In 2006, the Taiwanese Ministry of Education launched a kindergarten supervision project with the aim of advancing curriculum and instruction quality, and reinforcing teachers’ professional development. As a supervisor, I visited 12 kindergartens between 2007 and 2011, spending 60 hours per year at each, spread across 10 visits. My particular roles were to facilitate the arts curriculum and pro...

Teacher training programs in EFL contexts pursue the goal of promoting teaching skills and critical dispositions in prospective and experienced teachers and their ability to reflect on and enhance their mediating roles to maximize learning outcomes. Yet, discrepancies in teachers’ roles during and after the programs are not uncommon and accentuate the need to assess outcomes. This quasi-experim...

Over the past decades, education took a critical-oriented shift. This perspective changed the role of teachers, students, and classrooms. A teacher's role changes from an instructor to a reflective practitioner, a student is considered an active agent of his/her learning, and a classroom is a place for identity endeavor. The assumption underlying such an approach conceptualizes educatio...

One respected tradition in medical education holds that physicians should struggle to maintain sensibility, openness, and compassion in the face of strong contravening tendencies. However, today's medical education is structured around a more recent tradition, which maintains that physicians should struggle to develop emotional detachment as a prerequisite for objectivity. In this model, sensib...

BACKGROUND How students are introduced to their studies will affect the quality of learning. This project deals with tools for lifelong learning to increase students' awareness of learning how to learn. In parallel to an introductory course for students, a course for teachers was given with a focus on tutoring students. AIMS To evaluate an interprofessional transition course for first-year he...

This article presents a qualitative critical action research of six Grade 12 high school teachers who used Turnitin as part of their assessment processes. Turnitin submissions, one-on-one semi-structured interviews, observation and reflective activities were used for data production/generation. This article concluded that although Turnitin did not help teachers to prevent all learner acts of pl...

This research analyzed the feedback delivered by cooperating teachers and university supervisors in an internship, and reports how student teachers perceived the feedback they received during debriefing sessions with their mentors. Hattie and Timperley's (2007) framework for conceptualizing effective feedback was used to analyze cooperating teachers' and field supervisor' assessment of the stud...

This study describes the use of concept mapping in regard to teachers' views on the meaning of knowledge, learning, and expertise of teachers, as produced by SConSAT (Standardized Concept Structuring Analysis Task) interviews with expert and novice teachers. The study is based on the assumption that concept maps are cognitive and meta-cognitive tools that make it possible to reveal covert and o...

Transformational learning, according to Mezirow (1981), involves transforming taken-for-granted frames of reference into more discriminating, flexible ‘habits of mind’. In teacher education, transformative learning impacts on the development of students’ action theories, self-efficacy and professional attributes. Although considered imperative to reflective practice, not all students take a tra...

As the main part of a large-scale project, the present study investigated the relationship among reflective thinking, listening anxiety, and listening comprehension of Iranian EFL learners with regard to their proficiency level. To this end, 223 (106 intermediate and 117 advanced) adult male and female Iranian EFL learners from a private language institute took part in the study by completing t...