Teachers’ Worlds and Work


Book Description

Teacher professionalism in changing times -- Professional identities : teaching as emotional work -- Commitment as a key to quality : variations in teachers' work and lives -- A capacity for resilience -- Teachers' professional learning and development : combining the functional and attitudinal -- Learning as a school-led social endeavour -- The importance of high quality leadership -- Understanding complexity, building quality




New Understandings of Teacher's Work


Book Description

Within educational research that seeks to understand the quality and effectiveness of teachers and school, the role emotions play in educational change and school improvement has become a subject of increasing importance. In this book, scholars from around the world explore the connections between teaching, teacher education, teacher emotions, educational change and school leadership. (For this text, “teacher” encompasses pre-service teachers, in-service teachers and headteachers, or principals). New Understandings of Teacher’s Work: Emotions and Educational Change is divided into four themes: educational change; teachers and teaching; teacher education; and emotions in leadership. The chapters address the key basic and substantive issues relative to the central emotional themes of the following: teachers’ lives and careers in teaching; the role emotions play in teachers’ work; lives and leadership roles in the context of educational reform; the working conditions; the context-specific dynamics of reform work; school/teacher cultures; individual biographies that affect teachers’ emotional well-being; and the implications for the management and leadership of educational change, and for development, of teacher education.




Teaching, Learning and the Curriculum in Secondary Schools


Book Description

The articles which make up this reader provide both overview and analysis of the central issues in secondary education. Focused closely upon what it means to teach and learn in the modern secondary classroom, this book provides invaluable insight into the development of secondary education today. It is an ideal introduction to the task of teachers in secondary schools. Issues covered in the book include:the new agenda around teaching and learning effective pedagogy the teacher-student relationship teaching, learning and the digital agegrouping by ability managing the cu.




The Teaching for Understanding Guide


Book Description

Companion guide to: Teaching for understanding / Martha Stone Wiske, editor. 1998.




The Teaching Brain


Book Description

“A significant contribution to understanding the interaction among teachers, students, the environment, and the content of learning” (Herbert Kohl, education advocate and author). What is at work in the mind of a five-year-old explaining the game of tag to a new friend? What is going on in the head of a thirty-five-year-old parent showing a first-grader how to button a coat? And what exactly is happening in the brain of a sixty-five-year-old professor discussing statistics with a room full of graduate students? While research about the nature and science of learning abounds, shockingly few insights into how and why humans teach have emerged—until now. Countering the dated yet widely held presumption that teaching is simply the transfer of knowledge from one person to another, The Teaching Brain weaves together scientific research and real-life examples to show that teaching is a dynamic interaction and an evolutionary cognitive skill that develops from birth to adulthood. With engaging, accessible prose, Harvard researcher Vanessa Rodriguez reveals what it actually takes to become an expert teacher. At a time when all sides of the teaching debate tirelessly seek to define good teaching—or even how to build a better teacher—The Teaching Brain upends the misguided premises for how we measure the success of teachers. “A thoughtful analysis of current educational paradigms . . . Rodriguez’s case for altering pedagogy to match the fluctuating dynamic forces in the classroom is both convincing and steeped in common sense.” —Publishers Weekly




Learners & Pedagogy


Book Description

This textbook looks at the relationship between views of learning, learners, knowledge and pedagogy. Worldwide, education is being subjected to a succession of policy initiatives and political interventions. Questions of what should be taught, and how, are subjects of constant debate, seldom based on research findings or theoretical principles. The articles in this volume have been chosen to show how theories can provide frameworks for analysing pedagogy and to create a dialogue about new possibilities for advancing practice. Learners and Pedagogy is a Course Reader for The Open University course E836 Learning Curriculum and Assessment.




Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain


Book Description

A bold, brain-based teaching approach to culturally responsive instruction To close the achievement gap, diverse classrooms need a proven framework for optimizing student engagement. Culturally responsive instruction has shown promise, but many teachers have struggled with its implementation—until now. In this book, Zaretta Hammond draws on cutting-edge neuroscience research to offer an innovative approach for designing and implementing brain-compatible culturally responsive instruction. The book includes: Information on how one’s culture programs the brain to process data and affects learning relationships Ten “key moves” to build students’ learner operating systems and prepare them to become independent learners Prompts for action and valuable self-reflection




Understanding by Design


Book Description

What is understanding and how does it differ from knowledge? How can we determine the big ideas worth understanding? Why is understanding an important teaching goal, and how do we know when students have attained it? How can we create a rigorous and engaging curriculum that focuses on understanding and leads to improved student performance in today's high-stakes, standards-based environment? Authors Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe answer these and many other questions in this second edition of Understanding by Design. Drawing on feedback from thousands of educators around the world who have used the UbD framework since its introduction in 1998, the authors have greatly revised and expanded their original work to guide educators across the K-16 spectrum in the design of curriculum, assessment, and instruction. With an improved UbD Template at its core, the book explains the rationale of backward design and explores in greater depth the meaning of such key ideas as essential questions and transfer tasks. Readers will learn why the familiar coverage- and activity-based approaches to curriculum design fall short, and how a focus on the six facets of understanding can enrich student learning. With an expanded array of practical strategies, tools, and examples from all subject areas, the book demonstrates how the research-based principles of Understanding by Design apply to district frameworks as well as to individual units of curriculum. Combining provocative ideas, thoughtful analysis, and tested approaches, this new edition of Understanding by Design offers teacher-designers a clear path to the creation of curriculum that ensures better learning and a more stimulating experience for students and teachers alike.




The New Lives of Teachers


Book Description

The New Lives of Teachers examines the varied, often demanding commitments on teachers’ lives today as they attempt to pursue careers in primary and secondary education. Building upon Huberman’s classic study, it probes not only teachers’ everyday lives, but also the ways in which they negotiate the pitfalls of professional development and the different life and work ‘scenarios’ that challenge their sense of identity, well-being and effectiveness. The authors provide a new evidence-based framework to investigate and understand teachers’ lives. Using a range of contemporary examples of teaching, they demonstrate that it is the relative success with which teachers manage various personal, work and external policy challenges that is a key factor in the satisfaction, commitment, well-being and effectiveness of teachers in different contexts and at different times in their work and lives. The positive and negative influences upon career and professional development and the influences of school leadership, culture, colleagues and conditions are also shown to be profound and relate directly to teacher retention and the work-life balance agenda. The implications of these insights for teaching quality and teacher retention are discussed. This book will be of special interest to teachers, teachers’ associations, policy makers, school leaders, and teacher educators, and should also be of interest to students on postgraduate courses.




Powerful Learning


Book Description

In Powerful Learning, Linda Darling-Hammond and an impressive list of co-authors offer a clear, comprehensive, and engaging exploration of the most effective classroom practices. They review, in practical terms, teaching strategies that generate meaningful K–2 student understanding, and occur both within the classroom walls and beyond. The book includes rich stories, as well as online videos of innovative classrooms and schools, that show how students who are taught well are able to think critically, employ flexible problem-solving, and apply learned skills and knowledge to new situations.