The purpose of this study is an investigation of instructors‟ perceptions of composition learning objectives focusing on which should be taught and which should be emphasized. The researcher observed that instructors do not regard all course objectives in English Composition courses equally; emphasizing some and giving others brief consideration. From this observation, this study was developed to measure objectives as well as to examine principal reasons for the differences in perception. Using an 18-question (16 content area and two demographic) survey based on content areas chosen to mirror general learning objectives in composition courses, along with six focused interviews, the researcher discovered some levels of agreement, some of disagreement, and some areas of neutrality. The researcher has established some connections and some disconnects between some of the general learning objectives from English Composition courses, which are intriguing and thought provoking. Since instructors deliver instruction using learning objectives as the goals to be achieved in the English Composition courses they teach, it is prudent to be concerned with how these objectives are perceived and implemented by the users. The data collected conclusively reflects instructors‟ perceptions of learning objectives are not all the same. As the researcher measured instructors‟ perceptions of English Composition learning objectives, the results demonstrate that there are stronger relationships with some of the learning objectives, and some objectives have no relationships; some objectives are well matched and others are not. The purpose of this study, understanding relationships between instructors‟ perceptions of learning objectives in FY English Composition courses, will provide us with research to help improve objectives and positively impact instruction.

The importance of access to quality physical education (PE) among children is well-documented. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, however, resulted in significant shifts in PE curriculum delivery alongside a rapid uptake by PE teachers of new technologies. Although some research about integrating technology into teaching does exist, there is very little data about virtual learning in elementary school, particularly in the context of physical education. There are also clear gaps in the literature about teaching PE virtually during a pandemic. As such and in this study, I sought to fill a critical gap in the existing literature by identifying what specific factors shaped elementary physical education delivery during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as barriers and facilitators to successful curriculum delivery, and I drew implications for future emergency response needs.This mixed-methods study examined elementary physical education teachers’ perceptions of teaching virtually during the spring of 2020 and/or 2020-2021 school year. The study’s sample drew on PE teachers from urban, rural, and suburban settings across the US, which included diverse experiences to explore teachers’ perceptions of virtual teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. Surveys and focus groups were utilized. Results from this study elucidated that physical education teachers were challenged by limited space, equipment, internet use, and distraction within the environment when teaching. However, teachers in this sample also discussed their tenacity to help their students stay active by delivering supplies to families, posting on social media, and teaching how to make alternative equipment. Teachers also reported that the more support they received (for example, via social emotional support and also specific technology support), the less stress they felt during remote teaching. At the same time, the higher the teacher perception on live lesson participation, the more efficacious the teachers felt. The expectations of PE teachers during COVID varied from region to region, and the ever-changing schedules made teaching PE that more difficult. Although there has been some research on teaching virtually, before the pandemic there was very little research about specifically teaching elementary PE virtually. The need to pivot to remote instruction is part of our future. The implication of this work helps support the need for further education of public health goals. The need for a platform that supports PE and elementary age children is needed to best support this work. Using technology as an enrichment and supplement for PE to help reach this goal could be a positive outcome of this pandemic. The use of virtual platforms will also help deliver PE content to families and allow for technology skill development through targeted practice for any future need to pivot to remote.

No description available.

There is a gap in educational research regarding teachers’ narratives of teaching in diverse classrooms, especially in East Africa. It is essential to investigate teachers’ beliefs and perspectives because these are strong indicators of their planning, instructional decisions, and classroom practices and can also frame their perception of classroom transactions. In this study, I asked a group of Kenyan primary teachers at an informal settlement school about their perspectives on Kenya’s diversity; how they teach curricula reform objectives such as citizenship for all in their classrooms; and how experiences from their personal lives have shaped their stances on matters related to identity, nationhood, citizenship, and other related concepts. These teachers’ localized meaning-making revealed their citizenship consciousness and their considerations of history, power, and politics, which in turn impelled agency, action, and increased accountability in this place-specific project of citizenship education. I considered the school itself both as a liminal space, forgotten within Kenya’s urban planning and governance policies, and also as a relational, pluralistic, and intellectual space that merited scholarly research on pedagogy and practice. This study’s findings created space for new and different frameworks for conceptualizing teachers’ knowledge. Specifically, this study helped make teachers’ narratives of their experiences teaching in this context more visible and valuable, underscoring the importance of teacher education research as an area of onto-epistemological inquiry. Learning how teachers understand, think, and teach in complex urban borderlands can contribute to an emergence of shared understandings about belonging and identity in multiethnic spaces, particularly in postcolonial sites. This critical narrative case study collected responses to interviews and focus group discussions and also included classroom visits to observe how teachers made meaning of curricular objectives and understood concepts of sociocultural plurality, identities, citizenship, and belonging. The narratives that teachers held contained the potential to reimagine constructions of difference; invited a reconceptualization of ideologies related to language and inclusive spaces; and highlighted the need to consider inter-epistemic synergetic approaches within the fields of teacher education and curriculum studies in order to design pedagogies of pluralism to facilitate teaching and learning in diverse classrooms.

This multiple-bounded case study explored charter-school music teacher practitioners’(MTPs’) and instructional leaders’ (ILs’) perceptions of professional development (PD) in four charter management organizations (CMOs). The purpose was to provide a rich description of these practitioners’ professional development, with the goal of spurring policy conversations and further research on music teachers and their experiences in the charter domain. Over two months in the fall of 2023, the researcher conducted one-on-one interviews with eight participants, which focused on ways of making change, methods of delivery, beneficial components of the methods of supporting music literacy, and forms of PD assessment from the perspectives of MTPs and ILs. In addition to holding two focus groups (one with each case), the researcher conducted four classroom and debrief observations. The interviews and observations were analyzed using the participants’ words as first-cycle analysis themes; these were then filtered through the study’s conceptual framework of Desimone’s (2009) core elements of effective professional development: content focus, active learning, coherence, sustained duration, and collective participation. The findings illustrate the participants’ experience with the professional development phenomenon through a series of main themes: instruction is classroom management, except PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN CHARTER SCHOOLS when it is not, (b) the many moods of instructional coaching and workshops, (c) content expertise via cycles of inquiry, and (d) reflection is essential. Implications include framing future empirical research in this usually guarded sector as a partnership to identify best and emergent practices for practitioners that directly affect students and families. Framing research in this manner may resonate with charter management organizations that adhere to more formative professional development practices. Additionally, cycles of inquiry in which self-reflection can occur may be a way forward for myriad non-content-expert instructional leaders who support the professional development of music teacher practitioners in charter schools or traditional public schools. Further suggestions for future practice include hosting charter-specific sessions at music education conferences, which could be framed as dialogic sessions to foster collegial inquiry concerning practices at both charter and public schools. Because CMOs’ system structures are different, practitioners there experience some aspects of teaching and professional development differently than their traditional public counterparts. Offering sessions specifically tailored to charter practitioners’ needs could help ensure that their needs, as well as those of the ILs that support them, are met. Keywords: Professional Development, Charter Schools, In-Service Music Teacher Practitioners, Instructional Leaders, Instructional Coaching, Mentors, Workshops.

Using an explanatory sequential mixed methods design, this study aimed to contribute to an understanding of A) the availability of arts education programming in NYC during the 2022–2023 academic year at charter schools affiliated with Charter Management Organizations CMOs), and B) arts educators’ plans for retention and perceptions of professional satisfaction, network-level support, and school-level support. In this study, a CMO was defined as a non-profit operator that exists (as a business entity) separately from the charter schools it manages. Quantitative data was collected prior to qualitative data. In Phase 1 (quantitative data collection), an electronic survey of arts educators in CMO-affiliated schools in New York City (NYC) was conducted to measure job satisfaction, attitudes and opinions of perceived levels of support from networks and schools, and needs for further support. In Phase 2 (qualitative data collection), interviews were conducted with six arts educators to further explore the perceptions of support held by arts educators at schools associated with NYC-based CMOs. Emerging from the qualitative results were the educators’ concepts of and needs for support across three categories: structural support, peer support, and support for teacher development (including both lesson planning and lesson delivery). The roles of network-level leadership and school-level leadership (as a team and as individuals) in providing support across these three categories while also preserving teacher autonomy created a complex web of influences on charter sector teacher satisfaction and retention within the field of arts education at schools affiliated with CMOs for the teachers in this study, which has implications for theory, practice, and policy alike.

South Africa needs an economy which is competitive and successful. Therefore, it is important that an education system will provide a skilled work force. Learners need to develop biology skills that will equip them for life, enable them to solve problems and think critically. Unfortunately South Africa is presently encountering a lack of skilled citizens. The reasons for this most probably is that the biology curriculum is mainly discipline-based, content-loaded and largely irrelevant, resulting in learners not furthering their studies in biology and related fields. The biology matriculation examination has a strangle hold on what is taught. Lengthy, content-loaded curricula emphasise the memorising of facts by means of expository teaching methods, leaving little opportunity to teach the application of information and skills to solve problems in real life situations. The teaching methods of biology are thus not sufficiently stimulating and motivating. Biology teaching should not only concentrate on facts or explain facts to learners, but should also concentrate on ways or processes by means of which these facts can be obtained. To implement a process approach where learners can develop basic- and integrated skills is not an easy task for those involved. The empirical research of this study, confirmed the findings throughout the literature study that various factors hamper the effective implementation of the process approach. It is important that negative factors such as 'large classes' and 'a lengthy syllabus' (in historically disadvantaged [HD] and advantaged schools [HA]) and 'lack of equipment' and 'resource material' (only in HD schools) which received high percentages in the survey, will duly be considered when implementing the process approach, curriculum 2005 or 21. These factors can exert a powerful influence on the success of any changes in biology education. To ensure the successful implementation of the process approach it is important that all teachers receive adequate in-service training to keep abreast with new teaching strategies and methods / Educational Studies / D.Ed. (Didactics)

The objective of this research was to determine the relationship between several positive psychological constructs for 178 teachers. The reliability of the measuring instruments, the relationship to each other and the wellness of the teachers were determined. The following measuring instruments were used: sense of coherence (Antonovsky), locus of control (Schepers), coping (Carver), personal meaning (Wong), life regard (Battista and Almond), engagement (Schaufeli) and burnout (Maslach). The empirical survey showed that the constructs correlate significantly The regression analysis indicated that some of the constructs are good predictors of each other. The factor analysis between the dimensions was determined with the use of varimax factor rotation. The dimensions were divided into five factors which in practice correlated significantly with each other. / Industrial & Orgarnisation Psychology / (M. Com. (Industrial and Organisational Psychology))

Thesis (PhD (Curriculum Studies))--University of Stellenbosch, 2010. / Bibliography / The implementation of OBE has significant implications for teachers’ work; adopting an OBE approach entails reconstruction of professional knowledge and a redefinition of planning procedures, teaching approaches and assessment practices. A teacher attempting to make sense of OBE, learning outcomes, assessment standards, band levels, NQF, etc. will inevitably bring his/her worldviews, past experiences and beliefs into the process of teaching and learning, and would also need to engage with new concepts to keep track of the changes in meaning and priorities. Within this changing education scenario OBE, as an initiative, offers opportunities for new pedagogies to flourish, marking a departure from the safe haven of traditional pedagogy. Therefore a perspective on teachers’ beliefs regarding OBE can provide an alternative interpretive lens for researchers through understanding teachers’ actions and thoughts. Purpose: The aim was to examine strategies teachers employ in their classrooms in response to their beliefs about OBE. Teachers’ epistemological beliefs were explored and linked to OBE pedagogical frameworks and classroom management practices. Their belief systems were divided into three categories – the teachers’ views about OBE, mathematics knowledge, and the teaching and learning of mathematics. This study was based on the belief that conceptions are specific meanings given to phenomena, derived from different experiences involved in helping individuals make sense of their world. Furthermore, those worldviews in turn influence how new information is perceived. Methodology: The researcher adopted a qualitative exploratory design. The method of choice for this study was a combination of elements of phenomenology and ethnography. Nineteen teachers were interviewed and observed. The sample was drawn from two former Model C schools and three township schools. Data were analysed qualitatively. Findings: The findings confirmed that there are multiple beliefs that constitute a personal epistemology. Therefore, to investigate some unique entities of the belief system such as OBE requires examining the broader belief system. The majority of teachers responded to OBE implementation with uncertainty, anger, frustration and anxiety. In the absence of certainty about OBE and faced with a myriad of classroom iv challenges, teachers relied on their experience to make decisions regarding what was important to know, they drew on their own personal teaching theories more than what they thought about OBE to make judgments of learning processes. This study concludes that the link between teachers’ beliefs, conceptualisation of OBE and teaching practice is weak. Their beliefs about the nature of mathematics knowledge, teaching and learning mathematics had stronger connections with, and represented the basis for teachers’ pedagogical purpose behind their preferred teaching practice.

Thesis (MEd)--Stellenbosch University, 1999. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The revised norms and standards for teacher education requires an understanding of the beliefs, values and practices of the main religions of South Africa. However, many preservice teachers have emerged from backgrounds of monoreligious education, or from schools where Religious education was discarded from the curriculum. This situation implies that pre-service teachers may lack the knowledge and skills to cope within a religiously pluralist school environment. This study argues therefore that the attitudes and perceptions of pre-service teachers towards Religious education in particular and religions in general will be positively influenced by means of a programme of intervention. The main aim of this study is to examine strategies for teaching religion to pre-service teachers to equip them for the religious and cultural diversity of South African classrooms. F euerstein' s theory of Mediated Learning Experience (MLE) is examined as a vehicle for initiating new and creative ways of thinking about religions. Ten criteria for MLE are implemented within a context of co-operative small group learning on the grounds that learning about religions should take place in a constructivist paradigm. The potential influence of a tutor/mediator on the perceptions and attitudes of pre-service teachers towards religions other than their own is therefore a significant theme in this study. The influence of a programme of intervention on student attitudes towards religion and Religious education was determined within an action-enquiry research model. The empirical research indicates that active participation in the learning process not only enhanced student participants' knowledge and understanding of religious concepts, but also fostered the value of an unbiased, positive approach to the study of religions. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hersiende norme en standaarde vir onderwysersopleiding verg 'n kennis van die geloof, waardes en praktyke van die hoof religiee van Suid-Afrika. Nietemin kom baie studentonderwysers uit 'n monoreligieuse opvoedingsagtergrond of van skole waar religieuse onderrig van die kurrikulum verwyder is. Hierdie situasie impliseer dat studentonderwysers nie die nodige kennis dra, of die nodige vaardighede het, om in 'n pluralistiese religieuse skoolomgewing aan te pas nie. Hierdie studie argumenteer dat die houdings en persepsies van studentonderwysers teenoor religieuse onderrig in die besonder en religie in die algemeen positief be"invloed kan word deur middel van 'n intervensieprogram. Die hoofdoel van die studie is om verskillende strategiee in religieuse onderrig VIr studentonderwysers te ondersoek om hulle toe te rus vir die religieuse en kulturele diversiteit in Suid-Afrika. Feuerstein se teorie van Bemiddelde leerervaring (Mediated Learning Experience, MLE) word ondersoek as 'n middel waardeur nuwe kreatiewe denkmetodes oor religie ge"inisieer kan word. Tien kriteria van MLE word ge"implementeer binne 'n konteks van kooperatiewe leergroepe op grond daarvan dat religiee binne 'n konstruktivistiese paradigma moet plaasvind. Die potentiele invloed van die fasiliteerder op die persepsies en houdings van studentonderwysers teenoor ander religiee is dus 'n belangrike tema van die studie. Die invloed van 'n intervensieprogram op studentehoudings teenoor religiee en religieuse onderrig was bepaal deur middel van 'n aksienavraag navorsingsmodel. Die empiriese navorsing motiveer die feit dat aktiewe deelname in die leerproses nie net die deelnemende studentonderwysers se kennis en begrip van religieuse konsepte verdiep het nie, maar ook 'n onbevooroordeelde positiewe benadering tot die studie van religiee gekweek het.