Exploring Mathematics and Science Teachers' Knowledge


Book Description

Globally, mathematics and science education faces three crucial challenges: an increasing need for mathematics and science graduates; a declining enrolment of school graduates into university studies in these disciplines; and the varying quality of school teaching in these areas. Alongside these challenges, internationally more and more non-specialists are teaching mathematics and science at both primary and secondary levels, and research evidence has revealed how gaps and limitations in teachers’ content understandings can lead to classroom practices that present barriers to students’ learning. This book addresses these issues by investigating how teachers’ content knowledge interacts with their pedagogies across diverse contexts and perspectives. This knowledge-practice nexus is examined across mathematics and science teaching, traversing schooling phases and countries, with an emphasis on contexts of disadvantage. These features push the boundaries of research into teachers’ content knowledge. The book’s combination of mathematics and science enriches each discipline for the reader, and contributes to our understandings of student attainment by examining the nature of specialised content knowledge needed for competent teaching within and across the two domains. Exploring Mathematics and Science Teachers’ Knowledge will be key reading for researchers, doctoral students and postgraduates with a focus on Mathematics, Science and teacher knowledge research.




Equity, Teaching Practice and the Curriculum


Book Description

This book explores how different classroom discourses and concepts of knowledge permeate teaching in high- and low-performance classrooms. Drawing on empirical research from classrooms in Sweden, it presents a theory-based framework for classroom research. The book examines the central concepts of knowledge, curriculum, pedagogy and equity to discuss differences in access to knowledge and the implications of these differences for students’ future opportunities and well-being. It analyses the relationships between different teaching factors and discusses teaching from democratic perspectives developed within curriculum theory. Combining insights from curriculum theory with insights from sociolinguistic and sociocultural classroom research, this project breaks new ground in how knowledge from curriculum content is recontextualised into concrete teaching practices in the context of a standards-based curriculum. Providing valuable insights into the intersections between classroom practice, student performance and teacher expectations, this book will be of great interest to academics, researchers and post-graduate students in the fields of curriculum research, education policy, teacher education and classroom practice.




Affective Teacher Education


Book Description

This book helps teachers to visualize teaching and learning holistically, linking the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that students need to know, do, and feel, to achieve in school and become lifelong learners.




Chemical Education: Towards Research-based Practice


Book Description

Chemical education is essential to everybody because it deals with ideas that play major roles in personal, social, and economic decisions. This book is based on three principles: that all aspects of chemical education should be associated with research; that the development of opportunities for chemical education should be both a continuous process and be linked to research; and that the professional development of all those associated with chemical education should make extensive and diverse use of that research. It is intended for: pre-service and practising chemistry teachers and lecturers; chemistry teacher educators; chemical education researchers; the designers and managers of formal chemical curricula; informal chemical educators; authors of textbooks and curriculum support materials; practising chemists and chemical technologists. It addresses: the relation between chemistry and chemical education; curricula for chemical education; teaching and learning about chemical compounds and chemical change; the development of teachers; the development of chemical education as a field of enquiry. This is mainly done in respect of the full range of formal education contexts (schools, universities, vocational colleges) but also in respect of informal education contexts (books, science centres and museums).




Exploring Teacher Educator Knowledge


Book Description

Exploring Teacher Educator Knowledge lays the foundation for teacher educators, promoting strategies and methodology to support and foster practical and theoretical knowledge.




Mindstorms


Book Description

In this revolutionary book, a renowned computer scientist explains the importance of teaching children the basics of computing and how it can prepare them to succeed in the ever-evolving tech world. Computers have completely changed the way we teach children. We have Mindstorms to thank for that. In this book, pioneering computer scientist Seymour Papert uses the invention of LOGO, the first child-friendly programming language, to make the case for the value of teaching children with computers. Papert argues that children are more than capable of mastering computers, and that teaching computational processes like de-bugging in the classroom can change the way we learn everything else. He also shows that schools saturated with technology can actually improve socialization and interaction among students and between students and teachers. Technology changes every day, but the basic ways that computers can help us learn remain. For thousands of teachers and parents who have sought creative ways to help children learn with computers, Mindstorms is their bible.




Exploring More Signature Pedagogies


Book Description

What is distinctive about the ways specific disciplines are traditionally taught, and what kinds of learning do they promote? Do they inspire the habits of the discipline itself, or do they inadvertently contradict or ignore those disciplines? By analyzing assumptions about often unexamined teaching practices, their history, and relevance in contemporary learning contexts, this book offers teachers a fresh way to both think about their impact on students and explore more effective ways to engage students in authentic habits and practices. This companion volume to Exploring Signature Pedagogies covers disciplines not addressed in the earlier volume and further expands the scope of inquiry by interrogating the teaching methods in interdisciplinary fields and a number of professions, critically returning to Lee S. Shulman’s origins of the concept of signature pedagogies. This volume also differs from the first by including authors from across the United States, as well as Ireland and Australia.The first section examines the signature pedagogies in the humanities and fine arts fields of philosophy, foreign language instruction, communication, art and design, and arts entrepreneurship. The second section describes signature pedagogies in the social and natural sciences: political science, economics, and chemistry. Section three highlights the interdisciplinary fields of Ignatian pedagogy, women’s studies, and disability studies; and the book concludes with four chapters on professional pedagogies – nursing, occupational therapy, social work, and teacher education – that illustrate how these pedagogies change as the social context changes, as their knowledge base expands, or as online delivery of instruction increases.




Exploring Teacher Recruitment and Retention


Book Description

This thought-provoking collection examines the challenge of teacher shortages that is of international concern. It presents multiple perspectives, and explores the commonalities and differences in approaches from around the world to understand possible solutions for the current teacher workforce crisis. Acknowledging that solutions to attract and retain teachers vary by country, region and in some cases locality, the contributors scrutinise a range of workforce planning interventions at local and government level, including financial incentives and early career support. The book draws on different perspectives to understand a range of problems that negatively affect teacher recruitment and retention, unpicking key challenges, including links between the disadvantages of location and access to teachers for coastal and rural schools, rising pupil numbers, declining school budgets and the role of professional learning in raising teacher status. Abundant in critiques, research-informed positions and context-specific discussions about the impact of teacher workforce supply and shortages, this book will be valuable reading for teacher educators, educational leaders, education policy makers and academics in the field.




Values and Professional Knowledge in Teacher Education


Book Description

Values and Professional Knowledge in Teacher Education provides distinctive insights into potential strengths to develop trainee teachers’ values within school-based training. Looking at the personal moral and political values of trainees as fundamental to strategic and critical professional knowledge, the book considers a key question about training contexts: to what extent is teacher education embedded in the purpose and rationale of the school so that trainees’ values, and consequently their autonomy and identity, can flourish? The book is research focused and offers case studies that offer vicarious experiences which resonate with the professional needs and concerns of teacher educators. The book opens with a reflective narrative on the experience of a teacher educator in England. Further chapters explore international perspectives on values and professional knowledge in teacher education, applied theoretical principles for developing the relationship between trainee teachers’ values and their professional knowledge, the impact of university and school-based training contexts on the development of values-based professional knowledge, and the challenge of a values-based professional knowledge to current teacher education practice. Values and Professional Knowledge in Teacher Education will be of great interest to academics and post-graduate students in the field of education, university and school-based teacher educators, trainee teachers, researchers, policymakers and school leaders.




International Perspectives on Teacher Knowledge, Beliefs and Opportunities to Learn


Book Description

This book reviews the Teacher Education and Development Study: Learning to Teach Mathematics, which tested 23,000 primary and secondary level math teachers from 16 countries on content knowledge and asked their opinions on beliefs and opportunities to learn.