A New Understanding of our Confusion

This chapter discusses the philosophies and practices that drive the MSUrbanSTEM Leadership & Teaching Fellowship Program. This multi-year project offers a professional development program to a selected cohort of K-12 STEM educators from Chicago Public Schools, one of the largest urban districts in the U.S. This chapter provides a holistic view of the program, shares the fellow selection process, and focuses on the strategically developed curriculum and the theoretical bases for the chosen pedagogy. This allows the authors to explore the psychological and philosophical principles, based on the idea of accepting confusion, and embracing failure in beliefs about pedagogy and STEM instruction, which are used to expand the skills and abilities of these selected urban school teachers. Finally, we provide some initial findings about the teachers' growth and development both in their efficacy and leadership abilities.

Aligning Effective Professional Development and Online Learning

The focus of this chapter is an exploration of the intersection between widely acknowledged and implemented research-based practices for effective PD and a conceptual framework for effective online learning and engagement called the Community of Inquiry (CoI) (Garrision, Anderson, & Archer, 2000). A social constructivist perspective is used to align the characteristics of effective PD (e.g., duration, collaborative participation, active learning, coherence, and content focus) with the three CoI presences (e.g., teaching, social, and cognitive presences). Beyond the alignment of these two conceptual frameworks, practical examples of online tools are discussed for both synchronous and asynchronous online learning contexts within this chapter.

A Holistic Professional Development Model

Institutions struggle to develop online curriculum that meets increasing student demands for online education. The explosive growth of online learning necessitates that many higher education faculty transition from a traditional classroom to a web-based format, sometimes with little or no training. This chapter describes a holistic online faculty professional development (PD) model developed through use of a concerns-based adoption model (CBAM). The CBAM model provides an affective and behavioral lens for managing change. Through two of CBAM's components called stages of concern and levels of use, a PD plan was constructed that approaches the transition to distance learning as an ongoing process rather than simply as technology training. The holistic PD model considers each faculty member as an individual with unique needs. Components of the PD model and new Center for E-Learning (CeL) development and program building are explained. Impact on faculty and students and recommendations for program planning and future research are included.

Evaluating Teacher Education Programs for Philology Students

The chapter will deal with the process of training philology students for their future careers as language and literature teachers in the compulsory education system of Romania. Based on the concurrent model, their training implies studying at the same time for the Bachelor's and Master's degree and a teaching qualification. An analysis of the transformations undergone by Romanian teacher training education in the last twenty years may enable an exchange of opinions among the researchers concerned with the improvement of the field. The chapter will offer a chronological analysis of the process of training philology undergraduate and graduate students paying particular attention to the creation and development of new programs at academic level.

Alternative and Authentic

In this piece, the author describes an alternative teacher certification program to achieve two objectives. The first is to counter an argument that current programs in this category do not fit the criteria of alternative certification pathways that were established in the 1980s. The author will use this established framework (Walsh & Jacobs, 2007) to demonstrate that such programs still frame these criteria. The second objective is to refute the seemingly wide-spread negative perception that alternative teacher certification programs often carry due to the generalization of these types of programs. This will be accomplished by describing SUNY Empire State College's Master of Arts in Teaching Program and demonstrating that it meets the high standards expected from any teacher preparation program. It is the author's hope that stakeholders with an investment in education and in teacher preparation, in particular, will not make unfounded assumptions of alternative preparations and instead understand that there are high quality programs that support the profession of teaching.

Defining Effective Learning Tasks for All

An effective mathematics program may be defined as one in which classroom teachers implement tasks and activities that allow all students opportunities to engage in high levels of mathematical thinking and reasoning (NCTM, 2014). In the chapter, we describe background information regarding the preparation of practicing and prospective teachers when implementing research-based practices in the inclusive classroom. Specifically, we provide explicit background information from the extant literature regarding: 1. Equity, 2. Universal Design for Learning, and 3. How to use games as classroom activities to promote the development of mathematical concepts, skills, and conceptual reasoning.

Mathematics Teachers' Perspectives on Professional Development Around Implementing High Cognitive Demand Tasks

This chapter will provide readers with an overview of a professional development created and enacted to support teachers' implementation of high cognitive demand tasks (Smith & Stein, 2011). This multiple case study seeks to give voice to the three seventh grade mathematics teachers who participated in the professional development as they share their perspectives on what factors affected their implementation of high cognitive demand tasks. The goal of this chapter is to provide an overview of the structure of the professional development, share the aspects of the professional development the teachers identified as supportive when planning and implementing high cognitive demand tasks in their mathematics classrooms, and discuss ideas for future professional development aimed at providing teachers with instructional practices to incorporate into classrooms.

What Can I Do?

This chapter offers preservice candidates and inservice teachers a portrait into a classroom context where one teacher: 1. Identified the experiences and backgrounds of 20 culturally and linguistically diverse students; 2. Used critical literacy as a theory to purposefully select literature grounded in the lives and experiences of her culturally and linguistically diverse third graders; and 3. Used critical literacy and multimodal text types to enhance students meaning making and talk. Implications for practice and research are provided.

Middle School Teachers' Sensemaking of Job-Embedded Learning

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss a multi-case study on how middle school teachers constructed understandings of their job-embedded learning experiences. The aim of the study was to explore how teachers made sense of and gave meaning to their learning experiences that occurred during the school day as they engaged in the work of being a teacher. Job-embedded learning experiences referred to any formal or informal learning opportunity that was grounded in the context of the school day and characterized by active learning and reflection. This chapter includes a detailed overview of the literature on effective professional development and the characteristics of job-embedded learning as each relates to the middle school context; the background and significance of the study; a description of the research design, methods, and procedures; a discussion of the research findings and subsequent implications for educators; and suggestions and recommendations for practice and future research.

Gamified - Blended Learning Professional Development: A Descriptive Case Study

This descriptive case aimed to examine a new model of job-embedded and on-going professional development using both blended learning and gamification approach as a delivery method. Qualitative and quantitative data collected for the study were from different sources to ensure the validity and reliability of the findings. The quantitative data findings indicated that participating in the PD first module impacted both the teachers learning of effective mathematics teaching, as well as their mathematical content knowledge. Furthermore, they planned to implement what they learned from the PD into their classroom teaching. Qualitative data findings identified three common themes emerging from the data analysis including awareness of high quality resources, students' engagement through the use of games and technology, and tasks to promote students' mathematical thinking.