How Does Teacher Professional Development Support and Improve Technology Teacher Practice?

<p>The development and implementation of the New Zealand Curriculum in 2007 and the introduction of standards-based assessment, in the form of achievement standards, has necessitated a raft of changes for technology teachers. Professional development is widely considered to be of value in developing teacher knowledge which can positively impact on student knowledge and achievement. While there is a considerable body of research on professional development, there is a limited amount specific to technology education professional development in a New Zealand context. This thesis is based on an examination of the nature and characteristics of effective professional development for technology teachers. It used a qualitative, interpretive design and gathered data by interviewing a group of ten technology teachers and heads of technology departments from different schools in one region. The interview data were transcribed and sorted using inductive content analysis in order to categorise them and draw conclusions. The findings indicate that there is a wide range of characteristics which may be considered effective for technology teachers in this study, and foremost, the opportunity for teachers to work collaboratively in examining programmes, student work, resources and exemplars, such that teachers can build on their existing knowledge and skills, is most effective for them. The development of pedagogical content knowledge and subject content knowledge enabled the teachers to construct new understandings of teaching and student learning processes in technology education. The implications of this study are that facilitators, teachers, and others working within this curriculum area may be informed by its findings and as a result, professional development may be more effective in supporting teacher learning.</p>

How Does Teacher Professional Development Support and Improve Technology Teacher Practice?

<p>The development and implementation of the New Zealand Curriculum in 2007 and the introduction of standards-based assessment, in the form of achievement standards, has necessitated a raft of changes for technology teachers. Professional development is widely considered to be of value in developing teacher knowledge which can positively impact on student knowledge and achievement. While there is a considerable body of research on professional development, there is a limited amount specific to technology education professional development in a New Zealand context. This thesis is based on an examination of the nature and characteristics of effective professional development for technology teachers. It used a qualitative, interpretive design and gathered data by interviewing a group of ten technology teachers and heads of technology departments from different schools in one region. The interview data were transcribed and sorted using inductive content analysis in order to categorise them and draw conclusions. The findings indicate that there is a wide range of characteristics which may be considered effective for technology teachers in this study, and foremost, the opportunity for teachers to work collaboratively in examining programmes, student work, resources and exemplars, such that teachers can build on their existing knowledge and skills, is most effective for them. The development of pedagogical content knowledge and subject content knowledge enabled the teachers to construct new understandings of teaching and student learning processes in technology education. The implications of this study are that facilitators, teachers, and others working within this curriculum area may be informed by its findings and as a result, professional development may be more effective in supporting teacher learning.</p>

Mediation as a strategy for constructing meaning in the teaching of a subject by integrating a foreign language

The increasing globalization as well as internationalization have influenced educational systems all over the world, contributing to widespread of the idea of teaching in a second or foreign language so as to allow students, ranging from primary to tertiary levels, to compete in an international context. The aim of this paper is to analyse and categorise the strategies of mediation used for presentation of subject content knowledge while teaching in bilingual French-Polish classes at secondary school level. In order to take the complex nature of the issue into account, variety of used strategies will be examined by means of corpus analysis. The material used for analysis comes from the bilingual lessons of chemistry and biology recorded in secondary school in Warsaw in the period between November and December 2019. The studies presented will allow conclusions to be drawn regarding the potential possibilities and problems of content-knowledge presentation in foreign langue.

Identifying Effective Teachers: Lessons from Four Classroom Observation Tools

Four different classroom observation instruments—from the Service Delivery Indicators, the Stallings Observation System, the Classroom Assessment Scoring System, and the Teach classroom observation instrument—were implemented in about 100 schools across four regions of Tanzania. The research design is such that various combinations of tools were administered to various combinations of teachers, so these data can be used to explore the commonalities and differences in the behaviors and practices captured by each tool, the internal properties of the tools (for example, how stable they are across enumerators, or how various indicators relate to one another), and how variables collected by the various tools compare to each other. Analysis shows that inter-rater reliability can be low, especially for some of the subjective ratings; principal components analysis suggests that lower-level constructs do not map neatly to predetermined higher-level ones and suggest that the data have only a few dimensions. Measures collected during teacher observations are associated with student test scores, but patterns differ for teachers with lower versus higher subject content knowledge.

The Development of an Inclusive Model to Construct Teacher’s Professional Knowledge: Pedagogic content knowledge for sound-based music as a new subject area

This article outlines a systematic process for developing the different knowledge domains required for teaching sound-based (electroacoustic) music as a new subject area. As a new area within the discipline of music, teachers are novices to the field. This requires epistemological deconstruction of what knowledge teachers need in this new field. Then the analysis outlines how to develop teachers’ new knowledge, which can be constructed as subject content knowledge (SCK), pedagogic content knowledge (PCK) and technology pedagogic content knowledge (TPACK). This epistemological analysis informed our creation of teaching materials that develop these different knowledge domains and take account of the complex interplay between them. This process was demonstrated through the ElectroAcoustic Resource Site Projects, which first built subject content knowledge and then created teacher’s packs to build pedagogic content knowledge, and a bespoke CPD programme, which embedded their inter-relationships and built technology pedagogic content knowledge. Most importantly, creating the teacher’s packs employed a user-centred design approach, putting teachers and pupils in the centre of the development process, thereby giving them voice. Voice is an integral part of empowerment in our model, which disrupts the hegemonic grip of the academic curriculum dominated by the traditional music canon. This article adds to the knowledge-base regarding how to develop the different domains required for teaching a new subject. We argue that sound-based music is accessible to all teachers and learners, thereby increasing inclusivity. This in turn can radically disrupt ways of teaching music in schools and the model created provides the necessary scaffolding for a paradigm shift in music teaching on an international level.

Pre-service teachers’ experiences with a digital examination design: The inter-relation between continuity and change in an institutional context

This article reports a study of a full-scale digital examination in a five-year master program of teacher education in Norway. The innovative design involves observing a video case based on an authentic classroom situation and analysing the case in light of educational theory and subject content knowledge. All parts of this format are to be solved on a computer with Internet access. The study is centred on the pre-service teachers’ experiences of this open-ended and unfamiliar testing format. More specifically, the intention has been to analyse (a) what kinds of preparations they engaged in; (b) how they solved tasks during the examination; (c) their reflections on this mode of examination. Interviews with 11 informants have been conducted, and the content is summarized in three selected cases, and finally across the interview sample. The results indicate that innovations like this are interpreted and approached against the background of pre-service teachers’ expectations, and the open format engaged the pre-service teachers to draw upon a wide range of resources both when preparing and solving the tasks. It is, however, timely to question whether the introduction of the examination format, based on faculty interest and intentions, will have the intended impact on evaluation procedures in an established learning culture. Keywords: digital examinations, Higher education, teacher education, video, Lærerstudenters erfaringer med et digitalisert eksaminasjons-design: Den gjensidige relasjonen mellom kontinuitet og forandring i en institusjonell kontekst SammendragI denne artikkelen rapporteres en studie av en fullskala digital eksamen som har blitt benyttet i et femårig masterprogram i norsk lærerutdanning. Det innovative designet er en firetimers nettbasert og digital eksamen basert på observasjon av en video case fra en autentisk klasseromssituasjon, og en analyse på bakgrunn av pedagogisk og fagdidaktisk teori. Hele eksamenen besvares via en datamaskin med nettilgang. Studien er rettet mot studentenes erfaringer med denne åpne og ukjente eksamensformen. Mer spesifikt er intensjonen å analysere a) hva slags forberedelser de gjorde, b) hvordan de løste eksamensoppgavene under selve eksamen, og c) refleksjonene de hadde etter en slik eksamensform. Intervjuer med elleve informanter ble gjennomført, og innholdet oppsummert i tre case-studier samt en tematisk studie på tvers av utvalget. Resultatene tyder på at slike innovasjoner blir tolket og bearbeidet på bakgrunn av studentenes forventninger, og at de benyttet en rekke ulike ressurser for forberedelsene til og gjennomføringen av eksamen. Det er imidlertid betimelig å stille spørsmål om innføringen av et slikt eksamensformat, basert på fakultetets interesser og intensjoner, vil ha den ønskede påvirkningen på vurderingsprosedyrer i en etablert læringskultur Nøkkelord: eksamen, høyere utdanning, lærerutdanning, video, digital eksamen