Teachers' professional development

Although English language teaching professionals are commi ed to ongoing continuous professional development, economic and workload factors may impede their ability to a end a traditional 2-day annual conference. Teachers have turned to social media as an alternative approach to self-directed professional development. In particular, Twi er has become the choice of many educators with its potential for networking and collaboration. There are scheduled Twi er chats held regularly on a variety of topics of interest to language teaching professionals, including #CdnELTchat. In addition, connected educators have built a community of practice on the Twi er platform and provide inspiration and support to their colleagues online. In this article, four connected educators who have found their community on Twi er share their stories of how they got started on Twi er, how they connected with each other, and what they value about the open Twi er platform. Bien que les professionnels de l'enseignement de l'anglais s'engagent à poursuivre un perfectionnement professionnel continu, des facteurs économiques ou des charges de travail peuvent les empêcher d'assister à une conférence annuelle tra-ditionnelle de 2 jours. Les enseignantes et enseignants trouvent dans les réseaux sociaux une solution de rechange qui leur permet de veiller à leur propre perfec-tionnement professionnel. Twi er, notamment, est le nouveau choix de nombreux éducateurs et éducatrices en raison des possibilités de réseautage et de collaboration qu'il présente. Des sessions de clavardage ont régulièrement lieu sur une variété de sujets présentant un intérêt pour les professionnels de l'enseignement des langues, et ce, notamment sur #CdnELTchat. Qui plus est, les éducatrices et éducateurs connectés ont construit une communauté de praticiens sur la plate-forme Twi er et fournissent une inspiration et un soutien à leurs collègues en ligne. Dans cet article, quatre éducatrices connectées qui ont découvert leur com-munauté sur Twi er décrivent comment elles ont commencé à se servir de Twit-ter, comment elles se sont connectées les unes aux autres, et ce qu'elles apprécient le plus sur la plateforme ouverte de Twi er.

A body of knowledge is an essential component of being and becoming an expert in any area.  To become an expert teacher, there are four kinds of knowledge necessary: pedagogical knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, content knowledge, and knowledge of learners and learning.  Improving and enhancing education is not overly-complicated.  Simple enable and provide incentives for teachers to develop all four types of knowledge.  A simple, pragmatic, and economic way to develop pedagogical content knowledge can be found at: www.Readocity.com

After demonstrating that business management applications are unfruitful in managing academic professionals, this paper proceeds to the real dilemma in academic administration: control vs. autonomy.  The artistry of balancing administrative control and academic freedom is highlighted followed by a discussion of some specific career strategies that might mediate the administrator/faculty clash.

In this study, it is aimed to provide professional development of teachers by improving their classroom teaching based on dynamic professional development approach. The research was conducted as experimental action research. In the first step of the action research, interview technique was used to determine the opinions of teachers and school administrators about the teachers' professional development problems. In the second step, data were collected from the students who volunteered in the school where the action research will be carried out to determine the professional development levels of teachers. In the third step, teachers were given feedback about the answers. In the fourth step, teachers prepared action plans by reflecting on feedback. In the fifth step, the teachers were taught to teach according to the action plans they prepared. In the last step, in order to determine whether the plans are effective, the procedures in the first step were repeated and the professional development levels of teachers were re-determined, and the final results were compared with the first results. As a result of the research, it was determined that the teachers' professional development could be provided when they implement the action plans that they prepare by reflecting on the student evaluations. It was determined that teachers faced obstacles in their professional development and existing professional development activities were carried out with unplanned and mere information transfer without considering the needs of teachers. It is suggested that teachers should be provided according to the needs of their professional development, to make use of the observations of the students in order to determine the needs and to plan the development activities to respond to the teachers' practices in the classroom and to solve the teacher's problems.

Highlights:

Description of an apprenticeship-based model for mathematics professional developers.

Positively and consistently influenced course participants' knowledge across instructors.

Positively influenced course participants' self-efficacy; more variability in change in self-efficacy across instructors.

The purpose of the study was to examine the nature of planning education for sustainable development of schools in the South-south of Nigeria. The design of the study was ex-post facto. The population of the study consisted of 50,000 education stakeholders from the selected states of south-south of Nigeria. Three hypotheses were formulated to guide the study simple random sampling technique was used to select a sample of 499 respondents. The instrument used for data collection was the resconglar made questionnaire. The data was analyzed using one way analysis of variance (ANOVA). Findings indicated that forecasting projection, data and target setting are very essential input in planning education successfully. 2

La investigación en educación debe trascender las propuestas de innovación meramente teóricas, para aportar a realidades prácticas. Se han generado muchas teorías abstractas en torno a la educación, pero persisten prácticas pedagógicas obsoletas. Así, el capítulo de libro resultado de investigación establece estrategias para que la educación no se quede en teoría sino que su investigación pueda apropiar dimensiones específicas. Tales dimensiones son la personal, social, normativa y científica. En este sentido, se espera que la educación se pueda consolidar desde la investigación en una auténtica herramienta de transformación social.

Interviews with U.S.-based, justice-oriented, women of Color educators reveal critical consciousness embedded in their positionality, across all domains of their life, not something cultivated just in their teacher development. Through their families and communities, critical educational experiences from K-16+, and continued access to critical discourse, critical consciousness was both an epistemology (a way of being) and an ontology (a way of knowing). Recognizing the complex and continuous labor that goes into developing as a justice-oriented teacher, we argue that teacher education programs and schools must recruit and support those already engaged in developing their critical consciousness.

In this working research paper I draw on empirical work I have been involved in since 2016, involving over 1200 teacher mentors, to discuss a key issue that has arisen – the professional knowledge required to mentor effectively. This work includes the development of a curriculum for training school-based mentors of trainee and newly qualified teachers, Enhance your Mentoring Skills, delivered regionally across South Yorkshire (Pountney and Grasmeder, 2018), as well as nationally for mentors of mid-career teachers on the Chartered Teacher programme of the Chartered College of Teaching. I begin by discussing briefly what is known about teachers’ mentoring practices, and understandings of what constitutes professional knowledge. Next, I discuss the nature of mentor teachers’ learning for practice, and the difficulties inherent in articulating this to themselves, and to others. I illustrate this with examples, to show how the problem can be differentiated in two dimensions of meaning: the first is closeness to context (semantic gravity) and the second is the degree of conceptual complexity (semantic density). Finally, I discuss the need for a specialised language for mentoring and how this can promote the professional status of mentors, as well as building knowledge about, and for, effective mentoring practice.

The teacher is the most significant variable in determining the quality of reading instruction students receive. How do we make sure that teachers of reading have the necessary knowledge and research-based strategies to enable them to help all students reach their full literacy potential,?

The Madeline Hunter lesson plan format was popular in the late 1970's and 1980's and is still being used today (Hunter, 1982; Hunter, 2004). Hunter's original purpose here was to provide a platform that would enable educators to have conversations about effective teaching. However, it quickly moved away from being a conversational platform to becoming a teaching recipe. Schools and teacher preparation programs began to use the seven elements described in Hunter's model of instruction to observe and evaluate teachers. Just Follow the Recipe.  The Hunter Direct Instruction Model (HDIM) is similar to other direct instruction models. These models reduce the act of teaching to following a set of steps.

With the permeation of the Internet in teachers' personal and professional lives, teachers are going online to connect, share ideas and expand their learning opportunities. This qualitative study focuses on the use of digital applications that leverage opportunities for teachers in the design phase, that is, at the time they are developing and curating curriculum materials and designing learning sequences within their discipline areas before implementation in the classroom. Data drawn for this paper are part of a research project examining ICT-expert teachers' approaches to their ongoing online professional learning. Semi-structured interviews of internationally recognised ICT experts, specifically from Australia, Europe and the United States, are the main data source. The findings suggest that each teacher leveraged their online social media as their first approach or starting point within their design activities , with a curiosity to investigate the pedagogical application of a 'new' tool. These teachers looked first to the expertise of the colleague for their recommendation of the tool, engaging in little pedagogical reasoning before implementation. Additionally, elaboration of the term 'sharing' is provided for deeper understandings of the ways in which teachers engage in their professional learning networks.

Educational system of a country plays a key part in rearing a mentally and physically rich nation. The crucial role of teachers in the development of this system and training creative students is undeniable. Teacher creativity research has espoused the role of different factors, including teacher motivation, self-efficacy and burnout in creating more teaching creativity and increased teaching success. However, the findings of research in this regard are still inconclusive. The researchers in the current study embarked on probing the relationship between Iranian high school teachers" creativity on the one hand, and their motivation, self-efficacy and burnout, on the other. In so doing, 100 teachers were recruited as the study participants. To conduct the study, a set of questionnaires-Torrance"s (2008) test of creativity, Hackman and Oldham"s (1980) teacher motivation scale, Bandura"s (1997) teacher Self-Efficacy questionnaire, and Maslach and Jackson"s (1981) Burnout Inventory-were utilized. The results of the study showed that there is a significant positive correlation between teachers" motivation and self-efficacy, on the one hand, and their creativity, on the other. Moreover, a significant negative correlation was found between teacher burnout and creativity. The implications of the findings are discussed throughout the paper.