyzed according to their level of curricular …

Should Value-Added Modeling Be Used To Identify Highly Effective Teachers? Counterpoint, Kathryn Kinnucan-Welsch

Teacher Education Faculty Publications

In the past two decades, the importance of the teacher’s contribution to student learning has been widely acknowledged. Some researchers have argued that the teacher is the most important factor in explaining differences in student achievement. In previous decades much of the educational research literature explored differences in student achievement based largely on student characteristics such as educational attainment of the parents, socio-economic status, race, and gender. It is only recently that teachers have been placed at the center of research and accountability related to student learning. To put it simply, it is widely said that “teachers matter,” and recent …

In The Flow: A Mixed-Methods Phenomenological Study Of Optimal Experience In Adolescent Literacy, Susan E. Miles

Education Dissertations and Projects

This study is concerned with the flow experience of students while involved in independent reading. Based on Csikszentmihalyi's theory of flow, this experience is one of total engagement to the point of immersion involving deep concentration; enjoyment; and a loss of a sense of time, place, and self.

This is a quan>Qual study, which began with a quantitative measurement to determine a criterion sampling, followed by the primary research method, a transcendental phenomenology of flow during voluntary, independent reading. This primary research method was used due to the lack of research available on flow in the field of literacy …

Methodological Modes: Instructional Practice And 21 St Century Engagement In Secondary English Classrooms, Laurel Eury Naughton

Education Dissertations and Projects

This dissertation was designed to provide insight into the teaching practices of secondary English teachers. Current learners are in classrooms in which the instructional practices or methodologies are employed, but may not be engaging students. Information sought included the degree to which 21 st century practices were being incorporated into the lessons, and the level with which students were engaging with the material.

The researcher observed classrooms of junior and senior English, and measured the level of engagement triangulating the data from the local school agency's observation tool with that of Van Amburgh et al.'s (2007) active learning inventory tool …

Impact Of Freshman Academy Experiences On Student Academic Intrinsic Motivation, Shirley C. Sealy

Education Dissertations and Projects

This dissertation was designed to explore the transition of a group of ninth-grade students into a large rural upstate South Carolina high school. The primary focus was to ascertain the students' levels of academic intrinsic motivation toward English, math, science, history, and their general orientation toward school learning, and to explore those freshman academy experiences that the students felt most directly impacted these attributes. The freshman academy at this school was implemented in 2006 as a district initiative to strengthen the transition to high school and ultimately increase the graduation rate.

This was a mixed methods case study in which …

Applications Of The Well-Educated Mind 2003 Concept By Susan Bauer In The Southern California History Classrooms, Tomasz Bogdan Stanek

Theses Digitization Project

The purpose of this study is to discover how courses in world history and United States history are taught in Southern California secondary schools. At this stage of the research the study of the history course instruction will be generally defined as an exploratory and investigative inquiry involving the interviews of the history faculty, analysis of their course offerings and syllabi content, and the overall teachers' course content preparation and knowledge.

Preparing Students For Careers That Do Not Yet Exist, Glenn W. "Max" Mcgee

Publications & Research

The Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy (IMSA), as a self-described "teaching and learning laboratory for imagination and inquiry," has a history of pursuing innovations closely aligned with the vision and framework of the National Science Education Standards. Innovations include both methods and materials for inquiry-based student instruction as well as for delivering professional development for pre-service and practicing teachers. Instructional innovations described include yearlong student inquiry and research projects (SIR), self-paced physics instruction, student-driven energy and engineering projects, instruction in innovation and entrepreneurialism, and a host of student-led outreach activities to "ignite and nurture creative, ethical, scientific minds of students …

The Informal Learning Approaches Of Teachers In A Secondary School In Pakistan, Ali Nawab

Professional Development Centre, Chitral

The advocates of informal learning believe that learning is not always necessarily planned rather it could also happen informally in the workplace. Does informal learning equally happen in every context and setting? Using a qualitative approach, this study explores the nature of teachers’ informal learning in a secondary school in rural Pakistan. Data were generated through interviews and observations. The study finds that though limited in nature, there are some informal learning activities which the teachers are engaged in. Most of the informal learning happens through observations of the practices of senior colleagues. Moreover, the teachers also learn from the …

A Secondary Science Teacher’S Beliefs About Environmental Education And Its Relationship With The Classroom Practices, Salima Begum

Professional Development Centre, Gilgit

Global environmental issues are increasing due to the rapid developments in science and technology. To address these environmental issues there is a need to create awareness about environmental education among the masses. This can only be possible through teachers and teacher educators. It is assumed that science teachers are teaching environmental concepts as scientific facts, without creating awareness about environmental education. The ultimate purpose of this study was to explore the beliefs of a secondary science teacher about environmental education and how his stated beliefs matched with his classroom practices. The study was conducted in one of the co-operative schools …

The Moral Dimension Of Teaching, Affectionate Schools And The Student Drop Out: The Case Study Of A Mountainous Community In Pakistan, Zeenat Shah, Sultan Alam, Sharifullah Baig

Professional Development Centre, Gilgit

This study explored the perceptions, perspectives and viewpoints of the students about the reasons for turning the schools into uninteresting and unaffectionate places for the students eventually leading to the increased drop out ratio. This qualitative study was conducted in four secondary schools, which provide education to the children in four different educational systems of Gilgit- Baltistan, Pakistan. A number of six students from each school and altogether twenty four students were selected as the primary participants of this research. Semi structured interviews were the main tools of data collection. The findings highlighted the ethical, moral and behavioral aspect of …

Goal Setting And Student Achievement: A Longitudinal Study, Aleidine Kramer Moeller, Janine M. Theiler, Chaorong Wu

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

The connection between goals and student motivation has been widely investigated in the research literature, but the relationship of goal setting and student achievement at the classroom level has remained largely unexplored. This article reports the findings of a 5-year quasi-experimental study examining goal setting and student achievement in the high school Spanish language classroom. The implementation of LinguaFolio, a portfolio that focuses on student self-assessment, goal setting, and collection of evidence of language achievement, was introduced into 23 high schools with a total of 1,273 students. By using a hierarchical linear model, researchers were able to analyze the relationship …

An Examination Of The Perceptions And Motivations Of African American High School Students Regarding Performance Character Qualities For Future Success, Robin W. Stewart

Wayne State University Dissertations

The purpose of this dissertation is to understand student perceptions and motivations regarding performance character qualities (i.e., assertiveness, perseverance, resilience, and self-control) at an urban high school. In examining these relationships, students' perceptions and motivations towards performance character qualities were identified. The study is important because students' poor academic performance, low test scores, low high school graduation rates, and employers reporting that high school graduates do not possess the necessary performance qualities needed to excel on the job indicate that urban high school students may lack the proper orientation toward performance qualities. Research is needed to understand types of skills …

Crafting Leaders For Educational Change: Head Teacher’S Perspectives, Sultan Alam

Professional Development Centre, Gilgit

This research reports a study conducted in Gilgit-Baltistan of Pakistan. The purpose of the study is to explore the CELM experiences of a government school head teacher. A qualitative case study method was used to investigate the subject matter. The participant was selected on the basis of pre-determined criteria that s/he has participated in the whole intervention programme, and completed all the mandatory tasks assigned during the whole intervention period. The findings of the study showed that CELM intervention has been instrumental in bringing about a significant effect on the professional approaches of the head teacher. On one hand he …

High School Administrators' Perception Of The Effectiveness Of Professional Development, Rodney J. Williams

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

The importance of professional development has been emphasized in recent legislation and accountability acts. As Georgia competes for Race to the Top Funds, high school administrators are being required to attend various professional development activities. These may address the new teacher evaluation system, common core, and techniques on how to close the gap between high-achieving students and students with a learning disability. Therefore, the purpose of this qualitative study was to understand high school administrators’ perceptions of the effectiveness of professional development. This qualitative study used a case study design with purposive sampling. Participants included twelve high school administrators currently …

Our History: Illinois Mathematics And Science Academy, Illinois Mathematics And Science Academy

IMSA History

The internationally recognized Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy (IMSA) develops creative, ethical leaders in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. As a teaching and learning laboratory created by the State of Illinois, IMSA enrolls academically talented Illinois students (grades 10-12) in its advanced, residential college preparatory program, and it serves thousands of educators and students in Illinois and beyond through innovative instructional programs that foster imagination and inquiry. IMSA also advances education through research, groundbreaking ventures and strategic partnerships.

Growing Effective Cld Teachers For Today’S Classrooms Of Cld Children, Gayla Lohfink, Amanda Morales, Gail Shroyer, Sally Yahnke

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

Using a case study design, this investigation examined the effective teaching characteristics of nontraditional, culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) student teachers placed in rural, elementary schools with high populations of Latino/a students. Data collected reflected high percentages of effective teaching characteristics in multiple domains with specific indicators reflective of consistent teaching over time. A discussion of these findings considered aspects within the distance-delivery model that facilitated the CLD participants’ development of effective teaching and noted (1) consistent leadership, (2) explicit teacher instruction within CLD school settings, and (3) the strong cohesive nature of the CLD participants’ cohort as positively affecting …

Process Writing Instruction In Practice; When Revising Looks Like Editing, Emily Isaacs

Department of Writing Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

To better understand the short-term effectiveness of process-writing methodologies, a three-week qualitative study of a ninth grade integrated, untracked English class in an economically and racially diverse suburban-urban community in New Jersey was conducted. During the three week period of study focused on studying and writing a paper related to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, students were engaged in drafting, peer and expert reader review, as well as instructor feedback and guided revision practices. After blind review of first and last drafts by three independent readers, revised student drafts were deemed either "somewhat stronger" or "stronger than first drafts. Evidence …

Integration Of Learning Spaces And Modes In The Elt Class: A Case Inquiry Paper, Mariam Farooq

Institute for Educational Development, Karachi

No abstract provided.