STEAM - As a new learning technology in the teaching of chemistry

STEAM Education is an approach to learning that uses Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts and Mathematics as access points for guiding student inquiry, dialogue, and critical thinking. Use of STEAM lessons in teaching process, increased critical thinking, improved student achievement and help to development of personality formation. This article discusses the advantage of the STEAM methods and shown that an example of a STEAM-based chemistry lesson model. Key words: STEAM education,critical thinking, science, technology, engineering, teaching of chemistry, chemical experiment

Self-in-Field Action Research in Natural Spaces of Encounter: Inclusion, Learning, and Organizational Change

The goal of this paper is to examine the role of participatory action research (PAR) in improving relationships in “natural spaces of encounter” where members of conflicting groups meet and interact. It describes and analyzes a project, “the Academic Puzzle,” that fosters organization-wide change in relations between Jewish and Arab students at a College in Israel. The project consists of 16 programs, all initiatives by College faculty, administrators, or students. Many of these programs, though not all, use PAR methods such as cooperative inquiry, dialogue, action science, action evaluation, and photovoice. The paper focuses on four programs which were explicitly designed as PAR. Furthermore, it illustrates how the Puzzle project is guided by a “self-in-field” approach that helps link these individual initiatives into an “enclave” that offers an alternative to the dominant field in order to transform it.

Design Principles for the Professional Development of Teacher Educators: Illustrations of Narration, Dialogue and Self-study

Teacher education has been recognized increasingly as a profession that fundamentally differs from teaching pupils in schools. This has resulted in teacher educator development programs which address the uniqueness of the profession. In this article we depart from this recognition of teacher education as a profession outlining the specifics of teacher education, and we describe a professional development program for teacher educators run in the Netherlands. We describe its building blocks and three design principles – narrative inquiry, dialogue and self-study – and illustrate their value by examples of evaluations taken from the program.

Truth matters

Learning how to formulate, comprehend, and evaluate arguments is an essential part of helping students develop the ability to make better, more reasonable judgments. The Common Core identified argumentation as a fundamental life skill that is broadly important for the literate person. According to the authors, having students engage in an inquiry dialogue oriented toward finding the most reasonable answer is key to developing the skills of argumentation. Inquiry dialogue starts with a contestable, big question that is relevant to student interests and addresses a central issue raised in a text. Such questions invite students to take part in a genuine quest for truth and allow them to develop more reasonable and personally meaningful judgments. Inquiry dialogue is neither teacher-centered nor student-centered; rather, it is truth-centered. In a recent three-year project, the authors worked with elementary school teachers to learn how to support the use of such dialogue-intensive instruction in language arts classrooms.