Connecting the Dots from Professional Development to Student Learning

Teacher participation in professional development (PD) improved student learning compared with control teachers. Delivering neuroscience as a unit produced more student learning than when the content was sprinkled throughout the course. Despite commitment to enacting PD strategies, teacher decisions and implementation strategies influenced student outcomes.

Effective methods of teaching for learners of English

This article is dedicated to help readers to make teaching more effective,by attending to learning and the inner mental world of the learner, and by then under standing how classroom activities and teacher decisions can create or limit,children’s opportunities for learning. It is about how to teach students and learners with the help of some helpful methods and exercises, by mentioning many intricacies, obscure rules, and exceptions.From an instructional view point,creating a meaningful context for language use it another advantage that games present.By using games,teachers can create contexts with enable unconscious learning because learners’ attention is on the message,not on the language.Therefore,when they completely focus on a game as an activity,children acquire language in the same way that they acquire their mother tongue,that is,without being aware of it.

Análise de decisões de professorWorkshop: Analysis of teacher decisions

Esta oficina é ligada à conferência As decisões didáticas do professor: um modelo para tentar compreendê-las, proferido por Annie Bessot e tem como objetivo levar os participantes a trabalharem com o modelo proposto a partir de dados já produzidos.Cada um dos três encontros de duas horas e meia foi dedicado a estudar, na ordem, os seguintes temas: análise institucional, decisões de uma professora do 9º ano na preparação de uma sequência sobre o tema “Equação” e análise em termos de fatores de decisão.

Policy incentives in Canadian large-scale assessment: How policy levers influence teacher decisions about instructional change

Large-scale assessment (LSA) is a tool used by education authorities for several purposes, including the promotion of teacher-based instructional change. In Canada, all 10 provinces engage in large-scale testing across several grade levels and subjects, and also have the common expectation that the results data will be used to improve instruction in classrooms. Yet despite agreement between ministries that instructional change based on LSA results is a positive development and employs data-based decision making at its heart, there remain significant differences in the kinds of incentives written into assessment policies in Canada. It is also true that implementation of the policies is less than uniform between schools and school divisions. Using mixed methods (survey data and follow-up interviews), this study examines which policy factors have the most significant impact on teacher decisions regarding the use of data. The findings indicate that highly incentivized policies correlate well to instructional change including aspects of both teaching (to) the curriculum as well as teaching to the test. Since the latter will be examined as a neither an educationally defensible practice nor a stated policy goal, the statement that ‘incentives work’ does not fully capture the nature of these impacts.

The influence of typologies of school leaders on teacher retention

Purpose – While school leadership literature has searched for practices with the largest effect on outcomes, we know little about how these behaviors vary by context. Further, recent shifts to include teachers in leadership have prompted a need for purposeful distinction between teacher and principal perceptions and roles. Person-centered statistics offer a means to study differences in how teachers and principals perceive leadership by context, how these perceptions interact, and the extent to which this interaction influences teacher decisions, such as whether or not to remain at their current school. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – This study applies a two-level latent class analysis (LCA) with a cross-level interaction to the 1999-2000 Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), n=35,560 teachers across n=7,310 US public schools. SASS includes a comprehensive set of leadership measures, not found in other surveys, collected when US schools restructured to include teachers in leadership. Multilevel LCA helps to identify different types of teachers and principals in leadership, the distribution of teacher types across principal types and to test the extent that these types predict teacher retention decisions. Findings – Teacher and principal types were best defined by the survey items that addressed their own role not the role of the other. The highest and lowest responding teacher types were evenly distributed across principal types. Teacher types who reported the lowest principal-directed leadership were more likely to leave their school regardless of principal type. Originality/value – This study provides evidence for how leadership differs across perceptions and context and, in turn, influences teacher retention.