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"Teaching"

In fall 2008, twenty-one students from Hamilton High School in Chandler, Arizona participated in a University of Arizona pilot program and were enrolled in a course called ENGR 102 HS. This introductory engineering course offers students three units of credit towards an engineering degree. Since the initial pilot, 1218 high school students have enrolled and received college credit for the course. With a nearly identical core curriculum as the semester long, on campus version of ENGR 102, the high school program runs for a full school year and thus provides the increased contact time and teacher assistance many high school students require. Extra classroom time in the high school program allows students to participate in service learning projects, online modules and teacher designed, hands-on projects. High school teachers that are selected to teach ENGR 102 HS tend to have engineering backgrounds; however, many of the most successful teachers in the program teach math or science at their high school and succeed due to a personal enthusiasm for the topic. A week long teacher training workshop is held each summer to prepare new teachers to deliver the core curriculum. Returning teachers attend an annual three day training to share ideas, mentor new teachers, receive new classroom content and to strengthen the dynamic ENGR 102 HS community of engineering educators. Seed funding for ENGR 102 HS program development and logistical sustainability was provided during the first four years of the program. Now in its sixth year, ENGR 102 HS operates primarily on tuition dollars and has programs operating in two states, 29 diverse high schools, within 15 different school districts and 30 teachers deliver the course to over 450 students. 301 of the 450 students in the 2013-14 cohort took ENGR 102 HS for University of Arizona credit. This paper will discuss ENGR 102 HS program history, core curriculum, spin-off research and development, keys to success, teacher training and program logistics. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2014.

Literature suggests that whilst creativity is frequently seen as ubiquitous and taken for granted (Dawson, Tan, & McWilliam, 2011; Livingston, 2010) there is evidence that creative approaches in higher education can be seen as unnecessary work (Chao, 2009; Clouder et al., 2008; Gibson, 2010; McWilliam et al., 2008), and creative teaching is not always recognised or valued (Clouder et al., 2008; Dawson et al., 2011; Gibson, 2010). Forming part of a cross-cultural study of creative teaching (although reporting on only one part of it), the research explored student and lecturer perspectives in four universities in England, Malaysia and Thailand, using mixed methods within an interpretive frame. This paper reports on findings from the English University site. Key elements of creative teaching in this site were having a passion for the subject and for using sensitised pedagogical strategies, driven by an awareness of student perspective and relationship. Crucial goals were fostering independent thinking; striving for equality through conversation and collaboration; and orchestrating for knowledge-building. The lecturers' passion for the subject was a powerful engine for creative teaching across all academic disciplines spanning the arts, the humanities, and STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore how vocational teachers’ everyday practices can constitute innovative learning spaces that help students to experience engagement and commitment towards education and thus increase their possibilities for completing their studies despite notable difficulties.Design/methodology/approach – Based on two ethnographic field studies, we analyse vocational teaching situations in which teachers and students engage in daily remaking of the vocational educational training practice. It is argued that these everyday situations can be understood as innovative transformation of participation and practice.Findings – The exploration of teachers’ practicing new learning spaces sheds light on innovation potential embedded in everyday educational practices. The paper thus challenges the celebration of radical innovation and argues that innovation emerges from everyday activities in which teachers succeed to balance continuities and discontinuities. Studying innovation as a balance between change and stability thus involves emerging, negotiated processes of learning and participation in everyday practices where people talk, interact and conduct their work and studies.Practical implications – Based on the analysis, we argue that students’ engagement in education can be enhanced by transforming the educational settings on various parameters such as buildings, artefacts, emotions and experiences. Thus, innovation should be recognised as emerging everyday activities in which frontline workers like vocational teachers are drivers for innovation.Originality/value – Innovative everyday activities are often invisible; however, we suggest that they can be studied and thus become visible by use of the analytic term: “boundary-pushing“. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

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The paper presents the way in which the teaching activities relating with the subject of Electromagnetic Compatibility were enhanced through applying some original methods of learner involvement. A brief history on this subject taught at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science of Transilvania University of Braşov is presented along with the course content. The actions proposed for enhanced involvement include fieldwork and mini-projects. The mini-projects were approached through the PBL-method (Project Based Learning). Specific questionnaires were used for data collection. The students were asked to express their opinions by completing these questionnaires at both the beginning and at the end of the course period. The obtained results were evaluated by solving a common problem area using specific methods depending on the field of study pursued by the students. The obtained results opened new horizons in developing and applying teaching methods based on learning through new projects and communication, intended for increasing the students' degree of interest and satisfaction. The results provide the possibility of evaluating the differences at the level of academic performance depending on the students' field of study. The acquired knowledge allowed for the implementation of several solutions for improving the teaching activity, thereby offering better opportunities for the integration of the students in the labour market. © 2014 IEEE.

Background: Spatial skills are crucial for carpentry and are a major learning objective in the initial vocational training of carpenter apprentices. Carpenters specifically need to develop the capability to switch between two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) representations. Previous studies have explored spatial skills, but never in the context of vocational education and training (VET). This study sheds light on the level and evolution of spatial skills in the initial vocational training of carpenter apprentices in Switzerland. Methods: In this study, 726 subjects (98 females) who were either carpenter apprentices, apprentices of another profession, or high school students, took a test on spatial skills with three parts: mental rotation, paper folding, and orthographic projections. The first two parts are widely used tests for spatial skills, while the last one was specifically designed to address the 2D-3D transition that is a core skill of carpenters. Results: Carpenter apprentices do have higher spatial skills than would be expected given their general school level. In particular, their spatial skills were found to be similar to those of high school students and superior to those of apprentices of another profession. Carpenters' spatial skills improve over the course of their apprenticeship. These findings confirm that spatial skills are trainable and suggest that the high spatial skills level of carpenter apprentices is due to a selection bias as well as to the training that they receive during their apprenticeship. Conclusions: Carpenter apprentices improve their spatial skills over the time of their initial vocational training. As spatial skills are crucial in this profession, there is a need to develop further solutions that encourage further improvement of teaching and learning activities for spatial skills. © 2014 Cuendet et al.

The use of online methodologies to deliver coursework has become institutionalized in higher education. There is an urgent need to move beyond the question of which delivery model is most effective: face-toface, fully online, or blended, and switch the focus to teaching pedagogy and strategies that effectively engage students in the learning process. This chapter posits that student-learning outcomes are less dependent on delivery mode and instead dependent on a teacher's pedagogical practices; it is the skill of the teacher as facilitator that drives the effective development of the learning community and influences student-learning outcomes. Further, it is suggested that constructivism, as a pedagogy of teaching, be considered, regardless of delivery mode; students construct their own knowledge as the teacher facilitates the process through providing opportunities for active engagement and critical inquiry within a community of learners. teaching opportunities are adapted in response to the needs of students with technology as a tool to deliver learning outcomes. © 2015, IGI Global.

The use of blended learning environments is rapidly expanding in education. This chapter examines a teacher's enactment of the New Tech Network educational model, which utilizes a blended learning environment, and the teaching strategies she used to engage students and gauge student achievement. Detailed teacher interviews, classroom observations, and analyses of student assignments were the sources of data for the study. The findings centered on the integration of culturally relevant pedagogy and authentic instruction within this learning environment and the implications of this integration. Recommendations for future research include a more expansive study of the use of blended learning in social studies and different means of integrating culturally relevant pedagogy and authentic instruction into blended learning. © 2015, IGI Global.

Since the year 2000 learnerships have been introduced in all sectors of South African society including education, as a strategy to overcome the acute skills shortage which hinders national development. A learnership is defined as work-based learning with the aim of obtaining a qualification within the South African National Qualification Framework. Unlike an internship which provides experiential workplace learning for a successful graduate, a learnership provides work-based learning for a student who is in the process of gaining a qualification. In this context Open and Distance Learning (ODL) is the ideal tuition model as it enables the student to work and learn full-time while engaged in formal study. The value of learnerships as an effective means of training teachers is generally misunderstood by teacher education providers. To overcome this gap a qualitative case study explored the value of learnerships in teacher training endeavours. The inquiry was informed by Vygotsky's social constructivist learning theory, Lave and Wenger's theory of situated learning and Kolb's experiential learning theory. Twelve participants who were engaged in a teacher learnership programme in a public primary school and who were studying for a teaching qualification through ODL were selected by purposeful sampling. Data were gathered by means of participants' written accounts of their learnership experience structured around a set of ten open-ended questions which functioned as a prompt for writing. Findings indicated the professional benefits of learnerships; drawbacks of learnerships; the personal significance of the learnership; and the role of ODL tuition in the learnership programme. It was concluded that learnerships in teacher training embody a powerful and innovative strategy to produce teachers who possess a combination of work-based and theoretical knowledge and who can help overcome the skills shortage in the education sector in South Africa.