Development of Innovative Pedagogical Practices for a Modern Learning Experience: Introduction

In the current volume, the selected studies have been grouped into three thematic sections, presenting readers with a set of distinct but related research on meaningful issues for a modern learning experience. The first three chapters present professional and teacher development perspectives and collectively shed light on how to develop, maintain, and improve pre and in-service teacher training and professional development. The second set of four chapters provide research findings that describe the results of direct applications of modern learning elements through course assignments and teaching approaches. The final five chapters focus on critical thinking and range in their focus from classroom-based studies to full-scale curriculum reform. The collection of chapters presented in this volume represents the eclectic nature of modern learning experiences and demonstrate its applicability across educational contexts and disciplines. It is my hope that the chapters will resonate with other educational researchers in search of novel ways of creating, facilitating, and investigating modern learning experiences.

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Teacher Professional Development: EFL Teachers’ Experiences in the Republic of Benin

International Journal of English Linguistics ◽

10.5539/ijel.v6n4p144 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 6 (4) ◽

pp. 144

Author(s):

Juvenale Patinvoh Agbayahoun

Keyword(s):

Professional Development ◽

Action Research ◽

Teacher Development ◽

Top Down ◽

Teachers Experiences ◽

Efl Teachers ◽

Research Findings ◽

Teacher Professional ◽

Republic Of Benin ◽

The Republic

<p>Using a survey, this study examines EFL teachers’ views on professional development, the models of teacher development they are familiar with, and their experiences in the area. The study also inquires into the teachers’ knowledge and opinions about inquiry-based teaching. The results indicate that though the EFL teachers often have the opportunity to participate in teacher development activities, these activities do not enable them to develop the skill of reflection and action on practice as they are patterned on top-down models of teacher development and happen in a one-shot workshop-style. Other teacher development activities such as action-research, reading research findings in the field, peer observation, mentoring, or teacher networking are unfamiliar to them. While the participant EFL teachers acknowledged that the top-down teacher development activities give them exposure to informative input, they also reported that such activities, paradoxically, have little impact on their teaching and students’ learning. Most of them acknowledged having very little knowledge of teacher development activities that involve self-intiative and autonomy, and they expressed interest in learning about and trying action-research in their classrooms.</p>

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Teachers’ Views on the Utility of the Teacher’s File

International Journal of Scientific Research and Management ◽

10.18535/ijsrm/v6i5.el08 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 6 (05) ◽

Author(s):

Enos Moeti Makhele

Keyword(s):

Professional Development ◽

Classroom Management ◽

Teacher Development ◽

Basic Education ◽

Management Tool ◽

Learning Assessment ◽

Experiential Learning Theory ◽

Professional Teacher ◽

Research Findings ◽

Teaching Learning

In 2010, the Department of Basic Education instructed its teachers to maintain a teacher's file. This article reports on a research project which described teachers’ views on the utility of the teacher’s file and its relationship to skill of reflection related continuous professional teacher development (CPTD). The research described the meaning and the sense teachers attached to maintaining this file in the light of assumptions and principles of the experiential learning theory (ELT). It also probed ideas related to how the file could be improved and developed into a resource that contributes to the professional development of teachers in terms of teaching, learning and assessment (TLA). The study utilized interviews and document study as tools to collect data which were later analyzed and interpreted to arrive at the research findings and recommendations. The study found that all teachers regarded the teachers' file as an administrative tool which had nothing to do with their own professional development. They regarded it as a management tool which was meant to monitor them. The study found that to acquire more meaning to the teacher, the file must be enhanced to include more teacher advancement related matters. In view of the teachers' feelings that the file was purely administrative, the Department of Basic Education could review its current format and render it relevant to the professional development of the teacher. The aspects of professional development must include specific areas such as teaching, learning, assessment, classroom management and administration.

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ESP teacher professional development during the COVID-19 era at Igor Sikorsky Kyiv polytechnic institute

ScienceRise Pedagogical Education ◽

10.15587/2519-4984.2021.238556 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 4-10

Author(s):

Yuliia Olizko ◽

Nataliia Saienko

Keyword(s):

Professional Development ◽

Teacher Development ◽

Teacher Collaboration ◽

Professional Growth ◽

Quantitative Methods ◽

Teacher Behavior ◽

Teacher Assessment ◽

Teaching Approaches ◽

Research Issues ◽

Methods And Techniques

This article analyses professional development, completed by 34 in-service ESP teachers of the Department of English for Engineering No. 1 at Igor Sikorsky KPI during March-December 2020. In total 3344.3 hours of professional teacher development were analysed. They were confirmed by certificates of attendance and completion. A significant rise in the number of hours ESP teachers of the Department of English for Engineering No. 1 at Igor Sikorsky KPI spend professionally developing was noticed compared to the years before the pandemic. Quantitative methods and statistical and mathematical processing were used to analyse the data. Nine main categories of professional development were outlined. ICT teacher skills (51.8 % hours), teaching approaches, methods and techniques (18.4 %), student and teacher assessment and evaluation (14.5 %) were distinguished as the three top categories of professional development during the COVID-19 era at the department. Together these categories embraced approximately 85 % of all time, spent on professional growth by ESP teachers of the Department of English for Engineering No. 1 at Igor Sikorsky KPI. Other six categories included: connections with other disciplines (6.6 %), academic publications and research issues (4.8 %), international teacher collaboration (2.1 %), student and teacher behavior problems (1.6 %), language issues (0.2 %), curriculum development (0.07 %). The results confirmed the high demand for learning new ICT tools, platforms, and Google services in March-December 2020, the high interest in teaching approaches, methods and techniques, which can be used during the COVID-19 era, and ways to assess and evaluate students’ and teacher’s performance. Webinars, online conferences and online courses turned out to be the most popular forms of professional development of ESP teachers at Igor Sikorsky KPI during March-December 2020. Another discovered trend was the variety of providers of trainings for ESP teachers during the COVID-19 era. The list of them included 37 different organisations, institutes and centers, such as Dinternal education, Training Center Linguist (Cambridge University Press), Educational project “Na urok”, The Ukrainian Institute of Information Technologies in Education, Oxford University Press, Macmillan Education and others

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Exploring Second Life as a Venue for Peer-Teaching

Cases on E-Learning Management ◽

10.4018/978-1-4666-1933-3.ch015 ◽

2013 ◽

pp. 318-342

Author(s):

Karen Lybeck ◽

Dana Bruhn ◽

Solen Feyissa

Keyword(s):

Professional Development ◽

Virtual Reality ◽

Teacher Preparation ◽

Teacher Development ◽

Second Life ◽

Learning Experience ◽

Peer Teaching ◽

Teaching English ◽

Teaching Activities ◽

Online Teacher

Online teacher preparation courses have become a popular way to offer professional development for both pre- and in-service teachers. This move has not only provided greater access to professional development, but it has also afforded learners with more non-formal learning experiences. Moving online, however, has largely replaced an important, traditionally non-formal component of the learning experience, namely peer-teaching, with more formal, less authentic student presentations. In order to explore a possible solution to this problem, 25 Teaching-English-as-a-Second-Language (TESL) students were trained to conduct peer-teaching activities in Second Life virtual world. The suggestions and implications given in previous Second Life research guided the implementation of these activities in the hopes that an informed design would overcome problems previously documented by other educational users of Second Life. Despite this, the authors were not able to overcome previous difficulties, and did not find Second Life to be useful as a tool for peer-teaching in online teacher-development courses. Virtual reality, however, has promise for facilitating teacher development; thus, further investigation is needed to find an appropriate virtual venue for this purpose.

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Editorial

Literacy and Numeracy Studies ◽

10.5130/lns.v24i2.5304 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 24 (2) ◽

pp. 1-2

Author(s):

Keiko Yasukawa

Keyword(s):

Professional Development ◽

Research And Development ◽

Teacher Development ◽

Adult Literacy ◽

Publishing Research ◽

Public Access ◽

Development Programs ◽

Policy Debates ◽

Research Findings ◽

The Uk

In recent years many of us in the field of adult literacy and numeracy have become used to grieving the loss of university based teacher development programs and centres promoting research, professional development and debates in our field. Eighteen months ago, we learnt of the closure of the Centre for Literacy in Montreal, and twelve months ago, the effective closure of the National Research and Development Centre for Adult Literacy and Numeracy in the UK, both of which made major contributions to promoting and giving public access to resources, research findings and policy debates in the field of adult literacy and numeracy. Each year a few more researchers in the field ‘retire’ from their institutions, and while many are remaining active in publishing research, there is a sense of fear about who and what will be left in our field when they decide to really retire!

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A Model for Using a Concept Inventory as a Tool for Students' Assessment and Faculty Professional Development

CBE—Life Sciences Education ◽

10.1187/cbe.10-05-0069 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 9 (4) ◽

pp. 408-416 ◽

Cited By ~ 29

Author(s):

Gili Marbach-Ad ◽

Katherine C. McAdams ◽

Spencer Benson ◽

Volker Briken ◽

Laura Cathcart ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Professional Development ◽

Student Learning ◽

Curriculum Reform ◽

Learning Experience ◽

Concept Inventory ◽

Faculty Professional Development ◽

Faculty Teaching ◽

Research And Teaching ◽

Teaching Community ◽

Teaching Faculty

This essay describes how the use of a concept inventory has enhanced professional development and curriculum reform efforts of a faculty teaching community. The Host Pathogen Interactions (HPI) teaching team is composed of research and teaching faculty with expertise in HPI who share the goal of improving the learning experience of students in nine linked undergraduate microbiology courses. To support evidence-based curriculum reform, we administered our HPI Concept Inventory as a pre- and postsurvey to approximately 400 students each year since 2006. The resulting data include student scores as well as their open-ended explanations for distractor choices. The data have enabled us to address curriculum reform goals of 1) reconciling student learning with our expectations, 2) correlating student learning with background variables, 3) understanding student learning across institutions, 4) measuring the effect of teaching techniques on student learning, and 5) demonstrating how our courses collectively form a learning progression. The analysis of the concept inventory data has anchored and deepened the team's discussions of student learning. Reading and discussing students' responses revealed the gap between our understanding and the students' understanding. We provide evidence to support the concept inventory as a tool for assessing student understanding of HPI concepts and faculty development.

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The Scoping Review of Smart Healthcare Applications in Medical Health (Preprint)

10.2196/preprints.18681 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Cheng Hang Wu ◽

Ching Ju Chiu ◽

Yen Ju Liou ◽

Chun Ying Lee ◽

Susan C. Hu

Keyword(s):

Systematic Reviews ◽

Mobile Health ◽

Scoping Review ◽

Search Strategy ◽

Rapid Development ◽

Related Research ◽

Geographic Access ◽

Smart Healthcare ◽

Research Findings ◽

Healthcare Interventions

BACKGROUND There is still no consensus on research terms for smart healthcare worldwide. The study conducted by Lewis 10 years ago showed extending geographic access was the major health purpose of health-related information communication technology (ICT), but today's situation may be different because of the rapid development of smart healthcare. Objective: The main aim of this study is to classify recent smart healthcare interventions. Therefore, this scoping review was conducted as a feasible tool for exploring this domain and summarizing related research findings. OBJECTIVE The main aim of this study is to classify recent smart healthcare interventions. Therefore, this scoping review was conducted as a feasible tool for exploring this domain and summarizing related research findings. METHODS The scoping review relies on the analysis of previous reviews of smart healthcare interventions assessed for their effectiveness in the framework of a systematic review and/or meta-analysis. The search strategy was based on the identification of smart healthcare interventions reported as the proposed keywords. In the analysis, the reviews published from January 2015 to December 2019 were included. RESULTS The number of publications for smart healthcare's systematic reviews has continued to grow in the past five years. The search strategy yielded 210 systematic reviews and/or meta-analyses addressed to target groups of interest. 68.5% of these publications used mobile health as a keyword. According to the classification by Lewis, 37.62% of the literature was applied to extend geographic access. According to the classification by the Joint Commission of Taiwan (JCT), 48.84% of smart healthcare was applied in clinical areas, and 60% of it was applied in outpatient medical services. CONCLUSIONS Smart healthcare interventions are being widely used in clinical settings and for disease management. The research of mobile health has received the most attention among smart healthcare interventions. The main purpose of mobile health was used to extend geographic access to increase medical accessibility in clinical areas. CLINICALTRIAL none

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Integrating popular music into urban schools: Assessing the effectiveness of a comprehensive music teacher development program

International Journal of Music Education ◽

10.1177/0255761420986220 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 025576142098622

Author(s):

Hal Abeles ◽

Lindsay Weiss-Tornatore ◽

Bryan Powell

Keyword(s):

Professional Development ◽

New York ◽

Music Education ◽

Popular Music ◽

Teacher Development ◽

Development Program ◽

Music Teacher ◽

School Year ◽

Music Program ◽

K 12

As popular music education programs become more common, it is essential to determine what kinds of professional development experiences that are designed to help teachers include popular music into their music education classrooms are effective—keeping in mind that the inclusion of popular music in K–12 classrooms requires a change not only in instrumentation and repertoire but also pedagogical approaches. This study examined the effects of a popular music professional development initiative on more than 600 New York City urban music teachers’ musicianship, their pedagogy, and their leadership skills throughout one school year. Results revealed increases in all three areas, most notably in teachers’ musicianship. The study also showed an increase in teachers’ positive perceptions about their music programs, specifically, their level of excitement about the state of their music program and that their music program was more effective at meeting their students’ needs than it had been previously.

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Pedagogical Translanguaging to Create Sustainable Minority Language Practices in Kindergarten

Sustainability ◽

10.3390/su13073613 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 13 (7) ◽

pp. 3613

Author(s):

Carola Kleemann

Keyword(s):

Language Learners ◽

Kindergarten Teachers ◽

Pedagogical Practices ◽

Institution Building ◽

Language Practices ◽

Language And Culture ◽

Raising Awareness ◽

Core Areas ◽

Assimilation Policy ◽

Shed Light

The coastal areas of Finnmark have deep Sámi roots. With the Norwegian assimilation policy—Norwegianization—the transition to the Norwegian language has been extensive here, placing the region outside Sámi core areas. Nevertheless, indigenous Sea Sámi identity still exists, and language vitalization and raising awareness of culture are shown in Sámi institution building. Within these frames, kindergarten teachers with Sámi backgrounds work to strengthen their local Sámi language and culture in a Sámi department of a kindergarten outside the core Sámi areas. This article aims to shed light on how the use of their bilingual resources in pedagogical translanguaging practices can build sustainable language practices for North Sámi. With children and adults, we explored how culturally aware, situated outdoors activities, such as building a campfire and gathering berries, encouraged children’s use of North Sámi. Both children and adults recorded these activities with GoPro cameras. The material was transcribed and analyzed using Conversation Analysis and translanguaging. For this article, I chose three episodes in which kindergarten teachers used their bilingual language register to interact with children in different pedagogical practices to give children input in North Sámi. Pedagogical translanguaging with young language learners in an emergent bilingual situation could help strengthen North Sámi language and culture outside Sámi core areas.

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