Teacher Vital Signs: A Two-Country Study of Teacher Vitality

Defining teacher vitality as the vigor, energy, passion, and joy teachers bring to their classroom, students and colleagues; this article describes an international, comparative, qualitative, phenomenological study of teachers’ lived experiences to determine the elements influencing teacher vitality. This is a two-country, multiple-case study of twenty-one middle and high school teachers who had taught ten to twenty years. In order to serve as a confirmation of the universality of the elements of teacher vitality, the study was not only conducted in two different schools in Idaho, but also was replicated in two different schools in Austria. In each of the four participating schools, both high and low-vitality teachers were matched for similarities, then investigated to determine why—in the same school, with the same administration and colleagues, and with the same struggles and challenges—some teachers maintain their vitality while other teachers lose their vitality and may even want to leave the profession. Data in the form of field notes, interview transcripts, categorized relevant information, composite comparisons, and anecdotal stories are analyzed to isolate patterns in teachers’ perceptions of their vitality in the classroom. The goal of this analysis is to identify common themes and to develop principles to help teachers receive life, vigor, and enjoyment from their work. “If I could make the same amount of money doing something else, I would leave teaching,” said the teacher sitting next to me on the last day of a high-energy, informative teachers’ conference. Nicole and I visited for several minutes and her statement continued to bother me, particularly as she described dragging herself throughout each day. I thought about her students who are missing that special passion and vitality in the classroom. Based on my conviction that students need teachers who are passionate about helping students learn, I probed further, only to discover that the only thing that kept this teacher in the profession year after year in her deflated condition was retirement benefits. As I reflected on our discussion, I was saddened to think that she had been at a three-day conference and had experienced no personal renewal, no spark of encouragement, or new connections to reenergize her for her role in the classroom. If I could have taken Nicole’s vital signs that day, what would I have measured? Using the analogy of physical vital signs that doctors and nurses take to analyze health, I began a search to determine the elements of teacher vitality“If I could make the same amount of money doing something else, I would leave teaching,” said the teacher sitting next to me on the last day of a high-energy, informative teachers’ conference. Nicole and I visited for several minutes and her statement continued to bother me, particularly as she described dragging herself throughout each day. I thought about her students who are missing that special passion and vitality in the classroom. Based on my conviction that students need teachers who are passionate about helping students learn, I probed further, only to discover that the only thing that kept this teacher in the profession year after year in her deflated condition was retirement benefits. As I reflected on our discussion, I was saddened to think that she had been at a three-day conference and had experienced no personal renewal, no spark of encouragement, or new connections to reenergize her for her role in the classroom. If I could have taken Nicole’s vital signs that day, what would I have measured? Using the analogy of physical vital signs that doctors and nurses take to analyze health, I began a search to determine the elements of teacher vitalit

Plan Integrated Lessons for Deep Learning and Life Change

God has given everyone the capacity to learn deeply so that we will follow Him with “a whole heart and with a willing mind” (2 Chron. 28:9). This essay focuses on lesson planning that draws students to learn deeply and develop skills and habits that lead to life change. It first explores the background of integrated learning by analyzing models endorsed in the field of education. It introduces a lesson plan that integrates the head, heart, hands and habits and that promotes a heart response for each phase of learning. Finally, it reminds teachers how essential it is to prayerfully cooperate with the work of the Holy Spirit. When teachers plan lessons in ways that encourage students to put effort, depth, and passion into learning, the results can be deep and transformational

SUSY Contributions to RbR_b and Top Decay

I report on a systematic analysis of the MSSM parameter space to obtain the best SUSY solution to the $R_b$ anomaly within the constraint of top quark decay. Phenomenological implications for top decay and direct stop production at the Tevatron collider are discussed.Comment: Latex file (3 pages)+ 2 ps files containing figures. Invited talk at SUSY96, Maryland, May 199

Using an Interdisciplinary Case Study to Incorporate Quantitative Reasoning in Social Work, Nursing, and Mathematics

Through the national consortium, SUMMIT-P, Ferris State University faculty collaborated to develop and scaffold mathematics and quantitative reasoning across disciplines to reduce math anxiety. Participants in this collaborative group included faculty from social work, nursing, and mathematics who developed a case study on a Hurricane Katrina scenario that necessitated calculating the need for emergency shelter, water, food, and medicine, and as a response to the potential for a Malaria outbreak. This particular case study allowed faculty to use the lens of social justice to teach mathematical concepts and provided an avenue for nursing and social work students to engage in mathematics through a case study germane to their profession. This article discusses the process of developing this case study and focuses on the successes and challenges faculty and students faced while the parts of the case study were implemented in the varied disciplines. This discussion also includes sidebar contributions from faculty at other SUMMIT-P institutions who have engaged in similar cross-disciplinary collaborations

Phylogeography and Meta-Community Analysis in QGIS

Biodiversity Institute, The University of KansasPlatinum Sponsors KU School of Business Gold Sponsors Bartlett & West KU Department of Geography KU Environmental Studies Program KU Institute for Policy & Social Research KU Libraries Silver Sponsors Kansas Biological Survey KU Center for Global & International Studies Bronze Sponsors Global Information Systems State of Kansas Data Access and Support Center (DASC) KU Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets (CReSIS

Enabling Biodiversity Research with Open Source Workflow, GIS and Metadata Tools

Software developer, Informatics at the KU Biodiversity InstitutePlatinum Sponsors Coca-Cola Gold Sponsors KU Department of Geography KU Institute for Policy & Social Research KU Libraries GIS and Data Services State of Kansas Data Access and Support Center (DASC) Wilson & Company Engineers and Architects Silver Sponsors Bartlett & West Kansas Applied Remote Sensing Program KansasView Bronze Sponsors Garmin KU Biodiversity Institut

Adding Phylogenies to QGIS and Lifemapper for Evolutionary Studies of Species Diversity

Phylogenetic data from the “Tree of Life” have explicit spatial and temporal components when paired with species distribution and ecological data for testing contributions to biological community assembly at different geographic scales of species interaction. Important questions in biology about the degree of niche suitability and whether the history of a community’s assembly for an area can affect whether the species in a community are more or less phylogenetically related can be answered using several different spatially-filtered measures of phylogenetic diversity. Phylogenetic analyses which support the description of ecological processes are usually achieved in a handful of software libraries that are narrowly focused on a single set of tasks. Very few applications scale to large datasets and most do not have an explicit spatial component without relying on external visualization packages. This prompted us to explore bringing phylogenetic data into an open-source GIS environment. The Lifemapper Macroecology/Range & Diversity QGIS plug-in is a custom plug-in which we use to calculate and map biodiversity indices that describe range-diversity relationships derived from large multi-species datasets. We describe extensions to that plug-in which expand the Lifemapper set of ecological tools to link phylogenies to spatially derived ’diversity field’ statistics that describe the phylogenetic composition of natural communities

EDUC 323: Teaching Reading in the Elementary and Middle School

Современное христианств