A personal teaching philosophy is an essential and active element of a teacher. Acquiring a philosophy is powerful, in that it directs and guides a teacher’s teaching practices in the classroom as well as how they perceive teaching and learning and the students around them. This paper aims to discuss the importance of developing and reflecting on a personal teaching philosophy as a pre-service ...

The type of learning that takes place in teacher education courses typically results in pre-service teachers developing a mixture of knowledge, skills and values that enable them to become effective teachers in schools in the future. During their journey to become qualified teachers, pre-service teachers typically engage in coursework and experiential-based learning. By engaging in coursework e...

This paper addresses a feasibility study of a method for recurrent collegial reflection. A qualitative approach, using a participatory research design, was adopted. The collegial reflection was implemented in a school, in a middle-sized municipality in southern Sweden, with 21 teachers participating in the intervention. Data collection included digital recordings of collegial reflection, open q...

In the early 1990s, Johnson (1992a) stated that technology educators had shown little interest in cognitive science-based research which he observed was unfortunate because of the close alignment between many concepts in cognitive science and technology education. That may be less true today, but the disconnect between being aware of these concepts and/or terms and teaching students to be able ...

Systematic incorporation of digital games in schools is largely unexplored. This case study explored the ecological conditions necessary for implementing a game-based learning course by examining the interaction between three domains (the innovator, the innovation, and the context). From January-April 2012, one in-service teacher learned and applied the Play Curricular activity Reflection Discu...

The positive relationship between student engagement and achievement is well documented, but the nature of this engagement is less-widely considered and narrowly defined. This project investigated the levels of behavioural, emotional and cognitive engagement of students in a technology-rich learning project. A class of 22 Year 3 students, one participant-observer classroom teacher and two pre-s...

Teacher education students confront the challenging task of acquiring a unique and complex set of skills during their courses. These skills are acquired through the study of education theory together with practical experience in the classroom. Perhaps one of the most important skills that students quickly need to develop is that of reflective practice. It is only through a critical and detailed...

People send and receive messages with their body, especially with their hands in interpersonal communications. Gestures play an important role in teacher-student interactions in classrooms. In the domain of education, many research projects have focused on the study of gestures either in real classrooms or in tutorial settings with practicing teachers. Novice teachers need to hone their require...

Though blended learning had been continuously adopted in an Academic English Writing course (AEW) in a key university in Beijing, no attempts had been made to describe this new learning environment or investigate its effectiveness and impact. To fill in the gap, the present paper describes and evaluates blended learning in this AEW course in terms of course design, material development and pres...

This paper provides an overview of the numerous technological tools available to distance education teachers. It is becoming common to incorporate a variety of tools for design and implementation of distance learning programs. The distance learning environment is significantly different from that of a traditional classroom, and therefore requires considerable reflection on the part of the teach...