Teacher+Training

=Teacher Training=

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@http://vickeryb.edublogs.org/

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May 2005 | Volume **62** | Number **8** **Supporting New Educators** Pages 36-39 []

INNOVATIVE AND EFFECTIVE PROFESSIONAL LEARNING FOR STUDENT ACCOMPLISHMENT **Professor Stephen Dinham** //Research Director – Teaching, Learning and Leadership// //ACER 2008//




 * Senate Inquiry into Teacher Education** (2007) at this link

Grattan Report May 2010 [] at this link



International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE; __[|www.iste.org/]__)

Educational Testing Service (ETS) iSkills project (__[|www.ets.org/iskills/]__

A Framework for Learning to Teach Charlotte Danielson at this link ASCD

//from above link - Educational psychologist Lee Shulman (2004) illustrated the complexity of teaching by comparing the fields of teaching and medicine. He noted that teachers have classrooms of 25–35 students, whereas doctors treat only a single patient at a time. Even when working with a reading group of 6–8 students, teachers are overseeing the decoding skills, comprehension, word attack, performance, and engagement of those students while simultaneously keeping tabs on the learning of the other two dozen students in the room. "The only time a physician could possibly encounter a situation of comparable complexity," Shulman pointed out, "would be in the emergency room of a hospital during or after a natural disaster" (p. 258). He concluded that classroom teaching "is perhaps the most complex, most challenging, and most demanding, subtle, nuanced, and frightening activity that our species has ever invented" (p. 504).// //Most teachers would concur. No preservice preparation program, regardless of its quality, can adequately prepare teachers for all they need to know. The complexity of the craft requires ongoing teacher learning. Indeed, learning to teach is a career-long endeavor. The most experienced teachers acknowledge, frequently with pride, that they are still perfecting their craft.//

UoW T&L Good Practice at this link

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=Teacher quality - as assessed by students= Created date11-09-2011AuthorSTEPHEN DINHAM There has been a long-standing reluctance in teaching to actually listen to students. Teachers today increasingly engage in collaborative discussion and feedback with colleagues but feedback from students is still considered off-limits in many cases. The usual fear reported is that of teachers being forced to curry favour with students in order to receive favourable feedback and satisfaction ratings, i.e., the process becomes a popularity contest. More recent concerns have emerged with media such as ‘Rate My Teachers’ and ‘Facebook’, which have been used to defame, denigrate and harass teachers. However, where teachers and schools have used authentic means of obtaining student feedback through, for example, one-to-one discussions, surveys and focus groups, the evidence is clear that valuable insights can be gained. McIntyre, Pedder and Ruddock (University of Cambridge, 2005) found ‘considerable agreement between pupils in their views of teaching and learning. They preferred lessons that were less teacher-led and appreciated interactive teaching that gave them ownership of their learning. They also wanted more opportunities to collaborate with their peers’. Teachers who used feedback from their students ‘felt that many of their pupils’ ideas were sensible, practical and educationally desirable’. More recently in Australia there have been calls to greater utilise student views in informing teaching and learning (SMH, 29/8/11). Evidence from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and work done by the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) identified five key aspects of teacher practice that ‘if used in most or all lessons, can improve a child's literacy skills by the equivalent of one school year’: The above findings are congruent with the earlier work by McIntyre et al., who found that: Teachers, on the other hand, applied ‘demanding criteria’ to their pupils’ ideas. To be accepted, student ideas needed to be: It appears that students in lower SES schools are less likely to be engaged in the manners outlined above than students in higher SES schools (SMH, 27/8/11). Perhaps this is the result of less experienced teachers being clustered in low SES schools. It could also be the result of stereotyping and stigmatising low SES students as lower achievers and more passive learners. However, the research evidence suggests that underachievement runs across the SES spectrum and thus there are potentially valuable gains from both accessing feedback from students and involving them more in the teaching and learning process. A key aspect would seem to be the degree to which pupil input is seen as informing teaching and learning rather than simply being a source of evidence on which to make judgements about teacher quality. Where students are genuinely engaged in dialogue in a context of mutual respect, there is a much greater likelihood of thoughtful, informed and helpful input. On the other hand, where student input is seen to be more about compliance and even tokenism, and such feedback is not seen to be acted upon, students are less likely to take the process seriously. There is evidence that teachers are more likely to open themselves to observation and feedback from their colleagues. The isolation of the individual classroom is being broken down. Providing students with the opportunity to have input to their own learning represents another door that needs to be opened. //Professor Stephen Dinham, Chair of Teacher Education and Director of Learning and Teaching, Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne.// //E: sdinham@unimelb.edu.a//
 * giving students the chance to ask questions
 * asking students to explain the meaning of texts
 * telling students in advance how their work would be assessed
 * giving students time to think about their answers
 * asking questions that challenge students to better understand a text.
 * pupils want to be actively involved in their learning which means that teachers need to engage with what pupils bring to their own learning
 * pupils felt that learning tasks that connected new ideas with something they were already familiar with, especially in unusual ways, help them to understand and remember the ideas
 * pupils wanted greater independence in their classroom learning than they were used to - they wanted to be trusted to learn and to have their growing maturity recognised
 * pupils valued opportunities to collaborate with their peers - they felt collaboration helped them to express themselves and develop understandings.
 * an accurate account of classroom life
 * practical - for example, fitting in with the requirements of the curriculum and available time and space
 * popular with, and likely to be effective for, most or all members of the class
 * educationally desirable.

Assessing Student Learning: Why Reform is Overdue
Geoff N MastersAustralian Council for Educational Research Advances in our understanding of human learning require new approaches to assessing and monitoring student learning. Much assessment thinking has changed little over the past fifty years. The field continues to be dominated by twentieth century introductory textbook concepts, including such dichotomies as formative versus summative assessment, criterion-referenced versus norm-referenced testing, quantitative versus qualitative assessment, informal versus formal assessment – distinctions that often hamper rather than promote clear thinking about assessment. Assessment practice also has changed little over this period. Traditional, high-stakes examinations continue to dominate what is taught and learnt in many of our schools and universities. Greater use is now being made of promising new technologies, including banks of online assessment tasks, computer adaptive tests and technology-based assessments of ‘new’ life skills and attributes. However, while emerging technologies are capable of providing more innovative and informative explorations of student learning, much electronic assessment remains pedestrian and underpinned by traditional assessment thinking. At the same time, progress in our understanding of learning itself is challenging long-held assumptions and pointing to the need for a paradigm shift in assessment theory and practice. For example, substantial progress has been made in our understanding of human capacity for learning. It once was believed that individuals differed significantly in their capacity to learn. But research in neuroscience has shown how the plasticity of the brain enables almost all individuals to learn throughout the lifespan. This finding parallels the educational conclusion that, although students are at different points in their learning and are progressing at different rates, almost all students are capable of successful learning if motivated and if provided with appropriate learning opportunities and support. Research also is making clear the enormous variability in students’ levels of achievement and progress. Children begin school with very different social, cognitive, psychomotor and language development. Many of these differences do not disappear. In any given year of primary school, differences in reading and mathematics achievement are the equivalent of five or six years of school. And in some areas of learning and development, variability appears to increase across the school grades. We also know that, in mixed-ability classrooms, students learn best when provided with learning opportunities matched to their varying interests and progress. Learning is maximised when tasks are targeted just beyond individuals’ current levels of attainment – in the region where success is possible, but often only with scaffolding and support.i An implication of these observations is that educational assessment is best conceptualised as a process of discovering where learners are in their learning and development. Although it is common to refer to the ‘multiple purposes’ of assessment, assessment has only one fundamental purpose: to establish where learners are in their progress at the time of the assessment. This information can then be interpreted and used in a variety of ways. For example, students’ achievements can be interpreted by reference to the performances of other students nationally or internationally, by reference to achievement expectations or standards, or by reference to past performances to study trends or growth over time. The results of assessments can be used to inform starting points for teaching, to evaluate the effectiveness of educational programs and interventions or to award qualifications. For teaching purposes, it sometimes is desirable to obtain more detailed information to diagnose specific student misunderstandings or errors, but once again, the single underlying purpose is to discover where learners are in their learning. Much unnecessary complexity has been introduced into the assessment literature through failure to recognise and begin with this simple truth. The process of establishing where students are in their learning depends on a thorough understanding of the learning terrain through which they are progressing: typical paths of development; sequences in which understandings normally are established; and side-tracks in the form of common errors, learning difficulties and misunderstandings. Assessment as the discovery of where students are in their learning requires much more than familiarity with the intended curriculum. It depends on expert understanding of how learning occurs in a domain – a reference ‘map’ that is built from research and knowledge about learning itself.ii Essential to this approach to assessment is an appreciation of learning as ongoing progress. At the heart of all educational effort is the intention of student growth, development or improvement. Rather than being limited to specific courses, semesters or years of school, the progress that students make usually occurs incrementally over extended periods of time. For example, in areas such as reading, mathematics and science, progress typically occurs across the entire period of schooling. The role of assessment should be to establish where students are on these long-term continua of learning and what progress they are making over time. To establish where students are in their learning, evidence is required, usually in the form of observed performances on classroom activities or assigned assessment tasks. However, individual tasks are rarely, if ever, of intrinsic importance. Students may never again have to read and answer questions about the particular piece of text or solve the particular mathematics problems used in an assessment. Specific tasks are merely convenient but interchangeable vehicles for collecting evidence about what is really of interest – a student’s underlying reading ability, for example, or level of achievement in an area of mathematics. And establishing where students are in their learning always involves an on-balance inference with an accompanying degree of uncertainty. This conceptualisation of assessment stands in stark contrast to the traditional use of assessment to determine how much of what a teacher has taught each student has successfully learnt. Traditional assessments are made not in relation to an understanding of long-term learning progress, but in relation to a specific corpus of taught content. The onus is on students to learn this content and the role of assessment – whether during or upon completion of a course – is to judge how well they have done this. Conclusions about ‘how much’ students have learnt commonly are expressed as percentages, which may then be converted to grades to convey the extent of each student’s success (or failure). Under traditional approaches, it is common to treat ‘curriculum, teaching and assessment’ as separate activities. The role of teachers is to teach the curriculum, the role of students is to learn, and the role of assessment is to judge how much of the taught content students have learnt. By contrast, a view of assessment as professional investigation sees assessment as an integral part of good pedagogy. This view is consistent with the role of assessment in other professional work – for example in medicine and psychology – where the purpose is not so much to judge as to understand for the purpose of making informed decisions. Research into learning highlights the need for investigative approaches to assessment. Learning is rarely, if ever, a process of passively taking in and storing new information. Even from a very young age, learning is a process of actively trying to make sense of the world. Learners interpret what they see and hear in terms of what they already know. They construct their own mental models and understandings which are sometimes inaccurate or only partially correct. And it is clear that misconceptions, if not identified and addressed, can be significant obstacles to further learning.iii Research also shows that students sometimes can succeed on traditional forms of assessment while holding fundamental misconceptions. For example, physics students can sometimes recall formulae and substitute numerical values correctly to answer examination questions while holding fundamental misunderstandings about relationships between force and motion. Studies comparing experts and novices in various fields show that what distinguishes experts from novices is not only extensive knowledge of a field, but also the frames of reference that experts have for organising and making sense of that knowledge. Experts have deep understandings of concepts, principles and big ideas in a field which allow them to see patterns in information and to transfer their knowledge to new and unseen contexts. The implications of these research findings are that educational assessments must do more than establish whether students can reproduce what they have been taught, and teachers must be more than deliverers of curriculum content and judges of student success. The investigative process of establishing where students are in their learning must include an exploration of students’ understandings of important concepts and principles. An appreciation of learners’ own mental models and misunderstandings can provide important starting points for teaching (ie, assessments for learning). Assessments of factual and procedural knowledge will continue to be important, but perhaps more important in the future will be the assessment of students’ abilities to organise and use this knowledge and to apply their understandings to the solution of complex, real-world problems. In the past, assessment methods often have been more concerned with judging success and making reliable and fair comparisons of student performances than with investigating and understanding student learning. And the desire for large-scale implementation under standardised conditions, with a quick turnaround of results, often has resulted in assessments requiring only that students reproduce what they have been taught through the provision of ‘correct’ answers. Some educators have reacted against assessments of this kind by arguing that ‘authentic’, in situ assessments are always preferable to assessments based on specially-designed assessment tasks, or that ‘school-based’ assessments made by classroom teachers are always preferable to externally-developed assessments. But these are over-reactions. When the purpose of assessment is to explore and understand where students are in their learning, there must be a willingness to use the methods best able to provide this information, whatever form they take. Day-to-day observations made by classroom teachers generally provide the richest information for establishing where students are in their learning. Ideally, teachers would have intimate and precise knowledge of each student’s progress and learning needs and would use that knowledge to personalise and focus their teaching efforts, often by grouping students with similar needs.iv As noted already, assessments of this kind depend on expert understandings of the relevant learning domain as well as professional skill in exploring learning progress. Advances in technology are making it possible to incorporate professional knowledge of this kind into more sophisticated tools for investigating learning. Rather than testing only factual and procedural knowledge, these tools explore student thinking, including by testing hypotheses about misunderstandings and gaps in an individual’s learning. Intelligent forms of assessment in the future will be less concerned with judging how much a student has learnt and more concerned with diagnosing and under-standing the details of an individual’s learning. Research in neuroscience and cognitive psychology also is revealing the important role of emotions in learning.v People are more likely to learn and to remember if intrinsically motivated and emotionally engaged. In classroom settings, learning is promoted by ‘learning cultures’ in which all students are expected to learn successfully, are highly engaged and feel safe and supported in their learning. Conversely, negative emotions such as stress and fear of failure have been shown to impede learning and memory. In classroom settings, these emotions can be the result of ‘performance cultures’ in which learning is extrinsically motivated and students compete with each other for success.vi Other research has shown the importance of positive attitudes and beliefs about learning. Learners are more likely to learn successfully if they believe that they are capable of learning – in other words, if they have positive views of themselves as learners. They also must believe that effort will result in success. Effective learners are more likely to monitor their own learning, to recognise what they do not know and to be proactive in seeking out what they need to make further progress. Learners are assisted in these processes by relevant and timely feedback that guides action and enables them to see the progress they are making over time. These research findings relating to emotions, attitudes and beliefs have implications for how assessments of learning are conducted and how the results of assessments are reported and used. Some forms of assessment promote ‘performance’ rather than ‘learning’ cultures. For example, one-off, end-of-course examinations usually are designed to judge and compare students on the amount of course content they have learnt – often for the purposes of ranking and selecting students for the next phase of education – rather than to monitor and understand learning progress. In such assessments, learning can be driven more by external pressure for results than by curiosity and intrinsic motivation. And this pressure often distorts teaching and learning by encouraging cramming and creating unacceptable levels of stress for students and their families. The paradigm shift now required in assessment is from judging how much of a body of taught content students have successfully learnt to establishing where students are in their long-term learning and what progress they are making over time. For this reason, one-off, high-stakes assessment events probably have a limited future in the assessment of student learning. In some contexts, there will continue to be a need to ensure that minimum performance standards have been met, but such assessments could be undertaken when learners feel ready to be assessed rather than in a single assessment event. There are significant implications, too, for methods of reporting and monitoring student learning. Traditional reporting methods, such as percentages and grades, are more consistent with ‘performance’ than ‘learning’ cultures. Percentages and grades are used to describe how much of a body of taught content students have learnt. But these reporting methods are incapable of showing learning progress, and indeed usually mask progress. A student who receives a ‘D’ year after year is given no sense of the progress they are actually making. And worse, they are likely to infer from this outmoded method of reporting that there is something stable about their capacity to learn: they are a ‘D’ student. It sometimes is argued that students and parents ‘understand’ A to E grades; but they do not because course grades usually do not represent consistent, interpretable levels of achievement. Grading is more appropriate for describing the quality of agricultural produce or the products of industrial manufacturing than for describing learning. The educational challenge is to develop ways of reporting that show where students are in their long-term learning, what progress they are making (ie, assessments of learning) and what might be done to support further learning. Finally, the uses to which assessments are put also can encourage ‘performance’ rather than ‘learning’ cultures. Assessments conducted to understand and promote student learning can be undermined and distorted when the results of those assessments are then used for other, unintended purposes. For example, external attempts to use test results to drive performance inevitably change classroom teachers’ attitudes and behaviours. There is growing evidence that the linking of rewards and sanctions to test results not only fails to produce the desired improvements, but also results in a range of responses that are inconsistent with what we now know about effective teaching and learning.vii i Vygotsky, L (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ii Pellegrino, JW, Chudowsky, N, and Glaser, R (2001). Knowing what students know: The science and design of educational assessment, Washington, DC: National Academy Press. iii Bransford, JD, Brown, AL, & Cocking, RR (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience and school: Expanded Edition. Washington, DC: National Research Council. iv Fullan, M, Hill, PW & Crevola, C (2006). Breakthrough. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press. v Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (2007). Understanding the brain: The birth of a learning science. Paris: OECD. vi Dweck, CS (2000). Self-theories: Their role in motivation, personality and development. Philadelphia, PA: Psychology Press. vii Hout, M & Elliott, S.W. (Eds.) (2011). Incentives and test-based accountability in education. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

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