Inquiry Teaching: It is Easier than You Think!

This article is a survey of the literature on inquiry teaching. Many teachers do not participate in inquiry teaching for various reasons. The following are the main reasons: it takes too much time; students do not learn what they need for the state test; and, the teachers do not know how to grade projects and presentations. These reasons sound like rhetoric from long ago, but it is very current. In this article, research is used to show that students who participate in inquiry learning or any type of problem-based education do much better than students who do not have that opportunity. The student participants not only have better grades, but they think on a higher level, become more civic minded, and are better problem solvers. Included in the article are four models which can be used to teach inquiry science, and two lesson plans with rubrics to help grade the inquiry STS lesson. The major point being made throughout is that there is an advantage to teaching students using inquiry. The only disadvantage is not giving the students the opportunity to use inquiry and to grow

Advocacy: Are we teaching it?

Background. Health advocacy has been identified as a key outcome competency in the undergraduate curriculum for a number of health professions by the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA) and the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), Durban, SA. Despite health advocacy and activism playing a strong role in the student body and civil society, there has been only limited engagement with the manner in which to teach health advocacy in the health professions literature.Objectives. To assess how the faculty in health professions programmes at UKZN understood health advocacy and how it was covered in the curriculum.Methods. Focus group discussions were held with faculty from undergraduate health professions programmes at the university regarding how health advocacy was understood and how it was being integrated into the current curriculum. A thematic analysis was performed on the transcripts of the focus groups.Results. A range of ways in which health advocacy was understood became apparent in the focus groups, with a few disciplines indicating that they do not cover health advocacy explicitly in the curriculum. Three main focus areas of health advocacy training were identified: for the profession (particularly in the smaller health professions groups); for services within the health system; and for patients or communities. The main points of departure for health advocacy were ethics and human rights and to a much lesser degree social justice. There was generally limited experience of how health advocacy could be taught as a skill and little consensus between the participating disciplines regarding the scope and content of health advocacy training. Advocacy itself was also seen as potentially risky, which could undermine the relationship between the university and the service platform. Similarly, the potential risk to whistle-blowers and the institutional culture in universities and public sector services were also seen as limitations.Conclusions. Ample opportunities were identified for the potential teaching of health advocacy in complex professional and public sector interactions. Dual loyalty was seen to be a key dilemma for how to approach advocacy as part of work-based learning, and linked to considerable risk to the institution, educators and students. The current review offers an exciting opportunity to define more clearly what the outcome competencies of health advocacy are, particularly in the context of transformative health professions education – and how these can be operationalised in the overall curriculum

Learning to Program in Python – by Teaching It!

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts over 8 million job openings in IT and computing, including 1 million cybersecurity postings, over the current five-year period. This paper presents lessons learned in preparing middle-school students in rural Georgia for future careers in computer science/ IT by teaching computer programming in the free, open-source programming language Python using Turtle graphics, and discusses exercises and activities with low-cost drones, bots, and 3D printers to get students interested and keep them engaged in coding. Described herein is one pair of instructors’ (one middle-school, one university) multi-year, multi-stage approach to providing engineering and technology courses, including: how to code Turtle graphics in Python; how to engage children by using short, interactive, visual programs for every age level; building cross-curricular bridges toward technology careers using 3D printing, robotics, and low-cost drones; and, how to build more advanced programming skills in Python

Teaching It In A Knowledge Economy Raising Tacit Productivity

The growth of interactions represents a broad shift in the nature of economic activity. Interactions are defined as the searching, coordinating, and monitoring that people and firms do when they exchange goods, services, or ideas, for many employees today, collaborative, complex problem solving is the essence of their work, these “tacit” activates -- involving the exchange of information, the making of judgments, and a need to draw on multifaceted forms of knowledge in exchanges with coworkers, customers, and suppliers – are increasingly a part of the standard model for companies in the developed world

A Novel Approach for Teaching IT Tools within Learning Factories

Universities around the world are developing strategies to include into their curricula trend topics from Industry 4.0, such as Cyber Physical Systems, robotics, process virtualization and advanced IT tools. However, at the state of the art in literature there is few evidence for educational environments in which all these components are fully integrated. SMALL Factory, an ongoing project in Politecnico di Torino, aims to develop an integrated learning factory based on the technologies triggering the fourth industrial revolution. Beside the transfer of technological skills, the laboratory allows the on field training of students in the use of open source IT tools such as PLM and ERP systems. The present paper aims to present the teaching methodology proposed within the SMALL Factory framework. The ultimate aim of this project is to replace the traditional software teaching, based on tutorials and simple case studies, with a learning by doing, integrated approach, in order to provide students with a comprehensive perspective of a modern manufacturing environment and to train their mindset to be responsive

Communication Ethics: Is there an Alternative to Teaching It Prescriptively?

A goodly number of us are only teaching-practitioners in the field of communication ethics. To use the word only in this context is not meant to depreciate the worth of the classroom teacher, nor to suggest a separation between the theorist and the practitioner, but rather to identify where many of us, for one reason or another, focus the bulk of our time and energy, Because few of us in the profession take the time to concentrate on this particular scholarly activity, and because few of us are assigned to teach only a Communication Ethics course, we who teach the subject must rely heavily on the scattered scholars who do make major contributions to our discipline as published theorists in communication ethics, However, as we choose texts and gather materials for teaching such a course, we are somewhat limited in what we find, especially compared with other subjects in speech communication. Most of what we do find, and probably justifiably so,, is course content. Very little is said about the approach to teaching a course (or unit) on communication ethics. It is to this end that I write this paper, and not as an expert in pedagogy, but rather as one speech communication generalist who has long been interested in the subject of ethics in communicative behavior and who has had some positive feedback from both students and colleagues on his approach to the teaching of it. Though my primary concern is for the separately designed and taught course in Communication Ethics, what is written here is also applicable to units on ethics taught in other speech communication courses

Teaching IT in a Hybrid Learning Environment: A case study

Dakota State University offers a Master’s degree in Information Systems to students using what is referred to as a hybrid learning environment, a simultaneous combination of in-class, remote interactive audio/video connections (DDN), and Internet connections. This paper identifies some of the issues and challenges that have been encountered by faculty and students in this teaching environment

Statutory guidance on induction for newly qualified teachers in England

"Statutory induction is the bridge between initial teacher training and a career in teaching. It combines a personalised programme of development, support and professional dialogue, with monitoring and an assessment of performance against the core standards... This guidance explains the provisions of the 2008 regulations [Education (Induction Arrangements for School Teachers) (England) Regulations 2008], which come into effect on 1 September 2008 and provides further advice to help individuals to comply with the regulations. " - pp. 1-2