Teacher Education Frontiers


Book Description

Education is the most important investment in the long haul and the quality of education impacts on nation building, people's capacity for adaptation, value creation and innovation. The anchoring factor in successful education is the quality of the teacher. This edition on teacher education addresses the development of new teacher competencies in light of global changes. Teacher education must focus on producing thinking and innovative teachers - those who are not only good at classroom practices but also courageous in engaging the environment for real world learning. Recent international studies on the impact of educational reforms on student learning and achievement also point to the importance of focusing on teacher recruitment, teacher education and teacher development. What can we learn from the teacher policies and practices of some of the world's best performing education systems? How do some of the best systems cope with and envisage the future? What insights can policy makers, researchers and practitioners gain from the values paradigms, pedagogical, psychological and technological perspectives in innovating teacher education?The views presented in Teacher Education Frontiers: International Perspectives on Policy and Practice for Building New Teacher Competencies will help fill the gap for a much needed source of reference for policy leaders, researchers and practitioners to innovate and improve teacher education research, policy and practice.Also available in the Gale Virtual Reference Library (eBook).eBook pricing varies according to the size of your institution. Please contact us for details.eBook ISBN-13: 9789814392792




New Frontiers in Teaching and Learning English


Book Description

The contributions to this volume explore several focal issues related to the global spread of English and their implications for English language teaching, providing both theoretical and empirical perspectives on recent research and implications in educational terms. The volume is divided into three thematic sections, namely "Developments in ELF research and pedagogic implications", "Raising teachers' awareness of ELF", and "ELF and ELT practices". The book provides up-to-date perspectives on the issues, implications and repercussions that findings in ELF research can have for ELT practices. The contributors are all scholars and researchers who have long been engaged in ELF-related research, and who have undertaken operational and practical work in the field, and, as such, offer novel perspectives on the effects of EFL research on the teaching and learning of English. The volume also presents the findings of innovative projects in teacher education, involving pre- and in-service teachers, providing exemplificative good practices of possible new routes into pluralistic, ELF-aware and ELF-oriented didactic perspectives.




Language Teacher Cognition


Book Description

This book explores the topic of teacher cognition, making use of sociocultural theory as a framework to understand what teachers know, think, believe and do in their professional contexts through ‘applied’ conversation analysis. The author examines what teaching and learning mean to teachers by analyzing the interactional work they do with their students, considering when and why teachers make interactive decisions as well as how they utilize new technological tools to address their pedagogical objectives. After discussing how teachers construct identities and display emotions in the classroom, she presents suggestions for language teacher education and development, pedagogy improvement and teacher knowledge. This book will be of interest to language teachers and teacher trainers, as well as students and scholars of applied linguistics and sociocultural theory.




Teaching AI


Book Description

Get the tools, resources and insights you need to explore artificial intelligence in the classroom and explore what students need to know about living in a world with AI. For many, artificial intelligence, or AI, may seem like science fiction, or inherently overwhelming. The reality is that AI is already being applied in industry and, for many of us, in our daily lives as well. A better understanding of AI can help you make informed decisions in the classroom that will impact the future of your students. Drawing from a broad variety of expert voices from countries including Australia, Japan, and South Africa, as well as educators from around the world and underrepresented student voices, this book explores some of the ways AI can improve education. These include educating learners about AI, teaching them about living in a world where they will be surrounded by AI and helping educators understand how they can use AI to augment human ability. Each chapter offers activities and questions to help you deepen your understanding, try out new concepts and reflect on the information presented. Links to media artifacts from trusted sources will help make your learning experience more dynamic while also providing additional resources to use in your classroom. This book: • Offers a unique approach to the topic, with chapter opening scenes, case studies, and featured student voices. • Discusses a variety of ways to teach students about AI, through design thinking, project-based learning and STEM connections. • Includes lesson ideas, activities and tools for exploring AI with your students. • Includes references to films and other media you can use in class to start discussions on AI or inspire design thinking and STEM projects. In Teaching AI, you’ll learn what AI is, how it works and how to use it to better prepare students in a world with increased human-computer interaction.




A Handbook for Student Engagement in Higher Education


Book Description

Drawing on scholarship as well as established practice, A Handbook for Student Engagement in Higher Education is a sector-leading volume that unpacks the concept of student engagement. It provides ideas and examples alongside compelling theory- and research-based evidence to offer a thorough and innovative exploration of how students and staff can work together to genuinely transform the higher education learning experience. Providing readers with evidence from successfully embedded schemes, the book uses case studies and practical, workable examples from a variety of international institutions. With the insight of world-leading contributors, it showcases what good practice looks like in higher education institutions across the globe. Simultaneously collating a wealth of contemporary research, this book creates vivid connections between theories and student engagement in higher education, with chapter topics including: Creating relationships between students, staff and universities Offering non-traditional students extracurricular opportunities Taking a students-as-partners approach Critically reflecting on identities, particularities and relationships The future of student engagement. In a fast-developing and significantly shifting area, this book is essential reading for higher education managers and those working directly in the field of student engagement.




Exploring Language Teacher Efficacy in Japan


Book Description

This book examines language teacher efficacy beliefs, focusing on the individual and collective beliefs of Japanese high school teachers. It discusses personal and collective dimensions of language teacher efficacy related to personal second language (L2) capability, instructional L2 efficacy and collective capability towards collaboration. The book provides a detailed discussion about the ways in which these beliefs develop and situates the findings within the wider field of teacher efficacy research. It helps further understanding of factors that may influence teacher self-efficacy and suggests new directions for research to explore in future studies. It will appeal to postgraduates and researchers with an interest in language teacher cognition, the psychology of language teaching and those in the wider fields of self-efficacy, teacher efficacy and teacher agency. It is also of use to those with an interest in the high school English education system in Japan, as well as researchers investigating similar contexts.




Frontier Teachers


Book Description

If countless books and movies are to be believed, America’s Wild West was, at heart, a world of cowboys and Indians, sheriffs and gunslingers, scruffy settlers and mountain men—a man’s world. Here, Chris Enss, in the latest of her popular books to take on this stereotype, tells the stories of twelve courageous women who faced down schoolrooms full of children on the open prairies and in the mining towns of the Old West. Between 1847 and 1858, more than 600 women teachers traveled across the untamed frontier to provide youngsters with an education, and the numbers grew rapidly in the decades to come, as women took advantage of one of the few career opportunities for respectable work for ladies of the era. Enduring hardship, the dozen women whose stories are movingly told in the pages of Frontier Teachers demonstrated the utmost dedication and sacrifice necessary to bring formal education to the Wild West. As immortalized in works of art and literature, for many students their women teachers were heroic figures who introduced them to a world of possibilities—and changed America forever.




Language Education and Emotions


Book Description

Language Education and Emotions presents innovative, empirical research into the influence of emotions and affective factors in language education, both in L1 and in foreign language education. It offers a comprehensive overview of studies authored and co-authored by researchers from all over the world. The volume opens and ends with "backbone" contributions by two of the discipline’s most reputed scholars: Jane Arnold (Spain) and Jean-Marc Dewaele (United Kingdom). This book broadens our understanding of emotions, including well-known concepts such as foreign language anxiety as well as addressing the emotions that have only recently received scientific attention, driven by the positive psychology movement. Chapters explore emotions from the perspective of the language learner and the language teacher, and in relation to educational processes. A number of contributions deal with traditional, school-based contexts, whereas others study new settings of foreign language education such as migration. The book paints a picture of the broad scale of approaches used to study this topic and offers new and relevant insights for the field of language education and emotions. This book will be of great interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the field of language education, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and applied linguistics.




Promoting Spontaneous Use of Learning and Reasoning Strategies


Book Description

In this book, scholars from around the world develop viable answers to the question of how it may be possible to promote students’ spontaneity in the use of learning and reasoning strategies. They combine their expertise to put forward new theories and models for understanding the underlying mechanisms; provide details of new research to address pertinent questions and problems; and describe classroom practices that have proven successful in promoting spontaneous strategy use. This book is a must for educators and researchers who truly care that schooling should cultivate learning and reasoning strategies in students that would prepare and serve them for life. A seminal resource, this book will address the basic problem that many educators are well acquainted with: that students can learn how to effectively use learning and reasoning strategies but not use them of their own volition or in settings other than the one in which they learned the strategies.




Language Teacher Educator Identity


Book Description

The author examines who language teacher educators are in the field of language teaching and learning. This includes a description of the different types of language teacher educators working in a range of professional and institutional contexts, an analysis of the reflections of a group of experienced English teacher educators working in Colombia and enrolled in a doctoral program to continue their professional development, and an exposition of the work that language teacher educators do, particularly in the domains of pedagogy, research, and service and leadership (institutional and community). All of this is done with the aim of understanding the identities that language teacher educators negotiate and are ascribed in their working contexts. The author emphasizes the need for research to pay attention to the lives and work of language teacher educators, and offers forty research questions as an indication of possible future research directions.