The gradual release of responsibility: A case study of teaching science inquiry skills

This thesis investigated how a year-4 teacher used a pedagogical approach referred to as the Gradual Release of Responsibility (GRR) model of instruction for teaching Science Inquiry Skills in a primary classroom. Through scaffolding her students' learning using the GRR, the teacher guided her students towards developing an understanding about Scientific Inquiry leading to the foundations of scientific literacy. A learning environment was established in which students engaged in rich conversations, designed and conducted experiments using fair testing procedures, analysed and offered justifications for results, and negotiated knowledge claims in ways similar to some of those in the scientific community.

R U there yet? using virtual classrooms to transform teaching practice

Access to quality higher education is challenging for many Western Australians that live outside the metropolitan area. In 2010, the School of Education moved to flexible delivery of a fully online Bachelor of Education degree for their non -metropolitan students. The new model of delivery allows access for students from any location provided they have a computer and an internet connection. A number of academic staff had previously used an asynchronous environment to deliver learning modules housed within a learning management system (LMS) but had not used synchronous software with their students. To enhance the learning environment and to provide high quality learning experiences to students learning at a distance, the adoption of synchronous software (Elluminate Live) was introduced. This software is a real-time virtual classroom environment that allows for communication through Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and videoconferencing, along with a large number of collaboration tools to engage learners. This research paper reports on the integration of a live e-learning solution into the current LMS environment. Qualitative data were collected from academic staff through informal interviews and participant observation. The findings discuss (i) perceived level of support; (ii) identification of strategies used to create an effective online teacher presence; (iii) the perceived impact on the students' learning outcomes; and (iv) guidelines for professional development to enhance pedagogy within the live e-learning environment.

See you in class: Promoting a quality program for pre-service educators in regional locations through a virtual classroom

The quality of an online university degree is paramount to the student, the reputation of the university and most importantly, the profession that will be entered. At the School of Education within Curtin University, we aim to ensure that students within rural and remote areas are provided with high quality degrees equal to their city counterparts who access face-to-face classes on campus.In 2010, the School of Education moved to flexible delivery of a fully online Bachelor of Education degree for their rural students. In previous years, the degree had been delivered in physical locations around the state. Although this served the purpose for the time, it restricted the degree to only those rural students who were able to access the physical campus. The new model in 2010 allows access for students in any rural area who have a computer and an internet connection, regardless of their geographical location. As a result enrolments have seen a positive increase in new students. Academic staff had previously used an asynchronous environment to deliver learning modules housed within a learning management system (LMS). To enhance the learning environment and to provide high quality learning experiences to students learning at a distance, the adoption of synchronous software was introduced. This software is a real-time virtual classroom environment that allows for communication through Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and videoconferencing, along with a large number of collaboration tools to engage learners. This research paper reports on the professional development of academic staff to integrate a live e-learning solution into their current LMS environment. It involved professional development, including technical orientation for teaching staff and course participants simultaneously. Further, pedagogical innovations were offered to engage the students in a collaborative learning environment. Data were collected from academic staff through semi-structured interviews and participant observation. The findings discuss the perceived value of the technology, problems encountered and solutions sought.

Transforming teaching practice through virtual classrooms: A study of staff and student views of synchronous learning

Australia is a vast land and access to quality higher education is challenging for many Australians that live outside the larger metropolitan areas. In 2010, the School of Education at an Australian university (Curtin University in Western Australia) moved to flexible delivery of a fully online Bachelor of Education degree for their rural students. The new model of delivery allows access for students from any location provided they have a computer and an internet connection.A number of teaching staff had previously used an asynchronous environment to deliver learning modules housed within a learning management system (LMS) but had not used synchronous software with their students. To enhance the learning environment and to provide high quality learning experiences to students learning at a distance, the adoption of synchronous software (Elluminate Live) was introduced. This software is a real-time virtual classroom environment that allows for communication through Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and video conferencing, alongside a large number of collaboration tools to engage learners.This research paper reports on the integration of a live e-learning solution into the current Learning Management System (LMS) environment. Staff were interviewed about their perceptions and a questionnaire was administered to a sample of students to identify their experience with the synchronous software in order to inform future practice.

Critical Discourse Analysis research methods for the English classroom

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is an approach to analysing the discourses that operate in social contexts, such as classrooms in schools, and their material effects on people, such as teachers and learners. CDA offers a range of ways of engaging with the relationship between texts in context and the power they exercise. In this article, I overview key approaches and provide detail of Fairclough’s (1992, 2003) textually-oriented, linguistic method of CDA, with an example from my own research. I offer a challenge for English teachers, as researchers, to ‘make strange’ the familiar world of their classroom work, and in so doing, identify possibilities for productive change.

Introducing the multi-faceted teaching experiment

A mathematics classroom is comprised of many mathematicians with varying understanding of mathematics knowledge, including the teacher, students and sometimes researchers. To align with this conceptualisation of knowledge and understanding, the multi-faceted teaching experiment will be introduced as an approach to study all classroom participants’ interactions with the shared knowledge of mathematics. Drawing on the experiences of a large curriculum project, it is claimed that, unlike a multi-tiered teaching experiment, the multi-faceted teaching experiment provides a research framework that allows for the study of mathematicians’ building of knowledge in a classroom without privileging the experience of any one participant.

Hopwood Hall College: Touchscreen technology overtakes interactive whiteboards as interactive teaching tool of choice

Hopwood Hall is adopting the use of touch screen technology and gradually replacing its interactive whiteboards to improve access to interactive learning. The touch screen monitors connected to LCD TV’s provide a cheaper classroom build with technology that’s more user-friendly and better suited to classroom delivery. Until now, interactive boards had been the mainstay of classrooms but they created teaching barriers for staff including the additional software to learn and master. They are also expensive and often have usability issues with 'pens' not working or having a delay when used as the mouse tool.

Case study: Technology - a fundamental aspect of teaching, learning and assessment

Case study on how Reading College is taking a holistic approach to developing their digital strategy, focusing on good practice in teaching and learning and extending learning beyond the classroom walls.

Teaching Change: Information Literacy Collaboration at Texas A&M University at Galveston

While college students use a wide array of technologies to access information, their skills at determining what is relevant, in a university setting and in life, are poor. Many of these skills have to be taught in college courses. Instruction must be performed by a collaborative team using technologies that effectively reach students. This team must be ready to go into the classroom when needed and be able to address the problem whenever the student needs assistance. The results will be better writing and better research skills that will not only benefit the faculty but will lead to lifelong learning.

The Role of SoTL in Classroom Innovation.

The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) is being promoted as an activity for teaching-focused academics in the UK. However, support for SoTL is not a priority for most institutions, and formal provision for such support may not extend beyond the postgraduate certificate in higher education that is offered for new academic staff. This paper examines the experiences of SoTL of a group of twenty-one Life Sciences academics from a range of UK universities. It explores the role that SoTL has to play in developing classroom innovation in a structured and scholarly manner, and the consequences to both teaching staff and students, if SoTL is not supported as an academic activity throughout the careers of teaching-focused academics.

Team-teaching for inclusive learning: Purposes, practices and perceptions of a team-teaching initiative in Irish post-primary schools

Background. Schools unequivocally privilege solo-teaching. This research seeks to enhance our understanding of team-teaching by examining how two teachers, working in the same classroom at the same time, might or might not contribute to the promotion of inclusive learning. There are well-established policy statements that encourage change and moves towards the use of team-teaching to promote greater inclusion of students with special educational needs in mainstream schools and mainstream classrooms. What is not so well established is the practice of team-teaching in post-primary settings, with little research conducted to date on how it can be initiated and sustained, and a dearth of knowledge on how it impacts upon the students and teachers involved. Research questions and aims. In light of the paucity and inconclusive nature of the research on team-teaching to date (Hattie, 2009), the orientating question in this study asks ‘To what extent, can the introduction of a formal team-teaching initiative enhance the quality of inclusive student learning and teachers’ learning at post-primary level?’ The framing of this question emerges from ongoing political, legal and educational efforts to promote inclusive education. The study has three main aims. The first aim of this study is to gather and represent the voices and experiences of those most closely involved in the introduction of team-teaching; students, teachers, principals and administrators. The second aim is to generate a theory-informed understanding of such collaborative practices and how they may best be implemented in the future. The third aim is to advance our understandings regarding the day-to-day, and moment-to-moment interactions, between teachers and students which enable or inhibit inclusive learning. Sample. In total, 20 team-teaching dyads were formed across seven project schools. The study participants were from two of the seven project schools, Ash and Oak. It involved eight teachers and 53 students, whose age ranged from 12-16 years old, with 4 teachers forming two dyads per school. In Oak there was a class of first years (n=11) with one dyad and a class of transition year students (n=24) with the other dyad. In Ash one class group (n=18) had two dyads. The subjects in which the dyads engaged were English and Mathematics. Method. This research adopted an interpretive paradigm. The duration of the fieldwork was from April 2007 to June 2008. Research methodologies included semi-structured interviews (n=44), classroom observation (n=20), attendance at monthly teacher meetings (n=6), questionnaires and other data gathering practices which included school documentation, assessment findings and joint examination of student work samples (n=4). Results. Team-teaching involves changing normative practices, and involves placing both demands and opportunities before those who occupy classrooms (teachers and students) and before those who determine who should occupy these classrooms (principals and district administrators). This research shows how team-teaching has the potential to promote inclusive learning, and when implemented appropriately, can impact positively upon the learning experiences of both teachers and students. The results are outlined in two chapters. In chapter four, Social Capital Theory is used in framing the data, the change process of bonding, bridging and linking, and in capturing what the collaborative action of team-teaching means, asks and offers teachers; within classes, between classes, between schools and within the wider educational community. In chapter five, Positioning Theory deductively assists in revealing the moment-to-moment, dynamic and inclusive learning opportunities, that are made available to students through team-teaching. In this chapter a number of vignettes are chosen to illustrate such learning opportunities. These two theories help to reveal the counter-narrative that team-teaching offers, regarding how both teachers and students teach and learn. This counter-narrative can extend beyond the field of special education and include alternatives to the manner in which professional development is understood, implemented, and sustained in schools and classrooms. Team-teaching repositions teachers and students to engage with one another in an atmosphere that capitalises upon and builds relational trust and shared cognition. However, as this research study has found, it is wise that the purposes, processes and perceptions of team-teaching are clear to all so that team-teaching can be undertaken by those who are increasingly consciously competent and not merely accidentally adequate. Conclusions. The findings are discussed in the context of the promotion of effective inclusive practices in mainstream settings. I believe that such promotion requires more nuanced understandings of what is being asked of, and offered to, teachers and students. Team-teaching has, and I argue will increasingly have, its place in the repertoire of responses that support effective inclusive learning. To capture and extend such practice requires theoretical frameworks that facilitate iterative journeys between research, policy and practice. Research to date on team-teaching has been too focused on outcomes over short timeframes and not focused enough on the process that is team-teaching. As a consequence team-teaching has been under-used, under-valued, under-theorised and generally not very well understood. Moving from classroom to staff room and district board room, theoretical frameworks used in this research help to travel with, and understand, the initiation, engagement and early consequences of team-teaching within and across the educational landscape. Therefore, conclusions from this study have implications for the triad of research, practice and policy development where efforts to change normative practices can be matched by understandings associated with what it means to try something new/anew, and what it means to say it made a positive difference.

序破急 Jo-Ha-Kyu: enticement - crux - consolidation. From study to learning: Process drama projects in the Japanese English language university classroom

This dissertation investigates how social issues can be explored through process drama projects in the Japanese university English as a Foreign Language classroom context. The trajectory of this dissertation moves along a traditional Noh three part macro-continuum, called Jo-Ha-Kyu, interpreted as enticement, crux and consolidation. Within these three parts, there are six further divisions. Part I consists of three sections: Section I, the introduction, sets the backdrop for the entire dissertation, that of Japan, and aims to draw the reader into its culturally unique and specific world. This section outlines the rationale for placing the ethnographer at the centre of the research, and presents Japan through the eyes of the writer. Section II outlines relevant Japanese cultural norms, mores and values, the English educational landscape of Japan and an overview of theatre in Japan and its possible influences on the Japanese university student today. Section III provides three literature reviews: second language acquisition, drama in education to process drama, and Content Language Integrated Learning. In Part 2, Sections IV and V respectively consist of the research methodology and the action research at the core of this dissertation. Section IV describes the case of Kwansei Gakuin University, then explains the design of the process drama curricula. Section V details the three-process drama projects based around the three social issues at the centre of this dissertation. There is also a description of an extra project that of the guest lecturer project. The ultimate goals of all four projects were to change motivation through English in a CLIL context, to develop linguistic spontaneity and to deepen emotional engagement with the themes. Part 3 serves to reflect upon the viability of using process drama in the Japanese university curriculum, and to critically self-reflect on the project as a whole.

Japanese language teaching: a communicative approach

Japanese Language Teaching examines the practical aspects of the acquisition of Japanese as a second language, underpinned by current theory and research. Each chapter examines the theory and practice of language teaching, and progresses to a consideration of the practical design of tasks for teaching. The final section applies theory and practice to an empirical case study, drawn from a classroom with Japanese as a second language. With its emphasis on practice underpinned by contemporary theory, this book will be of interest to postgraduates studying second language acquisition and applied linguistics. [Source: publisher's description].