Pedagogy and new power relationships

Changes in the context of Higher Education have led to lecturers being disenfranchised. Both the introduction of new managerialism and developments in pedagogy have contributed to this process. On the one hand, performance management and the introduction of teaching and learning strategies have put issues of pedagogy and curriculum development into the realms of strategic management. On the other, student-centred learning has usurped teacher-centred models of education. In this paper, reviews of both of these trends are presented. Based on these, a benchmarking tool has been developed which enables the identification and monitoring of the way that the locus of control for various teaching-related activities has changed. This tool is then applied to the case of an MBA course that was transformed from a traditional to a distance format. The issues that arise from this case are discussed, and conclusions are drawn about the potential implications of “creeping managerialism ” in the context of Higher Education

E-Learning for Teachers and Trainers : Innovative Practices, Skills and Competences

Reproduction is authorised provided the source is acknowledged.Final Published versio

Teachers Know Best: Making Data Work For Teachers and Students

The Teachers Know Best research project seeks to encourage innovation in K - 12 education by helping product developers and those who procure resources for teachers better understand teachers' views. The intent of Making Data Work is to drill down to help educators, school leaders, and product developers better understand the challenges teachers face when working with this critical segment of digital instructional tools. More than 4,600 teachers from a nationally representative sample were surveyed about their use of data to drive instruction and the use of these tools.This study focuses on the potential of a specific subset of digital instructional tools: those that help teachers collect and make use of student data to tailor and improve instruction for individual students. The use of data is a crucial component in personalized learning, which ensures that student learning experiences -- what they learn and how, when, and where they learn it -- are tailored to their individual needs, skills, and interests and enable them to take ownership of their learning. Personalized learning is critical to meeting all students where they are, so they are neither bored with assignments that are too easy nor overwhelmed by work that is too hard

Justifying what we do: Criteria for the selection of literacy and thinking tools

Teachers of English, along with teachers from across the curriculum, have a moral and professional responsibility to nurture literate thinkers. In this article I argue that teachers who accept this responsibility stand to teachers who don’t as imagination stands to memory, as co-construction in a discursive community of practice stands to transmission teaching, and as a sense of what strategic English teaching might be to what it sometimes is. Strategic teachers of English, like literate thinkers, deploy a range of literacy and thinking tools that help their students construct and deconstruct meaning. But what tools should we teach students? What criteria might we use to select those tools, and ultimately, to justify what we do? Nine selection criteria are proposed below, and then applied to evaluate the Effective Literacy Strategies in Years 9-13: A guide for teachers (MOE, 2004). Teachers who use these criteria to select literacy and thinking tools are more likely to nurture literate thinkers. But first, the description of these criteria is set in a wider context that inform

Ethically Aligned Design: An empirical evaluation of the RESOLVEDD-strategy in Software and Systems development context

Use of artificial intelligence (AI) in human contexts calls for ethical considerations for the design and development of AI-based systems. However, little knowledge currently exists on how to provide useful and tangible tools that could help software developers and designers implement ethical considerations into practice. In this paper, we empirically evaluate a method that enables ethically aligned design in a decision-making process. Though this method, titled the RESOLVEDD-strategy, originates from the field of business ethics, it is being applied in other fields as well. We tested the RESOLVEDD-strategy in a multiple case study of five student projects where the use of ethical tools was given as one of the design requirements. A key finding from the study indicates that simply the presence of an ethical tool has an effect on ethical consideration, creating more responsibility even in instances where the use of the tool is not intrinsically motivated.Comment: This is the author's version of the work. The copyright holder's version can be found at https://doi.org/10.1109/SEAA.2019.0001

Making the Most of Interim Assessment Data: Lessons from Philadelphia

Under No Child Left Behind, urban school districts have increasingly turned to interim assessments, administered at regular intervals, to help gauge student progress in advance of annual state exams. These assessments have spawned growing debate among educators, assessment experts, and the testing industry: are they worth the significant investment of money and time? In Making the Most of Interim Assessment Data: Lessons from Philadelphia, Research for Action (RFA) weighs in on this issue. The School District of Philadelphia (SDP) was an early adopter of interim assessments, implementing the exams in 2003. Unlike teachers in some other regions, Philadelphia elementary and middle grades teachers rated these 'Benchmark' assessments highly. However, the study found that enthusiasm did not necessarily correlate with higher rates of student achievement. What did predict student success were three factors -- instructional leadership, collective responsibility, and use of the SDP's Core Curriculum. The report underscores the value of investment in ongoing data interpretation that emphasizes teachers' learning within formal instructional communities, such as grade groups of teachers. This research was funded by the Spencer Foundation and the William Penn Foundation