Search Results for
"Teaching"

This paper aims at examining the extent to which the English drama inspired by the Northeastern Thai folklore “Pachit-Oraphim” in an English classroom can reduce high school students’ classroom anxiety in speaking English. The participants were thirty-six students in the tenth and eleventh grades, who were enrolled in an English class under the School-Based Management for Local Development (SBMLD) program at a local high school in Bua Yai district, Nakhon Ratchasima province. Based on Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) questionnaires (Horwitz, Horwitz, & Cope, 1986) and focus-group interviews, the results reveal that the participants showed a significant increase in their self-confidence to speak English by lowering their classroom anxiety. The results also suggest that the use of folk drama could potentially alleviate their anxiety of speaking English and promote their positive attitudes toward English communication in the classroom. Moreover, students appreciated their local culture by performing this folk drama in authentic sociocultural situations. This study will be potentially beneficial for English teachers who would like to enhance students’ speaking skills through a fun and meaningful folk drama performance. Culturally-responsive English language teaching through folk drama familiar to students can be an adaptable language pedagogy to increase their confidence to engage in the English classroom. © 2019, Chulalongkorn University Language Institute. All rights reserved.

The burgeoning of green economies has sparked the development of green skills, primarily to fulfil the demanding requirement of green-collar employees. Human resources equipped with specific generic green skills will become a catalyst to penetrate the green job market. On the principle that skills can be shaped through education and training, a qualitative study was conducted using in-depth interviews with senior academics from the School of Education, of a local university in southern Peninsular Malaysia. The interview data were transcribed and analysed using NVivo. The findings showed that generic green skills are additional skills which complement existing generic skills and focus on conserving and maintaining the quality of the environment. Pertaining to that, embedding generic green skills in teaching and learning activities can be carried out through the ingenuous use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) which involves digital skill, internet technology and electricity saving consumption. Furthermore, additional studies of generic green skills are required to contribute to sustainable development. ©©2019 by authors, all rights reserved.

This book presents the background to the current shift in language education towards action-oriented/action-based teaching, and provides a theorization of the Action-oriented Approach (AoA). It discusses the concepts and theories that paved the way for the AoA and explores their relevance for the way language education is conceived and implemented in the classroom. In the process, it revisits the concept of competence and discusses the dynamic notions of mediation and plurilingualism. The authors explain the way in which the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) and its recent update, the CEFR Companion Volume, broaden the scope of language education, in particular in relation to the actional turn. The book provides scholars and practitioners with a research-informed description of the AoA, explains its implications for curriculum planning, teaching and assessment, and elaborates on its pedagogical implications. © 2019 Enrica Piccardo and Brian North. All rights reserved.

This paper is an overview of approaches to teaching physics courses delivered to students of engineering disciplines. It addresses, first, the history of teaching physics to engineering students starting in the early 20th century, then reviews the main issues presented and discussed over the last decade in a series of conferences on Physics teaching in Engineering Education (PTEE). Finally, this paper discusses more contemporary views on the subject, including the latest technologies and new methodologies. It is not a critical review of teaching physics to engineering students, but rather a summary of various views and approaches over the span of the entire century. The common denominator of the study is the relevance to the competency-based approach: how the papers focus on teaching engineers the principles of physics in a manner that contributes to success in their professional careers. © 2019 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

[No abstract available]

As part of a large-scale project, the current qualitative study investigated the possible contribution of a consciousness-raising interactive workshop (as a form of professional development activity) to 30 22 female and 8 male) Iranian EFL teachers’ professional identity construction. Thirty Iranian EFL teachers were asked to write two reflective journals (one individually and one collectively) before and two others after they attended an eight-session interactive workshop on Reflective Journal Writing (RJW). The workshop aimed at raising their consciousness of RJW based on the framework proposed by Richards (1995) and the journal content guide developed by Soodmand Afshar (in press). Subsequently, in order to demonstrate how the consciousness-raising interactive workshop contributed to the participants' professional identity construction, interviews were conducted with them. The data collected were analyzed through the grounded-theory approach and qualitative content analysis. The results indicated that the workshop contributed to the participants’ professional identity construction in various ways which are discussed at length in the paper. © 2019 IJSCL.

On-the-job medical training is known to be challenging due to the fast-paced environment and strong vocational profile. It relies on on-site supervisors, mainly doctors and nurses with long practical experience, who coach and teach their less experienced colleagues, such as residents and healthcare students. These supervisors receive pedagogical training to ensure that their guidance and teaching skills are constantly improved. The aim of such training is to develop participants' patient, collegiate and student guidance skills in a multi-professional environment, and to expand their understanding of guidance as part of their work as supervisors of healthcare professionals. In this paper, we investigate open-ended answers on guidance experience of 281 healthcare supervisors that participated in these training courses. To automate the analysis of the contents of the answers, we apply clustering to the natural language processed textual data. The results summarize the most common guidance experiences and allow an automatic grouping of the healthcare supervisors' reflection. Such an evidence-based knowledge can be used to further improve the organization of the training courses. © 2019 Kassel University Press GmbH.

This research aims to develop a teacher professional development assessment scale based on the dynamic professional development approach. The resulting Teacher Professional Development Student Assessment Scale is a data collection tool consisting of 27 items under 7 factors and can explain 62.90% of the total variance. The items have a five-point Likert scale ranging from never (1) to always (5). The Cronbach alpha reliability coefficients of the factors range from 0.66 to 0.83. The factor loads of the items ranged from 0.47 to 0.82. The construct validity of the scale was confirmed by confirmatory factor analysis. The criterion validity of the scale was tested using a parallel scale. The scale measures the teaching-related characteristics that can determine the professional development level of the teachers from all branches. It is concluded that the scale developed in this research can be used to assess teacher professional development according to student perceptions. School principals can use the scale to determine the professional development levels of teachers and can make necessary interventions to achieve better quality in teaching. © 2019, Dokuz Eylul University. All rights reserved.

Although India is one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, a large proportion of its people live in rural regions and is employed in the informal economy. Constituting a prominent role in the informal economy, the textile industry is one of the oldest and most labour-intensive in India, which is globally ranked fourth in leading garment sourcing destinations around the world. However, the Indian garment industry has a shortage of skilled labour. Vocational skills training is one of the best tools to help individuals participate in the labour market and boost productivity and working conditions, especially for disadvantaged people. However, recent economic trends and traditional curriculum methods tend to ignore the needs of these marginalised groups, and this impedes the growth and productivity of the informal sector. This article explores the extent to which a competency-based curriculum development approach can respond to the skills training needs of people (seeking to be) employed in the informal sector. The authors discuss the theoretical framework of competency-based curricula. Next, they describe the process of developing a curriculum for sewing skills training based on learners’ demands. This process was part of a study they carried out in rural South India, and the resulting curriculum was subsequently piloted in four villages in South India as an intervention strategy. The authors complement the analysis and discussion of their findings from the piloted curriculum with insights from expert interviews they conducted to explore curriculum framing and teaching–learning arrangements from a pedagogical perspective. They conclude that a competency-based curriculum approach works best in the informal sector if the targeted learners are directly involved in its planning and development. © 2019, UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning and Springer Nature B.V.

This research study aims at gathering the views of science teachers regarding the classes of school experience and teaching practices and especially finding out how much science teachers can reflect their gains from these two courses they take during their undergraduate education on their professional teaching lives. In this direction, this study was carried out with the assistance of the 29 interviewer science teachers who volunteered for this study, graduated from the state universities in Turkey and have been hired in the different provinces. This study has used qualitative research technique and an open-answer survey has been implemented. The content analysis method has been used for analyzing the survey results. The findings indicate that most of the science teachers have expressed that they could not receive proper and satisfactory guidance relevant to these classes, and they could not have a productive learning processes at their undergraduate due to the learning barriers formed by the instructors, unsatisfactory teaching, and teaching style not introducing new approaches regarding School experience. The findings about the class of teaching Practices indicate that the class is implemented as one class and it is detected that not enough necessary assessments are used during the class. Consequently, most of the science teachers involved in this research study state that they cannot reflect the gains from these classes to their professional teaching. © 2019, Ankara University. All rights reserved.