Multiple Pathways to Graduation: New Routes to High School Competition

Examines three approaches -- targeted population, district-wide, and linked learning -- to raising graduation rates, benefits, and challenges; what is required for implementation; and which approaches work well for different types of districts

Spartan Daily, April 9, 2019

Volume 152, Issue 29https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartan_daily_2019/1028/thumbnail.jp

What Made Me the Teacher I Am Today? A Reflection by Selected Leonore Annenberg-Woodrow Wilson Teaching Fellows

The report offers a series of short essays from 18 teachers, each reflecting on what inspired and guided them into the teaching profession. Some of the highlights include:"I've come to realize that my learning process in the classroom actually feels a whole lot like the science I practiced at the bench: engineering experimental procedures, collecting and analyzing data, and formulating questions about next steps. It turns out that my scientific worldview can really improve learning outcomes for my students," said Kristin Milks, a biology and earth science teacher in Bloomington, IN, who enrolled in a teacher preparation program shortly after completing her Ph.D. in biochemistry."What transforms someone from being a good teacher to being a great teacher is the passion to make connections with students, to constantly evaluate and adjust their practice to do what is in the students' best interest," said Catherine Ann Haney, a Virginia Spanish teacher who has recently been teaching in Santiago, Chile."Enrolling in a teacher education program, instead of starting my career as a teacher first and then obtaining my master's degree after, meant I had a cohort of other soon-to-be teachers to learn with as we persevered through a very rigorous and demanding year," said Jeremy Cress, a math teacher in Philadelphia."I realized that being a good math teacher does not mean explaining clearly, making kids like me, or making math fun. Rather, it means giving students the opportunity to solve problems by themselves from start to finish, to struggle and persevere, and to learn from each other's particular strengths," said Brittany Leknes, a math teacher from Sunnyvale, CA."Together my students and I co-create their identities, their sense of themselves, and their understanding of their place in society. Because I believe wholly in my students' own power, I teach to disrupt school cultures that suggest that students need to be anything less than their whole selves," said Kayla Vinson, who taught social students in the Harlem Children's Zone.Created in 2007, the Leonore Annenberg-Woodrow Wilson Teaching Fellowship was designed to serve as the equivalent of a national "Rhodes Scholarship" for teaching. Working with Stanford University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Virginia, and the University of Washington, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation provided $30,000 stipends for exceptionally able candidates to complete a yearlong master's degree program. In exchange, the teacher candidates agreed to teach for three years in high-need secondary schools across the country. The Leonore Annenberg Teaching Fellowship was funded through grants from the Annenberg Foundation and Carnegie Corporation of New York. It served as the basis for the Woodrow Wilson Foundation's successful Teaching Fellowship program, which now operates in five states (Georgia, Indiana, Michigan, New Jersey, and Ohio), operating in partnership with 28 universities. Woodrow Wilson Teaching Fellows complete a rigorous yearlong master's degree program, coupled with a robust yearlong clinical experience. Once they earn their degrees, Woodrow Wilson Teaching Fellows teach in high-need STEM classrooms, while receiving three years of coaching and mentoring

Socio-musical connections and teacher identity development in a university methods course and community youth symphony partnership

In this article we describe the experiences of nine preservice music teachers enrolled in the first semester of a newly designed instrumental methods course in which a traditional lecture format was replaced with experiential, student-driven, service-oriented activities. Students were entrusted with organizing and directing a community youth symphony, including sharing of teaching and all administrative responsibilities (e.g., recruiting, fundraising, repertoire selection, community outreach). While the first author was the professor and designer of the course, the second author acted as an outside observer, collecting data through rehearsal observations, student interviews, and study of course artifacts. Findings suggest that students benefitted from opportunities to observe and collaborate with the professor and classmates in real-world teaching settings. Furthermore, students demonstrated evidence of growth and maturation over the course of the semester in teaching skills, professional identity, and socio-musical connections. The article closes with a description of how student recommendations for course improvement were implemented in subsequent semesters

Design of teacher assistance tools in an exploratory learning environment for algebraic generalisation

The MiGen project is designing and developing an intelligent exploratory environment to support 11-14 year-old students in their learning of algebraic generalisation. Deployed within the classroom, the system also provides tools to assist teachers in monitoring students' activities and progress. This paper describes the architectural design of these Teacher Assistance tools and gives a detailed description of one such tool, focussing in particular on the research challenges faced, and the technologies and approaches chosen to implement the necessary functionalities given the context of the project

'Now you know what you’re doing right and wrong!' Peer feedback quality in synchronous peer assessment in secondary education

This study explores the effects of peer assessment (PA) practice on peer feedback (PF) quality of 11th grade secondary education students (N= 36). The PA setting was synchronous: anonymous assessors gave immediate PF using mobile response technology during 10 feedback occasions. The design was quasi-experimental (experimental vs. control condition) in which students in one condition received a scaffold to filter out relevant information they received. It was expected that this filter-out scaffold would influence PF quality in subsequent tasks in which they were assessors. PF content analysis showed that offering multiple PF occasions improved PF quality: messages contained more negative verifications and informative and suggestive elaborations after the intervention. However, no effects were found of filtering out relevant information on PF quality. Moreover, students’ perceived peer feedback skills improved which was in correspondence with their actual quality improvement over time. Additionally, the perceived usefulness of the received feedback was rated high by all participants

Development and Evaluation of "Where Are We?" Map-Skills Software and Curriculum

The "Where are We?" software and lessons are designed to help children in grades two through four learn to "translate" between the visually-perceived world that they sense around them, and the schematic representation of that landscape on a map. Field-based tests were developed to examine students' ability to absorb information in the real world and to transfer it onto a map and, conversely, the ability to absorb information from a map and transfer it into an action in the real world. Formative evaluation of a prototype version of "Where are We?" resulted in the following improvements in the instructional materials: more and prompter feedback for students, additional assessment tools for teachers, development of lessons to model successful map-using strategies, development of lessons to overcome common misconceptions, and replacement of text-based instructions with a voiceover demo. Educational levels: Graduate or professional

System upgrade: realising the vision for UK education

A report summarising the findings of the TEL programme in the wider context of technology-enhanced learning and offering recommendations for future strategy in the area was launched on 13th June at the House of Lords to a group of policymakers, technologists and practitioners chaired by Lord Knight. The report – a major outcome of the programme – is written by TEL director Professor Richard Noss and a team of experts in various fields of technology-enhanced learning. The report features the programme’s 12 recommendations for using technology-enhanced learning to upgrade UK education