The Three-Talk Model: Getting Both Evidence and Preferences into a Pre-Service Teacher Health Workshop

We describe a pre-service teacher workshop about sustainable health decisions in school. This one-week workshop had two goals: to improve the ability of students to cope with health and illness as teachers in daily school life, and to improve scientific literacy in health contexts. In this way, the workshop aimed at creating a situation of mutual benefit between science education and health education, as it is suggested in the new science pedagogy called Science|Environment|Health. To reach this aim, the workshop was structured by the evidence-preference approach and the three-talk model, both originally developed for shared-decision making in medicine. In the evidence-preference approach, the experts (the physician, here the teacher) provide the best evidence available, while the laypersons (the patient, here the teacher students) bring in their preferences and, together with the experts, find their personal standpoint. This process is structured by the three-talk model, which is conceived as a characteristic succession of choice talk, option talk, and decision talk. We describe how the pre-service teacher workshop embraced this new approach, compare it to a scientific literacy point of view, and suggest how it could be applied in many other educational contexts, particularly in many issues of education for sustainability.

Service Learning in Teachers and Students Mentoring for 2020 Bebras Challenge in Pandemic Era at Maranatha Bebras Bureau Christian University

Bebras Challenge is a competition for elementary to high school students to educate informatics and computational thinking, followed by sixty countries all over the world. Bebras Indonesia Community in coordination with the International Bebras Committee holds the challenge yearly. Indonesia has participated in the Bebras Challenge since 2016. Faculty of Information Technology Maranatha Christian University as a Bebras Bureau has also been involved in the challenge since 2016. To prepare students for Bebras Challenge, Maranatha Bebras Bureau holds a teacher workshop yearly. The Teacher Workshop supports teachers to strengthen students in practicing Bebras tasks. Data on students who participated in the Bebras Challenge at Maranatha Bebras Bureau indicates increasing numbers from 2016 until 2020. This paper describes a service learning for mentoring teachers and students in the Bebras Challenge, which was held in the pandemic year 2020. Teacher mentoring was using a service learning approach, where the lecturers provided training to the teachers and then the teachers would share their knowledge back to their students. There were advantages and disadvantages of the execution during the pandemic. Although in a distance learning condition, teachers and students were still enthusiastic to participate in Bebras Challenge. The number of students who followed the 2020 Bebras Challenge nearly five times compared to 2019 in the Maranatha Bebras Bureau. The scores of elementary school students who followed the challenge showed very good results. On the other side, the results of junior and senior high school students were not as good as the scores of elementary school students.

Top Teachers’ Workshop

On the basis of improving teaching quality and enriching education mind, the rural workshop of Liangbin Yi in Hangzhou returns to the essence of teaching, truly promoting students’ development. This research topic is also the core of the teaching, scientific research, and management of the workshop. With the abundant teaching resources, the workshop conducted various teaching activities and exhibition activities, such as building the learning platform, holding the report sharing, summit forum, on-the-job training, and sending teachers to the countryside, through practical action research. It can also propel the curriculum reform, deepen the classroom teaching research, strengthen the unity of knowledge and action, improve teachers’ teaching theory and practical ability at the same time, and improve the evaluation system, which provided fully play to the guidance and demonstration of famous rural teacher workshop, and positively contributed to the rural teachers’ development.

The Distinguished Teacher Workshop Mode of Professional Learning Communities in Guangxi

Distinguished Teacher Workshops are important ways for teacher professional development. Through questionnaires and interviews with over 1,000 participants, this paper reports the implementation of the Distinguished Teacher Workshops in Guangxi, China, covering their operational mechanism and initial outcomes: The empowerment of members; the strengthened internal motive of the community; and the enhanced vitality of professional development and a more sustainable development community for teachers. It is concluded that the Distinguished Teacher Workshops have shown that distinguished teachers play a leading role in teacher development in Guangxi.

Design, Development, and Evaluation of a Teacher Workshop Enhanced with DNA Instructional Cases to Impact Content Knowledge and Confidence

In an effort to address K-8 teacher confidence in STEM and increase basic genetics knowledge to a level consistent with its importance in society, we have developed, implemented, and evaluated a 7-day teacher professional development workshop. The overarching goal of our workshop is to facilitate the implementation of innovative DNA-based classroom activities in K-8 classrooms by (i) increasing teacher content knowledge, (ii) increasing teacher confidence in teaching STEM, and (iii) developing teacher interest in using engaging activities, so they are empowered to teach new content in compelling ways. We relied on case-based learning to provide relevance and context to scientific content that was not initially familiar to many of the teachers. Here we describe the workshop and its evaluation. Overall results suggest positive gains in teacher learning, confidence, and interest in the scientific content, as well as the intention to incorporate the scientific content and activities into their teaching.