eric.ed.gov har udgivet: A total of 58 preservice teachers enrolled in an elementary childhood program at Fitchburg State College in Massachusetts were surveyed before and after taking a special math, science, and social studies course called Piggybacking. This course emphasizes child-centered and cooperative learning by allowing elementary school students to choose individual preservice teachers to work with on a one-to-one basis for an entire semester. The elementary school students learn math, science, and social studies concepts, and the preservice teachers learn by observing how children think and learn. Before enrolling in the course, the preservice teachers indicated high levels of concern about innovative methods such as child-centered and cooperative learning. After the course, however, levels of concern dropped by an average of 20 percent. (MDM) Link til kilde
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eric.ed.gov har udgivet: The authors’ goal is twofold. First, they wished to produce a theoretically-based approach to this synthesis. Child-centered programs have a long history. However, concerns about children’s achievement, and the pressure of content-specific standards, have set up a perceived conflict, in which educators believe they are being asked to abandon child-centered approaches, or, at least, to compromise and squeeze in, as one teacher put it, “Literacy on Monday-Wednesday-Friday, math on Tuesday-Thursday, and socio-emotional during our shortened play periods.” They hope that their approach, if shown to be efficacious, will serve as a model that others can use to successfully and synergistically combine these strategies so the whole is more than the sum of its integrated, not conflicting, parts. Second, and more importantly, they are producing a rigorous evaluation… Continue Reading →
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eric.ed.gov har udgivet: In this article, the author shares his experiences on a journey with 10-12-year-old students from Chicago’s Cabrini Green neighborhood. The quintessential point he wants to make is that curriculum is not all about what state boards of education decide is important for teachers to do with children, or what a teacher decides to construct alone. It also is certainly not fixed or finite. Rather, it is a journey of co-creation and looking to the students for what is worthwhile–what is worth knowing, doing, being, becoming, thinking about, pondering, and wondering. The author became fascinated by the idea of an integrated curriculum–not one that merely connected math and science and threw in a little bit of music, but one that takes into consideration the subjects and ideas that… Continue Reading →
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eric.ed.gov har udgivet: Like many countries building up human and technological resources, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) has embarked on the goal of Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) to its citizens. One goal for the KSA Ministry of Education is increasing acceptance rates at teacher colleges for both genders specializing in English, in addition to Arabic, Math, Science and Computer Science (The Executive Summary of the Ministry of Education Ten-Year Plan, 2005). Virtually all government policies come with unexpected results. For example, Native English speaking teachers (NESTs) teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL) often interact in ways that can be at odds with their host countries. Concerns involving pedagogy have been expressed in many countries with TEFL programs using NESTs (Degen & Absalom, 1998; Liu &… Continue Reading →
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eric.ed.gov har udgivet: This report summarizes findings from a national survey of 1,902 teachers of preschoolers regarding the extent to which they are able to engage in the educational practices they endorse. Teachers were given a list of 21 practices and asked to rate the extent to which each practice happened in their classroom and the extent to which they would want the practice to occur in a “perfect world.” Findings indicate few discrepancies between reported practices and beliefs. There were significant differences in the extent to which teachers from various types of programs endorsed group-centered beliefs, that is, those that encourage all children to engage in the same activities at the same time and at the same pace. Teachers in public schools, Head Start centers, and other non-profit centers… Continue Reading →
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eric.ed.gov har udgivet: Educators today must be able to respond to the needs of an increasingly diverse student body and to teach all students the knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed for civic participation in a globalized, pluralist society. While state departments of education and national teacher organizations have begun to adopt global awareness in their teaching standards and evaluation tools, educators need to understand what globally competent teachers actually do in classrooms across subject areas and grade levels. This qualitative, multiple case study explores the signature pedagogies (Shulman, 2005) of 10 in-service teachers in one southeastern state who teach for global competence in math, music, science, English, social studies, and language classes across elementary, middle, and high schools. We found three signature pedagogies that characterized globally competent teaching practices across… Continue Reading →
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eric.ed.gov har udgivet: While early childhood practitioners have long been asked to have complex understandings of child development and provide rich, meaningful educational experiences for children, focusing on mathematics marks new terrain. Consequently, teacher educators are now tasked with figuring out how to communicate new ideas about early mathematics education to early childhood practitioners, yet we know little about their work. This paper examines what early childhood teacher educators have to say about their work. We found that there were only small differences in how they described: (1) what they teach; (2) how to teach it; (3) resources they draw from; and (4) what informs their work. When there were differences in their approaches, these often were reflective of whether the teacher educators had more of an early childhood or… Continue Reading →
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