Professional Learning Portfolios for Argumentation in School Science

This paper reports on the use of portfolios in a continuing professional development programme to advance teachers’ skills in their pedagogy of argumentation. The programme adopted a cyclical process of expert input- teacher practice- sharing practice, in order for professional learning to include reflective analysis of growing accomplishment. Accomplishment was initially defined according to previous research and development on the teaching of argumentation, but was redefined during the programme as teachers shared practice and discussed their achievements. Portfolios were used to help teachers apply their learning, collate evidence of their accomplishment and share reflective analysis of practice with other colleagues on the programme. The paper includes extracts of two teachers’ portfolios; these provide evidence of each teacher’s developing accomplishment in the teaching of argumentation. Portfolios are idiosyncratic and are constructed according to an individual teacher’s motivations, interpretations and situations. Teachers need structure and guidance in creating purposeful portfolios that enhance reflective practice

Professional Learning Portfolios for Argumentation in School Science

This paper reports on the use of portfolios in a continuing professional development programme to advance teachers’ skills in their pedagogy of argumentation. The programme adopted a cyclical process of expert input- teacher practice- sharing practice, in order for professional learning to include reflective analysis of growing accomplishment. Accomplishment was initially defined according to previous research and development on the teaching of argumentation, but was redefined during the programme as teachers shared practice and discussed their achievements. Portfolios were used to help teachers apply their learning, collate evidence of their accomplishment and share reflective analysis of practice with other colleagues on the programme. The paper includes extracts of two teachers’ portfolios; these provide evidence of each teacher’s developing accomplishment in the teaching of argumentation. Portfolios are idiosyncratic and are constructed according to an individual teacher’s motivations, interpretations and situations. Teachers need structure and guidance in creating purposeful portfolios that enhance reflective practice

The volunteer leader in the Worcester Girl Scout Council, Inc

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston University, 1948. This item was digitized by the Internet Archive

Special And General Education Partners Co-Teaching Through The Structural Lens Of Complexity Theory

ABSTRACT Inclusive education is one of the most complex and demanding reforms in schools today. How school systems are structured may account for the many difficulties schools are having in strengthening, sustaining, and expanding inclusive education. Co-teaching is an instructional delivery method that offers a promising practice towards successful inclusive education. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to examine the perspectives of co-teachers actively engaged in expanding the practice of co-teaching to help leaders strengthen, sustain, and expand effective inclusive education for students with disabilities. Complexity theory provided the theoretical framework to explore how the co-teachers interacted and self-organized when faced with the complex phenomenon of improving and sustaining inclusive education in a school system. Data were gathered through semi-structured interviews with thirteen participants. The following four textural themes emerged: (a) participants believed in the philosophy of inclusive education, (b) participants experienced personal and professional growth, (c) quality of instruction improved as the result of co-teaching, and (d) participants perceived relationships were key to their success as co-teachers. The following three structural elements needed to strengthen, sustain, and expand inclusive education merged: (a) improved communication, (b) administrative support, and (c) administrative commitment. These themes are discussed and examined for the implication they hold for school personnel who are developing successful, sustainable, inclusive programs

Doubly stochastic continuous-time hidden Markov approach for analyzing genome tiling arrays

Microarrays have been developed that tile the entire nonrepetitive genomes of many different organisms, allowing for the unbiased mapping of active transcription regions or protein binding sites across the entire genome. These tiling array experiments produce massive correlated data sets that have many experimental artifacts, presenting many challenges to researchers that require innovative analysis methods and efficient computational algorithms. This paper presents a doubly stochastic latent variable analysis method for transcript discovery and protein binding region localization using tiling array data. This model is unique in that it considers actual genomic distance between probes. Additionally, the model is designed to be robust to cross-hybridized and nonresponsive probes, which can often lead to false-positive results in microarray experiments. We apply our model to a transcript finding data set to illustrate the consistency of our method. Additionally, we apply our method to a spike-in experiment that can be used as a benchmark data set for researchers interested in developing and comparing future tiling array methods. The results indicate that our method is very powerful, accurate and can be used on a single sample and without control experiments, thus defraying some of the overhead cost of conducting experiments on tiling arrays.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/09-AOAS248 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org