New Building Bridges 6 Teacher 39;s Book

[Eugene Aubry]

Aformer K-5 public school principal turned author, presenter, and leadership coach, Peter DeWitt provides insights and advice for education leaders. Former superintendent Michael Nelson is a frequent contributor. Read more from this blog.

Why do we use language like that? Sure, some leaders left the classroom to make more money and take on more responsibility, but most did it because they felt like they could help more students, work harder with a larger group of parents, and bring more teachers together to focus on learning.

Why do people talk about each other instead of with each other? Well, it all comes back to trust and school climate. With every conversation between both parties, comes the risk of chipping away at trust...or building it.

Principals who knock down walls by creating supportive environments for teachers, and welcome parents into schools are those who understand how important their actions are to the school climate. They listen to all sides and find the best solutions. Principals who engage positively with students, and treat them with respect and like they are the growing human beings they are, are the ones who understand what positive relationships and engagement means to learning.

In the End

Schools will only be a better place for learning when the adults learn how to work better together. This is not a huge surprise...no big secret here. Yet, time and time again principals and teachers seem to be working from different sides and use language that helps create barriers instead of bridges.

Teachers and principals can both be leaders in schools. They can lead negativity and resentment, or they can lead a more inclusive environment where people feel safe to share when they agree or disagree with a process and how to move forward.

Some of the areas we need to focus on are:

Focus on learning -Hattie talks a lot about how too often we focus on adult issues in schools and neglect to talk enough about learning. Are the issues we are having really anything to do with our students?

Co-construct goals - Leaders and teachers need to work on goals together and keep a constant focus on those goals as they go throughout the year. The goals should fit into the larger district initiatives, which are fairly open enough that most goals can fit into them.

Provide feedback to one another - Feedback is something that leaders, teachers and students all need. We should be providing feedback to one another, and that feedback should be wrapped around the goal and success criteria we have already set.

Talk through issues - Difficult conversations happen, and my friend Jen Abrams is a master at these. We need to have the difficult conversations and learn how to work through them together. Too often when difficult conversations happen, people vent and then resentment builds. Venting is fine, but we need to work it all out before resentment builds.

Building and bridge failures can be devastating, but Bao is helping to prevent them. She is an expert in addressing the challenges of aging infrastructure in the United States, and she is producing the next generation of engineers to help solve those challenges.

That philosophy is what set Bao apart this year, and she is being honored with a 2021 Eisenhart Award for Outstanding Teaching. She brings extensive experience in building bridges and strong connections to students.

Bao started supplementing her lectures with multiple online resources. She began posting more detailed class notes and illustrated problem descriptions. Bao has also become a YouTube star with a series of videos about assessing the design loads of truss structures for bridges and frames for buildings.

Her use of technology and active learning activities has seen multiple benefits. Student grades improved year-over-year and the varied learning options allowed the Deaf students in her classes to learn at their own pace.

Over the years, one of her more enjoyable activities is the annual class photo. Bao has filled her office walls with these photos of her students. She continues to hear from many to say that through her, they were prepared well for graduate studies and the workplace.

When David, a third-year exercise science major, heard about the study abroad program offered through RIT Global, he was determined to go and to take his sister with him. In June, the Brassies left for the six-week program at Perrotis College, where they would study the Mediterranean diet and Greek culture.

After attending Digital Hollywood: The AI Summer Summit, Associate Professor Frank Deese shares his key takeaways from discussions about how artificial intelligence impacts screenwriters in Hollywood.

Here, we systematically review research on teaching knowledge in the context of undergraduate STEM education, with particular attention to what this research reveals about knowledge that is important for evidence-based teaching. Evidence-based teaching can improve student outcomes in undergraduate STEM education. However, the enactment of promising evidence-based teaching strategies depends greatly on the instructor and potentially on the teaching knowledge they are able to deploy. The review includes an overview of prevalent teaching knowledge theory, including pedagogical content knowledge, mathematical knowledge for teaching, and pedagogical knowledge. We compare and contrast teaching knowledge theory and terminology across STEM disciplines in order to build bridges for researchers across disciplines. Our search for peer-reviewed investigations of teaching knowledge in undergraduate science, engineering and mathematics yielded 45 papers. We examined the theoretical frameworks used in each study and analyzed study approaches, comparing across disciplines. Importantly, we also synthesized findings from research conducted in the context of evidence-based teaching. Overall, teaching knowledge research is sparse and siloed by discipline, and we call for collaborative work and better bridge-building across STEM disciplines. Though disciplinary divergences are common in discipline-based education research, the effect is magnified in this research area because the theoretical frameworks are themselves siloed by discipline. Investigations of declarative knowledge were common, and we call for increased attention to knowledge used in the practice of teaching. Finally, there are not many studies examining teaching knowledge in the context of evidence-based teaching, but the existing work suggests that components of pedagogical content knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, and content knowledge influence the implementation of evidence-based teaching. We describe implications for future teaching knowledge research. We also call on those who develop and test evidence-based strategies and curriculum to consider, from the beginning, the teaching knowledge needed for effective implementation.

Evidence-based teaching can improve outcomes for all students in undergraduate STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and can disproportionately benefit students from historically underrepresented groups (e.g., Freeman et al., 2014; Laursen et al., 2014; Theobald et al., 2020). As a result of this potential, there have been repeated, high-profile calls for substantial reform in teaching practices in undergraduate STEM (e.g., Holdren & Lander, 2012; Rosenberg et al., 2018). While evidence-based strategies can be highly effective at improving student outcomes, the results instructors achieve vary substantially (Andrews et al., 2011; Johnson et al., 2020; Laursen et al., 2014). Furthermore, education research contains many examples of how carefully crafted teaching materials and strategies can fall short of their potential to improve student learning when implemented (e.g., Cohen & Ball, 1990; Dancy et al., 2016; Ganter, 2001). We define evidence-based teaching as the use of teaching strategies that are supported by high-quality evidence that they can positively impact students. A broad definition is appropriate for this work because different STEM disciplines prioritize different evidence-based strategies.

Yet an assumption inherent in systems of higher education is that disciplinary expertise prepares faculty to be effective undergraduate educators. This disconnect between how we approach teaching in higher education and what has been learned about the importance of specialized teaching knowledge among K12 teachers suggests there is much to be pursued, especially in the context of calls for reform in undergraduate STEM education. Our primary research question is: What is known about teaching knowledge used in the context of undergraduate STEM instruction? Analysis of the body of research into teaching knowledge conducted in undergraduate STEM contexts can aid researchers and practitioners. Taking stock of what is currently known can provide valuable insights into findings and theory. In addition, doing so across multiple STEM disciplines can enable us to leverage the limited number of such studies in any single discipline to help undergraduate STEM instructors to achieve the promise of evidence-based instruction for their students.

In this paper, we systematically reviewed existing research on teaching knowledge in the context of undergraduate STEM, with particular attention to what this research reveals about knowledge that is important to evidence-based teaching. We compare work across STEM disciplines because identifying similarities across disciplines can strengthen our confidence in theory and findings and noting differences can advance efforts by bringing to light areas that have been under-examined in particular disciplines. For the purposes of this review, we use teaching knowledge as an umbrella term to refer to pedagogical content knowledge, mathematical knowledge for teaching, and pedagogical knowledge, which are described in detail in the following section. In the remainder of the introduction, we describe theoretical frameworks of teaching knowledge, articulate the need for studies of teaching knowledge in undergraduate STEM contexts, and end by presenting our research goal.

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