Do You Know What I Know? Children Use Informants’ Beliefs About Their Abilities to Calibrate Choices During Pedagogy

Models of pedagogy highlight the reciprocal reasoning underlying learner-teacher interactions, including that learners’ inferences should be shaped by what they believe a teacher knows about them. Yet, little is known about how this influences learning, despite the fact that even young children make rapid inferences about teaching from sparse data. In the current work, six- to eight-year-olds’ performance on a picture-matching game was either overestimated, underestimated, or accurately represented by a confederate (the “Teacher”), who then presented three new matching games of varying assessed difficulty (too easy, too hard, just right). A simple model of this problem predicts that while children should follow the recommendation of an accurate Teacher, learners should choose easier games when the Teacher overestimated their abilities, and harder games when she underestimated them. Results from our experiment support these predictions, providing insight into children’s ability to consider teachers’ knowledge when learning from pedagogy.

‘We acted like ELLs’: A pedagogy of embodiment in preservice teacher education

Many US K-12 teachers in ethnolinguistically homogenous, rural areas are not adequately prepared to meet the needs of their English language learner (ELL) students. Such educators often lack conceptual understanding of language pedagogy and affective investment in ELLs. The field of language teacher education (LTE) needs research on how to better prepare these teachers to serve ELLs. The teacher educator and lead researcher in this article responded to this need, implementing an LTE pedagogy of embodiment for preservice K-12 teacher-learners. Embodiment refers to ways in which a concept or feeling, related to language pedagogy in this case, is made physically or emotionally tangible. Participants – undergraduates in a TESOL survey course – took part in an embodied ELL lesson, which was rich in tasks that the teacher educator had developed years earlier for her own language learner students. In the context of the university teacher education classroom, teacher-learners participated in this authentic ELL lesson. Data include LTE classroom discourse, focus groups, written reflections, and background questionnaires. Findings reveal that two language learning tasks from the embodied lesson especially enabled teacher-learners’ language pedagogy concept learning. Namely, in a timed reading and video enactment, teacher-learners experienced and reflected on language pedagogy concepts related to task sequencing, collaborative interaction, fluency development, and engagement. The participants performed two distinct roles during the embodied lesson: at some moments, they ‘acted like’ language learners while at others like reflective language educators. These teacher-learners reported increased empathy towards ELLs as a consequence of their participation in the embodied lesson. This research offers insights into LTE pedagogical practices that promote preservice K-12 educators’ learning of language pedagogy concepts and their development of empathy for ELLs. By presenting the notion of an LTE pedagogy of embodiment, we contribute to sociocultural frameworks of learning.

Language teachers’ narratives of professional experience in online class discussions

Language teachers’ narratives of professional and personal experience have been shown to support sense-making, problem-solving, and the forging of personal connections, as well as to aid in developing their identities as language teachers. As language teacher education increasingly moves online, examining how teacher-learners engage in the sharing of professional experiences through narratives in these spaces is of paramount importance. This paper traces narratives of professional experience across 1,089 discussion posts shared by 10 Master’s students throughout one graduate-level online course, analyzing participants’ forum discussions to understand the functions of these narratives for the teacher-learners engaged in the course. Findings demonstrate how narratives of professional experience served to warrant individuals’ claims about topics related to multilingual writing pedagogy and teaching multilingual learners in general, positioning them as competent experts, often by presenting narrative events as something experienced time and again. Finally, this study considers how narratives of professional experience produce and reproduce a particular view of teachers’ role in educating language learners, collaboratively building on one another to preclude alternative stances, even when making potentially controversial claims.

Aligning assessment, technology, and multi-literacies

This article is premised on research that suggests there is a gap between technology use for teaching and learning and the technology used in assessment. Digital technology such as blogs, Facebook, Twitter, podcasts, and news feeds are increasingly used in teaching and learning. On the other hand, assessment is often only in traditional essay form and frequently via pen and paper. This article examines the complex nature of multimodal design and argues for assessment that has constructive alignment, which sets out the interdependence of learning outcomes, teaching, and assessment where all three are aligned as equal partners. The aim of the research described was to investigate whether teacher–learners believed there was alignment between learning outcomes, activities, and assessment that utilized digital media technology. This article presents findings from a small-scale case study that drew on qualitative data from Student Evaluations of the Paper and from online surveys from four cohorts of participating teachers in a postgraduate adult literacy, language, and numeracy professional development program. There were three important findings from the data that indicated the importance of firstly having alignment of digital technology and course design outcomes, activities, and assessments and that this was clearly visible to the participants. The second finding indicated the content was relevant to the teacher–learners and involved them in constructing their own learning through authentic and practical activities and assessment. The third finding indicated that course outcomes, activities, and assessment tasks were aligned with multi-literacy skills. It is argued that academics design courses that are constructively aligned connecting learners with outcomes, activities, and assessment, which include an explicit focus on teaching the multi-literacy skills required in a world that is becoming increasingly digital.

Supporting Elementary Mathematics Teacher Candidates' Use of Divergent Formative Assessment

In this chapter, the authors consider the purposeful design of two mathematics content courses (Content 1 and Content II) and one methods course (Methods) as a means of helping teacher candidates (TCs) learn about divergent formative assessment (DFA), which seeks to explore what students understand rather than only if they understand a concept or skill. The authors leverage the research of groupworthy tasks and the Rights of the Learner to describe three tasks they use to help TCs learn mathematics through problem-solving and to learn to teach through problem-solving. The chapter outlines three commonalities across the courses: 1) Shifting from implicit to explicit and informal to formal practices of DFA that reflects teaching through problem-solving; 2) Using DFAs to transition TCs' identities from learners to teacher-learners; and 3) Supporting TCs' self-assessment through DFAs in multiple ways.

“So Why Is It OK Here?” Literacy Candidates Grappling With Culture/Culturally Relevant Pedagogy in Urban Fieldsites

Drawing on culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP) and the development of cultural competence, this study explores how teacher learners in a critical inquiry group narrated and discussed their urban field experiences, particularly in regard to equity-oriented literacy education. More specifically, this study demonstrates both the impact that deep-seated deficit perspectives had on how the teacher learners approached their work as educators and the tensions they felt between engaging in CRP and maintaining high standards. The article ends by offering a heuristic for “critical practice-based field experiences” as a way of contextualizing practice within school-based teacher learning.

Examining International Telecollaboration in Language Teacher Education

This chapter presents findings of case study action research examining the impact of technology-mediated collaboration between teacher-learners in two graduate-level Applied Linguistics Master's programs in Canada and Israel. To date, little research has been conducted on international telecollaborative exchanges in language teacher education programs. This chapter will discuss teacher-learners' perceived benefits and challenges of this international telecollaborative exchange, its impact on beliefs towards the use of technology-mediated tools, and the relevance of these types of collaborations in language teacher education. The authors will highlight individual teacher-learner voices in this study that illustrate how teacher assumptions about authority, experience, and teacher identity evolve on individual pathways and are situated in complex, historically embedded paradigms of teaching and learning experience. The chapter will conclude with insights gained regarding strategies for implementing effective international telecollaborative exchanges in language teacher education programs.

The Implementation of Humanistic Learning at Darul Aman Islamic High School in Aceh Besar

This article focuses on humanistic learning at an Islamic private school in Aceh. It uses qualitative descriptive method and takes seven subjects as the sample of the data. It shows that the humanistic learning in Darul Aman Private Madrasah Aliyah of Aceh Besar was implemented through three mechanisms. First, creating a humanist class situation, both physical and non-physical environment (socio-emotional), through a democratic approach. Second, employing a cooperative learning model as the basis of humanistic learning. Third, adopting an effective communication model in creating humanistic learning interactions. This involves cycle-models of communication and interaction of learning: one direction interaction (teacher-student), teacher-learners-learners (their feedback for teachers; students learn from each other) and multi-interaction of the teacher-learner, learner-teacher, learners-learners (interaction in many directions). The implementation of humanistic learning at Darul Aman Private Madrasah Aliyah of Aceh Besar had a problem in the form of limited instructional media resources. Nevertheless, the overall learning process was humanist. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.20414/ujis.v21i1.1161