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Accelerating Experience| Using Learning Scenarios Based on Master Teacher Experiences and Specific School Contexts to Help Induct Novice Faculty into Teaching at an Independent Boarding School

<p> Many independent boarding schools have customarily hired significant numbers of novice faculty who are not certified teachers and who do not have significant teaching experience. Additionally, the time available to help such novice faculty learn about the many aspects of their jobs is quite limited. Therefore, the methods used to help novice faculty learn, while they already enacting their roles as educators, are important. As a result, this study examined the effectiveness of using school context based learning scenarios as a tool for teaching novice faculty at independent boarding schools. Specifically, the study tried to determine if such scenarios helped novice faculty feel greater self-efficacy and helped them to more effectively gain the benefits of their own experiential learning, thus acquiring more quickly the important knowledge of their craft that senior teachers developed through their own experiential learning. I theorized that this would ultimately lead to their achieving better educational outcomes with their students in all facets of their jobs. First, the researcher interviewed six master teachers from three different junior boarding schools to gather information about the key experiential learning events of successful teachers and then analyzed this data to identify common themes and types of experiences. These narrated, real experiences and the analyses of them were used as the basis for the construction of learning scenarios. These scenarios attempted to both highlight important concepts and approaches to working with adolescents that the master teachers felt they gleaned from the actual experiences and reflect the specific details of the independent boarding middle school where they were used. These scenarios were then read and discussed with the novice faculty at the school as part of their induction to life and work there over the course of a four-month period. To assess the impact of the use of scenarios, the researcher audio recorded, video taped and analyzed two of the scenario learning sessions; had the new faculty respond, in written form, to two scenarios; conducted a focus group with the new faculty, and administered a pre and post scenario learning experience self-efficacy scale.</p>

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:PROQUEST/oai:pqdtoai.proquest.com:10264630
Date22 June 2017
CreatorsCyr-Mutty, Paul B.
PublisherUniversity of Pennsylvania
Source SetsProQuest.com
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typethesis

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