Due to the recent increase in trade, travel and political and social co-operation, language competence has become a key skill in modern Europe. Great efforts have been made to improve language training at all education levels. Whereas in the past language teaching was mainly related to cultural themes with an emphasis on literature, communicative aspects in everyday international contact situat...

Institutions of Higher Education are beginning to place a greater emphasis on quality teaching and student learning. However, few faculty receive any type of teacher training prior to entering the academy. As a result, faculty development is one likely solution to teacher quality issues. But faculty development is faced with serious shortcomings that impede its ability to improve teacher qualit...

R eflective th inking i s not a new idea Dewey (1933) referred to it in his early works but only a handful of researchers and practition ers were using the term until Schon (1983, 1987) began to write about re flective practice in education and other professions Now, those who have always believed in the impor tance of the critical and analytical thinking of teachers are rallying around the ide...

Concerns about a lack of face-to-face contact with students, a focus on grading rather than teaching, and limited expertise with technology or needed pedagogical strategies, may contribute to instructor reluctance to teach online. The interaction between the instructor and learner and among learners affects the quality and success of online learning, and the learner’s ability to master the outc...

Repositories of learning objects have the potential to support teachers’ work and diffuse innovation in the school, nevertheless they did not arouse much interest from the teachers so far. We argue that this problem could be overcome by adding to repositories possibilities of focused interaction and collaboration among teachers, so as to foster reflection and value teachers’ experience. To this...

Open Learner Models (OLM) are believed to facilitate students’ metacognitive activities in learning. Inspectable student models are a simple but very common form of OLM that grant students opportunities to get feedback on their knowledge and reflect on it. This paper uses individualized surveys and interviews with high school students who have at least three years experience learning with the C...

Self-regulated learning (SRL) is a crucial skill in the era when people need to learn during their whole lives. However, the traditional educational system, which is teacher-centered, does not cultivate this competence very well. In this paper we propose an approach to stimulate reflection of learners about their own learning processes, which is an important part of SRL. The approach is based o...

This paper presents and discusses the results of a research project in Education Sciences, which aimed at identifying and understanding the effects of in-service teacher education carried out in schools, on the educational practices of a school of the 1st Cycle of Basic Education (CBE). The training was organized with small project groups consisting of six teachers and a trainer, and lasted thr...

This study focuses on understanding the reflection on teaching practices of two mathematics teachers teaching technical mathematics in a technical institute. For the purpose of this study, reflection is considered as the teachers’ interpretation of their teaching practices. These teachers were interviewed to describe their teaching practices aspects including the teaching plan, teaching strateg...

The description of individual course units is here presented as a privileged way to improve course quality by fostering teacher reflection. To that end, the paper presents a structured way to specify the several parts that compose the course unit descriptions. The most important parts are made strongly interconnected as a way to maximize coherence and force additional reflection during course d...