The Characteristics of Successful Learners Revisited

Over the past 25 years teachers in the USA, and more recently elsewhere, have been exposed to a wide variety of instructional techniques aimed at helping to improve the thinking abilities and practices of our students. Often these have come integrated into their own set of materials.

The Curriculum Journal, 2016

Why should we teach students to engage in skillful thinking -- for example skillful decision making, judging the reliability of sources of information, and determining the most likely cause of something -- in contrast to the usual: memory and rote learning? And why should we help students learn how to use these types of skillful; thinking to engage with the regular content curriculum? This series of editorials published in a popular education supplement in Spain explores answers to these questions, especially why and how we can teach all students to develop creative ideas, judge their feasibility, and select powerful figurative language to express important thoughts and feelings.

Understanding and Developing Science Teachers’ Pedagogical Content Knowledge, 2012

What is the smallest bit? 4.2: Teaching about the concept of nothing 4.3: Playdough balls: Concrete models of abstract ideas 4.4: Careful chemical reactions 4.5: Questions and answers 4.6: Seeing things differently 4.7: Probing students' views 4.8: Good vibrations CHAPTER FIVE Chemical reactions SECTION ONE 5.1a: Creating a unit of work in chemistry 5.1b: What is a chemical reaction 5.1c: Background to murder mystery unit 5.1d: Students love a murder mystery 5.1e: An annotated syllabus SECTION TWO 5.2: Understanding what substances are 5.3: What are the differences in the ways metals react? 5.4: Introducing reaction types: Less is more 5.5: The limitations of predictability of chemical reactions 5.6: Probing students' views: Insights into teacher change 5.7: The increase in mass through combustion CHAPTER SIX Circulatory system 6.1: What is it about blood? 6.2: Not just a thing, but a need for a function 6.3: Heart exploration 6.4: Questions we want answered 6.5: Roadways 6.6: Walking the heart 6.7: Mapping students' knowledge 6.8: Commenting on the core CHAPTER SEVEN Force SECTION ONE 7.1a: The big ideas 7.1b: Newton's third law: A key to understanding force vi 7.1c: Developing ideas of force and reaction forces 7.1d: Being specific about force 7.1e: Developing students' ideas about friction SECTION TWO 7.2: Familiar forces 7.3: Issues to be resolved with year 7.4: Features of force 7.5: Does gravity need air? 7.6: What students' think CHAPTER EIGHT Electric circuits 8.1: The jelly bean role play-some pros and cons 8.2: Language matters 8.3: It's like a … 8.4: Why one teacher avoids using v = ir 8.5: Strings and light globes 8.6: Helping students to discriminate CHAPTER NINE Genetics 9.1: A mental model for teaching genetics 9.2: Deep time 9.3: Terminology talk 9.4: Understanding how natural selection works 9.5: Understanding the role of chance in evolution 9.6: Introducing DNA with sweets and songs 9.7: Science is different when you have to teach it CHAPTER TEN Examining the use and value of CoRes and PaPeRs CHAPTER ELEVEN Science teaching and teacher education x

A growing body of research focuses on investigating the ways in which teachers use curriculum to design instruction. Research results indicate that effective teachers hold an analytical stance toward curriculum materials, critiquing and adapting them to achieve productive instructional ends (Beyer & Davis, 2012). Analyzing curriculum materials is essential for effective teaching at least from two reasons. First, parallel to the recent developments in educational researches curriculum materials changes regularly. To compete these changes teachers need to follow curricular materials regularly and recognize the changes and adapt them to their classroom needs as well as considering their knowledge and skills. Second, as curriculum developers take the stance of wider audiences usually, teachers need to adapt the curriculum to their school environment and student needs. For these two basic reasons teachers need to be cautious, perhaps ought to be critical against the curriculum materials instead of directly applying them without any questioning. Even though critiquing and adapting curriculum materials are essential aspects of teaching practice, novice teachers encounter difficulties with these tasks (Beyer & Davis, 2012). Teaching is commonly viewed as a craft (Eisner, 1983). Teachers, in many ways, must perceive and interpret existing resources, evaluate the constraints of the classroom setting, balance tradeoffs, and devise strategies – all in the pursuit of their instructional goals. Therefore it is essential to help teacher how to analyze the curriculum materials and adapt them into their teaching circumstances such as student needs and interest and his/her own knowledge and skills. Therefore this workshop, we will focus on how to help teachers to analyze and understand the curriculum and adapt into their classrooms. References Beyer, C.J. & Davis, E.A. (2012). Learning to critique and adapt science curriculum materials: Examining the development of pre-service elementary teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge. Science Education, 96(1), 130-157. Eisner, E. W. (1983). The art and craft of teaching. Educational Leadership, 40(4), 4–13.

2004

The focus of current classroom teaching in Malaysia is the utilization of metacognitive strategies especially thinking skills. In fact many educational psychologists argued that thinking skills are important aspects in education (Sternberg, 1990a, l990b). In Malaysia, it is realized that many teachers are not fully capable of incorporating thinking skills in their teaching strategies. Therefore it is the objectives of this study to find out how far students are inculcated with: a) critical thinking; b) creative thinking; and c) divergent/convergent thinking. A research survey was carried out on 387 secondary school students aged between 15–16 years. Results showed that teachers incorporated critical thinking skills, creative thinking skills as well as convergent/divergent thinking skills in their teaching of their subjects. Though this study showed that there is a new trend in teaching and learning where students are actively involved in the learning process, there is plenty of room...

This article summarizes the results of a number of studies conducted over nearly a decade in Hungary. The knowledge of students in Grade 7 and Grade 11 was assessed on four levels -(1) teacher grades (2) objective knowledge tests based on the curriculum assessments of the quality of knowledge ( eg level of student understanding of content, ability to apply knowledge on novel contexts -this included assessment of Science application, misconceptions, Math understanding, spatial reasoning, historical reasoning etc.) and (4.) higher order thinking skills ( considered to be essential in order to acquire 'high quality' knowledge -this included assessment of inductive and deductive reasoning, correlative reasoning, critical thinking, verbal analogies etc.). Students were also given questionnaires to collect background information including information about their motivation and self-concept.

Pastoral Care in Education, 2000

Let's begin with two foundational works on curriculum, one by Ralph and the other by Jerome Bruner (1960). These provide a good beginning, not only because they were among the first books on curriculum to be published but because the ideas they contain have been among the most enduring. Indeed, they continue to provide the foundation for our most current thinking in curriculum development.

Journal of Curriculum Studies, 1997

Fundamental reform of American secondary schooling will require more than just revising the structures and relationships within schools; it demands as well a serious rethinking of the curriculum, the heart of teaching and learning. Drawing on several school-based examples, the paper illustrates the di erences between`subject matter learning' and disciplinary learning. It then proceeds to explore some of the problems posed by using disciplines as the primary source of authority in shaping the curriculum, and goes on to propose a more radical, alternative model for thinking about curriculum. This alternative attempts to integrate more evenly the in¯uence of disciplines with other in¯uences on the curriculum, such as the child' s world, the particulars of context and the knowledge of professions. Fundamental reform of American education depends in part on a serious rethinking of the very heart of teaching and learning ± the curriculum. Many of the reform movements currently sweeping schools across the US have enacted`reform' that amounts to a restructuring of the relationships and authority within the organization of a school and its community. Such reforms ± site-based management, school improvement committees, shared decision-making ± are not inappropriate, but they are incomplete: they arè not focusing on the right things, the cultural core of curriculum and instruction' (Fullan 1993: 51). As Michael Fullan (1993) points out, even in the best of circumstances ± where change is voluntarily pursued, where considerable¯exibility exists to de® ne the kinds of reform sought, or where large resources are concentrated in a few schools ± the task of substantively changing schools is extremely challenging. In Fullan's view, the relative silence about curriculum is at the root of much failed reform. Why? The`hardest core to crack is the learning core: all of our attempts to alter formal structures will not necessarily change the norms, habits, skills and beliefs that have shaped our current conceptions of that learning core, the curriculum' (Fullan 1993: 49). The curriculum, then, plays a central role in the workings of schools and must be addressed if those workings are to be substantially altered.