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The Unlocking the World community is the perfect place to ask questions, discuss ideas and exchange information with other teachers and our program consultants.
Exceptional teachers for disadvantaged schools
August 11, 2011
Exceptional teachers for disadvantaged schools
Jo Lampert, Bruce Burnett, Curriculum Leadership, 5 August 2011
The Exceptional Teachers for Disadvantaged Schools (ETDS) project is an innovative way to prepare high-quality teachers for employment in low-SES schools. The program, based at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), offers a specialised curriculum, designed to equip high-achieving pre-service teachers for work in the schools that need them most.
Selected pre-service teachers at QUT are invited to take part in the trial course, based on their academic performance over the first two years of their four-year Bachelor of Education degree, and on a demonstrated commitment to social justice. These participants undertake a modified version of QUT's B Ed on-campus curriculum. They have their practicum/field experience at one of a range of disadvantaged schools throughout Queensland which have agreed to partner with QUT in the program.
In the past, teacher education for disadvantaged schools has been described as applying a 'missionary' or deficit model (Larabee, 2010; Comber and Kamler, 2004; Flessa, 2007). The principals of schools participating in the ETDS react strongly against such an approach, and have explicitly asked project staff not to send them anyone who 'thinks they can save the world'. The ETDS project has moved well away from such a model, towards a position that is explicitly centred on notions of academic excellence.
The project is now at the end of its first trial year.
Read more: http://www.curriculum.edu.au/leader/default.asp?id=33544&issueID=12442
Dr Jo Lampert and Dr Bruce Burnett are senior lecturers in the Faculty of Education, Queensland University of Technology.
SPERA: Summit 2011
August 05, 2011
The purpose of the Summit is to produce a set of recommendations for local, state/territory and national governments and agencies, private enterprise, relevant community associations and for wider public interest on Australia's sustainability and the roles of education and rural communities in progressing this.
Read more: http://www.spera.asn.au/articles.php?req=read&article_id=136
Understanding Learning: Working out how students think and learn
August 05, 2011
Bernard Lane, The Australian, July 27, 2011
BRUNO is a barman. One night he works six hours and gets $66 in tips. If he takes home $81.90 in total, how much is he paid an hour?
This is a story problem: a routine device to test knowledge of maths in the classroom. Another tactic would be just to give students an equation: X x 6 + 66 = 81.90. Now, the question put to teachers in a study: which will their students find harder to solve?
Being fluent in equation-speak, most teachers think the story problem will prove difficult. But research shows them wrong. For school students, the familiar language of the story problem more readily unlocks the answer.
"We have this mantra: the student is not like me," said Kenneth Koedinger, a visiting US academic explaining this study at Australia's first meeting devoted to a field called the science of learning.
Koedinger and an impressive number of colleagues from US centres for science of learning joined Australian scientists and educators for the two-day meeting last week on the St Lucia campus of the University of Queensland.
The premise of this new, multidisciplinary field is that we simply don't know enough about the innards of learning.
Sometimes, as in the equation study, educators are plain wrong about what works in learning.
Or, as education researcher Geoff Masters told the meeting at the Queensland Brain Institute: "We often know what works long before we know why it works."
One obvious question is where to look for the why.
New featured topic: People and Places
August 02, 2011
A new featured topic is now on our website and it is called 'People and Places'. Here you will find some links to sites that show you the lives of people from different places and from different eras. There are links to celebrations, street scenes and sports as well as other daily activities. If you know of a good site please add it and include 'daily life' in the tags.