Design and Evaluation of Teacher Education Programs - Coursework Example

1. In this program we will identify and evaluate learning experiences provided by scientific ideas in textbooks in the middle school by addressing any issues in reading or comprehension. Also it will improve the overall learning experience by inculcating more effective usage of textbooks, and interactions between students, teachers and those mediums. 2. Rationale: Students and teachers have a unique relationship with their textbooks. Most teachers utilize textbooks in their classroom as a way to provide important information to their students and guide them through their coursework. The question is how effective is this method. Students are faced with difficult challenges when learning science that normally would not come into play when studying other subjects. The majority of science study is learning facts and testing facts against hypotheses in order to create new facts. Textbooks present the facts needed to form hypotheses in the form of text and diagrams. It is the teachers’ responsibility to convey these messages in a way that the students can understand what the message or main idea when they read scientific ideas in the textbook. Since textbooks are such a large part in learning science, it’s reasonable to assess the quality of these textbooks and their usefulness to students learning science. Many teachers and students have told the evaluator that students’ abilities to read and comprehend passages are extremely limited. They believe that the passages in these textbooks are not useful and undermine improvement in scientific ideas. It is the teachers’ role to engage the students in learning the subject. Eager students will learn more from text when motivated to read the text. A certain amount of information should be given to the students in order to retain their interest and promote sustained learning. This program will assess the value that textbooks has in the process of teaching student science to determine whether an alternate or additional medium is necessary for effective student comprehension. In testing the comprehension of students taught by textbooks (scientific ideas in the textbook) alone as well as with other methods of learning, we will better understand the needs of student aids in textbook learning. We will also evaluate the material provided by current textbooks to address issues with students’ understanding. There is no denying the fact that textbooks are very important for students’ learning. The books provide a thorough understanding of the concepts, and serves as repository for facts and figures. It is very essential to encourage students to read these textbooks. Again, there is also a need to encourage students to learn from other information sources and do not treat their textbooks as bible. In this program we will encourage students to read from both textbooks and other information sources (Journals, periodicals, other related researches) to give them an up to date learning experience of science. Furthermore, students should comprehend what they learn and practice in a classroom in such a way that they can explain their ideas orally and through writing while demonstrating efficient knowledge of their studies. They should be able to effectively assess a problem, create a course of action to develop a resolution, implement experiments in order to test their solution and efficiently collect enough data throughout the entire process to share their findings with others and after read some scientific ideas in the textbook. 3. Description of the Proposed Program: A. Goals: 1- To enable teachers to use textbooks in middle school science courses effectively in order to give a better learning experience to students. 2- Develop the skills and competencies of the teachers and students by addressing any issues in the textbook. B- Objectives: The objectives of the overall program for teachers: 1. Teachers should have the ability to establish peer-recognized expertise in the teaching. They should have the ability to articulate this expertise by formulating and solving student’s problems. 2. Teachers should have the ability to engage in sustained learning. 3. They should be able to help students analyze the scientific knowledge. 4. They should enable students to collect, organize, analyze, interpret and present quantitative and qualitative data and incorporate them into the broader context of scientific knowledge. C- Program Details Participants of the Educational Project and activities This program will perform in one of the middle school in Tampa city, in the USA. Textbooks have been used for several years to help guide teachers through topics and subjects of the course and help the students to master skills like reading, writing, analysis and experimentation. This program benefits teachers and students in numerous ways. Students will be able to analyze scientific ideas, identify the evolutionary processes that lead to understanding scientific ideas, collect, organize, analyze, interpret and present quantitative and qualitative data and incorporate them into a broader context of scientific knowledge in better ways. In this program teachers will be able to establish peer-recognized expertise and articulate this expertise by formulating and solving students problems. Teachers should also be able to develop the students learning abilities where he or she would memorize terms, passages, or theories faster and easier. Teachers will be able to find, select, determine and even evaluate various types of scientific information including primary research articles, mass media sources and world-wide web information. Textbooks are very essential to our everyday life and environment, by reading the passages from science books we apply what we read in our daily routines to experiment the information we read or even for class projects. Students will use the information and scientific ideas from the textbooks for the class to conduct experiments, define terms for class projects and tests. The theories stated in science textbooks even imply how reading and comprehension effects the way we talk, think, and learn. In class we will read aloud and also read individually to ourselves. When we all read together as a class a student may comprehend a sentence differently from another. Then we take turns explaining what we read. Although all the textbooks refer to the same topic we all comprehend differently. Guided-inquiry teaching strategies will be used in class that will help students to continue developing and modifying their knowledge. One of the models I will use is 5 E’s model where teaching process is taken through these five stages: Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate and Evaluate. The discussions will take place with a blend of high-level, low-level, open-ended and closed-ended questions to activate students’ thinking. More emphasize will be given on group work than on individuals because learning process is enhanced when students learn in a group setting. In order for all this to work accordingly and to evaluate the effective method of teaching, we will divide our sessions into different learning activities through different mediums. After every new medium, we will take a 5-10 minutes feedback session from the students to understand if they have found this medium more effective for learning. Following are the list of activities planned for the entire two months period: 1- Group Presentations: In this activity students will be divided into groups of 4 each and assigned certain topics from the textbook to learn and present to the entire class. In this activity, students will read the textbooks as well as go through other information sources. They will have to make their presentations thorough, yet interesting and interactive enough for rest of the class to understand the concepts. 2- Debate: Debates are one of the best modes of generating students’ interests and engaging them in class discussions to shed light on different topics. Every month, there will be one debate session on any topic and class will have to prepare beforehand the debate. 3- A science Exhibition: Students love to learn through practical experiences. Students will be asked to build science projects to show how they have learned in theory and whether they are able to comprehend it and apply in a practical setting. This activity will be prepared for in January and will be executed in the third week of February. Below is the timeline for these activities: Programs Development stage January February W1 W2 W3 W1 W2 W3 W4 W1 W2 W3 W4 Teacher’s preparation Group presentation Class Debate Science Exhibition = Preparation/ Development stage = Execution Read More