The recent release of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) offers a new challenge and opportunity for science. Science practices are the social interactions, tools and language that scientist use as they construct, evaluate and communicate scientific knowledge. The effective integration of science practices into classrooms can better support a wide range of students, including those typically underrepresented in science, to develop greater scientific literacy.
Effective integration of science practices in classrooms requires instructional leadership to support that change. Instructional leaders can include a variety of different individuals including, but not limited to, school principals, district leaders, coaches and lead teachers. The ILSP team is developing tools to support instructional leaders in the science practices.
Vision
Our vision for supporting instructional leaders in their work with teachers to improve science teaching and learning stems from our approach to instructional supervision and science instruction.
Our orientation to supervision is rooted in the importance of strong instructional leadership. We seek to support leaders in their work with teachers as they promote a growth mindset, foster frequent and ongoing opportunities for feedback, sustain a commitment to teacher development over time, and engage in collaborative practices.
In this paper I identify some current elaborations on the theme of participation and digital literacy in order to open further debate on the relationship between interaction, collaboration and learning in online environments. Motivated by an interest in using new technologies in the context of formal learning (Merchant, 2009), I draw on in-school and out-of-school work in Web 2.0 spaces. This work is inflected by the new literacies approach (Lankshear & Knobel, 2006a). Here I provide an overview of the ways in which learning through participation is characterised by those adopting this and other related perspectives. I include a critical examination of the idea of “participatory” culture as articulated in the field of media studies, focusing particularly on the influential work of Jenkins (2006a; 2006b). In order to draw these threads together around conceptualizations of learning, I summarise ways in which participation is described in the literature on socially-situated cognition. This is used to generate some tentative suggestions about how learning and literacy in Web 2.0 spaces might be envisioned and how ideas about participation might inform curriculum planning and design.
What makes these findings so interesting are the implications for pedagogy. If teachers wish to maximise the power of tablets and mobile devices, they should create contexts in which students are encouraged to be proactive in their study,
Article investigating roles played by young siblings close in age in each others’ literacy development arguing for a unique reciprocity in learning between older and younger child.
*from Abstract* Maybin, Janet; Mercer, Neil and Stierer, Barry (1992). 'Scaffolding': learning in the classroom. In: Norman, Kate ed. Thinking Voices: The work of the National Oracy Project. London: Hodder & Stoughton, pp. 186–195.
Proponents and practitioners of the open web also bear responsibility for the missed opportunities in higher education. In retrospect, temperamental preferences for DIY culture, relentless tinkering and experimentation, and indulging the delightful paradoxes of ill-structured problems has not served to promote the adoption of open online tools in the wider culture. Whereas innovators and early adopters tend to have a relatively high tolerance for chaos, higher education as a whole does not (and arguably cannot). Railing against the academy's failure to embrace a perceived risk can be dismal fun for many of us, but an honest appraisal of our own missteps has to be in the mix.
What do we teach when we teach information literacy in higher education? This paper describes a pedagogical approach to information literacy that helps instructors focus content around transformative learning thresholds. The threshold concept framework holds promise for librarians because it grounds the instructor in the big ideas and underlying concepts that make information literacy exciting and worth learning about. This paper looks at how this new idea relates to existing standards and posits several threshold concepts for information literacy.
Threshold concepts are a theory of teaching and learning proposed by two British
educators, Jan Meyer and Ray Land. Threshold concepts can be used for teaching information literacy and could inform the Standards revision as well. There are five definitional criteria that make a concept a threshold concept
The aim of this article is to discuss some of the challenges and possibilities that librarians may face when engaging in faculty-library collaboration. The main objective is to present findings from two case studies of embedded librarianship at Gjøvik University College (GUC) and to compare these findings with results from a literature review. The literature review is concentrated around collaboration challenges, a possible role-expansion for librarians, team-teaching and assessment of information skills courses. Another objective is to present two pedagogical approaches that are in use at GUC; the tutor approach and the team-teaching approach. Findings from the case studies suggest that faculty staff were impressed with the librarian’s knowledge and they quickly became comfortable with team-teaching and/or leaving the librarian in charge of the students. However there were concerns from both the teacher and librarian about the time-consuming nature of collaborative work. This paper contributes to the literature through a literature review, two case studies and teaching approaches that highlight factors leading to success when collaborating with faculty.
Computer science as a field requires curricular guidance, as new innovations are filtered into teaching its knowledge areas at a rapid pace. Furthermore, another trend is the growing number of students with different cultural backgrounds. These developments require taking into account both the differences in learning styles and teaching methods in practice in the development of curricular knowledge areas. In this paper, an intensive collaborative teaching concept, Code Camp, is utilized to illustrate the effect of learning styles on the success of a course. Code Camp teaching concept promotes collaborative learning and multiple skills and knowledge in a single course context. The results indicate that Code Camp as a concept is well liked, increases motivation to learn and is suitable for both intuitive and reflective learners. Furthermore, it appears to provide interesting creative challenges and pushes students to collaborate and work as a team. In particular, the concept also promotes intuition.
The Go-Lab Project (Global Online Science Labs for Inquiry Learning at School) opens up online science laboratories (remote and virtual labs) for the large-scale use in school education. The overall aim of the project is to encourage young people aged from 10 to 18 to engage in science topics, acquire scientific inquiry skills, and experience the culture of doing science by undertaking active guided experimentation.
To achieve this aim, the Go-Lab project creates the Go-Lab Portal allowing science teachers finding online labs and inquiry learning applications appropriate for their class, combining these in Inquiry Learning Spaces (ILSs) supporting particular lesson scenarios, and sharing the ILSs with their students. Using the ILSs, the students receive the opportunity to perform personalized scientific experiments with online labs in a structured learning environment.
These six ways help enhance learning in digital classrooms:
- Connected by Interests
- Experiment with Content
- Peer Supported learning
- Link the Goal
- Importance to Academics
- Networking Learning
This fall, MIT Professor Shigeru Miyagawa flipped his classroom as he taught two versions of Visualizing Japan to two distinctive audiences at the same time. He co-taught the massive online open course (MOOC) VJx on edX, as well as the residential version of the course, 21F.027, to students at MIT. The students in the residential class were assigned the MOOC video lectures and quizzes to complement their classroom work.