An official website of the United States government
The recent groundswell of interest in computer science education across many countries has created a pressing need for computing teachers at the secondary level. To satisfy this demand, some educational systems are drawing from their pool of in-service teachers trained in other disciplines. While these transitioning teachers can learn about computing pedagogy and subject matter at professional learning workshops, daily teaching experiences will also be a source of their learning. We studied a co-teaching program where instructional responsibilities were distributed between teachers and volunteers from the tech industry to explore how specific teaching practices supported teacher learning, with a focus on pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). Through qualitative analysis of questionnaire and interview data gathered from three teachers during one school year, we identified the practices they engaged in and how their learning related to the enactment of those practices. Our results highlight several factors that influenced the ways in which teaching practices provided participants with opportunities to learn PCK: (a) active participation of students and volunteers; (b) teacher’s level of content knowledge; (c) interdependent practices; and (d) immediacy of the classroom environment.
more »
« less
Iterative teacher-aware learning.
In human pedagogy, teachers and students can interact adaptively to maximize communication efficiency. The teacher adjusts her teaching method for different students, and the student, after getting familiar with the teacher’s instruction mechanism, can infer the teacher’s intention to learn faster. Recently, the benefits of integrating this cooperative pedagogy into machine concept learning in discrete spaces have been proved by multiple works. However, how cooperative pedagogy can facilitate machine parameter learning hasn’t been thoroughly studied. In this paper, we propose a gradient optimization based teacher-aware learner who can incorporate teacher’s cooperative intention into the likelihood function and learn provably faster compared with the naive learning algorithms used in previous machine teaching works. We give theoretical proof that the iterative teacher-aware learning (ITAL) process leads to local and global improvements. We then validate our algorithms with extensive experiments on various tasks including regression, classification, and inverse reinforcement learning using synthetic and real data. We also show the advantage of modeling teacher-awareness when agents are learning from human teachers.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 2015577
- PAR ID:
- 10351380
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2021).
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
We are interested in how whiteness shaped one teacher’s abilities to engage his elemen- tary school students in culturally responsive pedagogy, especially his abilities to engage or avoid conversations about race-based inequities in an integrated technology unit focused on NGSS disciplinary practices. We draw upon culturally responsive pedagogy, critical race theory, and critical whiteness studies to understand the role of whiteness in a single case study of integrated elementary science teaching leveraging electronic textiles technology. The case study reported here is part of a larger study investigating how technology inte- gration supports justice-centered science learning for elementary school teachers and their students in the Intermountain Region of the USA. The authors are white and Latino and all, but one, are former classroom teachers. Drawing on multiple data sources (field notes of classroom observations, interviews, transcripts of video-recorded classroom sessions), we developed a single descriptive case to illustrate shifts in teacher practice over time. We documented one white, male, fifth grade teacher’s engagements with his students around issues of race as manifested in conversations about immigration, migration, and forced relocation in an integrated technology unit focused on NGSS disciplinary practices. This single case and the teacher perspectives it illustrates are resonant not only of our data but also the scholarly literature on white pre- and in-service teachers in the USA. We conclude with some practical recommendations for teacher professional development.more » « less
-
Learning to teach is a culturally situated activity. As teachers learn, it is important to understand not only what teachers learn, but how they learn. This article describes a qualitative case study of a subset of four teachers’ learning during a professional development surrounding a plate tectonics curriculum. Using qualitative methods, this study tells the story of how the four teachers negotiated professional vision for science teaching around dilemmas that emerged throughout the professional development. By taking a sociocultural perspective on professional vision, researchers can gain insight into how and what teachers learn in professional develop- ment settings because it renders teacher learning complex and nuanced. Additionally, we argue negotiating professional vision parallels sensemak- ing. Sensemaking around science teaching includes grappling with epis- temic issues of science in addition to pedagogy and curriculum. Implications for science teacher education are discussed. Specifically, we argue learning to teach requires teachers to engage in conversations that create opportunities to “get somewhere” in relation to dilemmas they have about teaching. In this way, professional vision is an ongoing process of learning that has no endpoint or ideal articulation of teaching or science. Therefore, by framing professional vision as a process of learning we are able to push back on simplistic descriptions of teaching and science.more » « less
-
Cohen, J; Solano, G (Ed.)From teaching with technology to teaching through technology: this is an important shift that educator preparation programs must embrace as we continue to develop teachers who can facilitate meaningful learning experiences across a variety of delivery modalities. Drawing on the data from our three-year mixed methods research, the authors describe a programmatic model for preparing teacher candidates to implement digital pedagogy while ensuring that learning opportunities are equitable, accessible, and inclusive of all learners. This paper first identifies the Essential Elements of our critical digital pedagogy model for facilitating learning in hybrid, hyflex, and online environments. Second, we describe how we have integrated these Essential elements across the three phases of our teacher preparation programs, with a particular focus on the two asynchronous online workshops we have integrated into students’ clinical experiences. Third, we identify a set of indicators used to provide feedback to preservice teachers as they demonstrate their critical digital pedagogy during their student teaching semester. We present the research findings that examine how this programmatic approach impacts teacher candidates’ knowledge, skills, and dispositions for transforming teaching and learning through technology. We conclude with a discussion of how the programmatic model and research findings may impact the broader field of teacher education.more » « less
-
Abstract This paper examines a professional learning (PL) context to understand what one teacher took up and learned and how this impacted her classroom instruction five years after participating in a specified professional learning (PL) program. Understanding teachers’ perceptions about specific design features of a program that they believe impacted their learning brings an important new voice to PL literature. Findings show that the teacher’s learning of targeted content and pedagogical strategies was consonant with the PL program’s goals and intentions. We highlight five assertions that connect PL design features to teacher learning in four categories - content, pedagogy, resources, and collaboration. Our study provides more granular evidence about the design elements of high-quality PL and contributes new understandings about the connections between PL design features and teacher uptake related to the following: aligned beliefs about teaching and learning, a knowledgeable facilitator, bounded routines, representations, and a community of learners to anchor learning from PL. This study shines light on the necessity of studying teacher learning from PL over time in an intentional and in-depth manner, as it takes time for teachers to incorporate new ideas into their teaching practice and make observable changes. More research is needed to continue the study of how and why PL design elements impact teachers’ experiences for corroboration and extending of assertions and theories about teacher professional learning.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- The DOI is not currently available.
