‘...teachers need extended opportunities to think through new ideas and to try out new practices, ideally in a context where they get feedback from a more expert practitioner and continue to refine their practice in collaboration with colleagues. Observation, coaching and talk-analysis feedback may be useful tools for professional development whereby sympathetic discussion by groups of teachers...

We describe an experiment that measures the pedagogical usefulness of the results returned by the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) and Google. Eleven public school teachers from the state of Virginia (USA) were used to evaluate a set of 38 search terms and search results based on the Standards of Learning (SOL) for Virginia Public Schools. Evaluations of search results were obtained from...

Integrating thinking skills such as focusing, information gathering, and organization into all subjects is becoming increasingly important in elementary schools. The nonacademic subjects of physical education, art, and music can provide opportunities for teaching thinking skills. In this study, 2 physical education programs (8 classes) were examined for the presence of opportunities to use thin...

This article presents the results of two case studies undertaken within the project MoKoM funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). In this context, expert interviews were conducted in order to identify relevant competencies empirically concerning informatics comprehension and modelling. The interviews (N = 30) were based on typical scenarios of this domain and were conducted with differe...

We wish to document the use of important teaching strategies and to cast them in a form that will optimize their usefulness for teachers and curriculum developers. From expert think-aloud protocols, we have identified a number of strategies for evaluating and modifying explanatory mental models. Analyzing a model-based high school science curriculum to see whether this set of strategies might a...

As the Internet-based crowdsourcing services become more and more popular, learning from multiple teachers or sources has received more attention of the researchers in the machine learning area. In this setting, the learning system is dealing with samples and labels provided by multiple teachers, who in common cases, are non-expert. Their labeling styles and behaviors are usually diverse, some ...

The creation of professional learning communities (PLCs) in schools and the designation of instructional coaching positions have become popular strategies to support teacher learning and instructional improvement. PLCs and coaching initiatives share a similar theory of action: that providing teachers with opportunities to interact with peers and/or expert coaches will enable them to learn and i...