Session Information
10 SES 02 B, Supporting Teacher Reflection through New Technologies
Paper Session
Contribution
In order to develop the kind of qualities and abilities of children required for the coming era, all teachers and staff must develop effective learning contents and activities through occasions such as in-school studies and associate learning from all subjects. One of the keys in proceeding with it is curriculum management.
There have been efforts to use information and communications technology (ICT) as a teaching tool as well as a learning tool in teacher training as well. However, the efforts to use ICT as an assessment tool are still in the germination stage. The efforts to use ICT as an assessment tool would train teachers’ eyes in understanding the class based on how children are doing and provide them with the opportunities to design learning activities with an active learning-type of approach and also to think about the method for evaluating the design.
In this study, we decided to ask graduate students use the records in e-portfolio to conduct detailed class analysis on the relationship between children’s capabilities developed in each subject and unit as well as across all subjects and the teaching guidance in each setting and examine the meaning and method of evidence-based lesson studies.
This is because we thought conducting lesson studies by using e-portfolio like this would allow the participants to hone their awareness and expertise on lesson design that looks at teaching based on how children are doing, while providing them with the opportunity to think about the kind of curriculum management expected in the future based on the specifics of classes.
Through such an initiative, this study aims to allow graduate students to become aware of the meaning of the unit-level lesson studies and, based on case studies, clarify effective procedures and methods in conducting such a lesson studies and the points to consider when utilizing e-portfolio in lesson studies toward curriculum management.
This study investigated the ERIC database to look at what sort of course international research related to e-portfolios and curriculum management had taken and what types of research perspectives had been related to its progress. Of the research reports and papers that were published up through 2016 that were compiled in ERIC, there were 621 works where "curriculum management” was included in the abstract and 460 works where "e-portfolio" was included. The first instance of an international study on curriculum management was a seminar report related to adult education in 1967, and it described the relationship between curriculum and management. However, this was different from the meaning of the term curriculum management as it is currently being used. On the other hand, there was a report in 1992 that described the relationship between literacy, portfolios, and technology, but it was around the year 2000, when studies that would become the source of modern e-portfolios started to appear.
During this time, many of the studies on curriculum management targeted primary and secondary education, and the studies on e-portfolios often targeted higher education. Additionally, many of the studies on e-portfolios found in the international research focused on utilizing technology for e-portfolios or the development of related tools, and there were few studies that used e-portfolios for assessing school programs. There were studies that looked at the attitudes of child students or the change in the attitude of university students, but studies using e-portfolios for the assessment of primary and secondary education curriculum were anticipated for the future.
Then, studies that were focused on what this study is interested in, the relationship between e-portfolios and teaching staff in elementary and secondary education learning curriculum management (including Lesson studies), were extremely rare.
Method
The collaborators of this study included seven graduate students (five graduate students who are currently teaching, two graduate students straight from the undergraduate program; three males and four females) who took the graduate course “The Role of Middle Leader and the Method of Mentoring” (16 lectures) in FY 2017. The program was implemented with the following contents (120-minute guidance in advance + eight 90-minute lectures). The program’s actual implementation of classroom observation went as follows. As a note, the units we worked on included the 6th grade science “Human Body and Life,” 5th grade science “Electric Current and Magnetic Field,” and 4th grade science “Volume of Things” and “Volume of Temperature of Things.” Since the implementation of lessons at the affiliated elementary school actually extended over a long period of time, all learning records were kept (lesson videos, children’s learning records in each lesson, etc.). However, the number of times the enrollees of this program attended and participated all lessons turned out to be limited. As for the recording and analyzing learning activities, it was done by using Fujitsu’s e-portfolio “Chietama.” Fujitsu’s e-portfolio “Chietama” refers to the environment in which students’ learning and teacher’s learning (the know-how for using ICT to teach) in the setting where ICT is used are collected and used so that the learning data can be effectively utilized to realize “use” “accumulate” “apply.” It also offers capabilities for searching and using records to suit the purpose. Procedure of Analysis: “Look at the thought process of the children and the instruction process throughout the unit” (1)Referring to the unit’s goal, look at the state of performance in the last summary and classify children into those who are deemed to have achieved the objective and those who are not. (2)If you were the teacher of that class, what kind of guidance would you think is necessary? The analysis of the results of what the graduate students learned and the assessment of the utilization of the e-portfolio were conducted by analyzing the content of the reports created by the graduate students in the lecture and by using the graduate students' recorded reflections of what they learned that were written in the professional school for teacher education's e-portfolio. The User Local text mining tools were used as the means of analysis. (http://textmining.userlocal.jp/)
Expected Outcomes
The graduate students referred to the records of lesson questions and children’s learning by hour and looked at the changes based on children’s learning records in that time frame. They discussed who prompted the change—whether it was due to teacher’s guidance or the discussion among children—and talked about for a quite some time that it is difficult to understand this because they did not observe the lessons at the end. There were also discussions to assess the way questions were asked for a given objective. These discussions were consistent with the flow and manner of lesson study at school in the past in which their interest was directed to teacher’s teaching behavior. However, in the second session in which they broke into three groups to revisit the previous analysis experience and the objective of this program and analyzed the learning activities in the 4th grade science “Volume of Things,” they were able to smoothly conduct the analysis in accordance with the procedure described earlier. As the findings obtained, this project was able to demonstrate that it is analytically effective 1) to make the graduate students aware of similarities and differences between lesson study at the one-hour level and classroom observation at the entire unit level, 2) to make the graduate students think about the process for reviewing unit design based on the results of lesson study at the entire unit level, and 3) to look at the progress of children by going back in time from the unit summary as a way of using the e-portfolio at that time.
References
Carrier, S.J.(2011) Implementing and Integrating Effective Teaching Strategies Including Features of Lesson Study in an Elementary Science Methods Course. Teacher Educator. 46(2),145-160. Frantz, N. R.(1976) A Curriculum Management Model for State Vocational Education Agencies. Journal of Industrial Teacher Education. 13(4), 59-71. Sunal, C. S., McCormick,T., Sunal, D. W., and Shwery, C.S. (2005) The Demonstration of Teaching Values in Elementary Pre-Service Teachers' E-Portfolios. International Journal of Social Education. 20 (1), 81-90. Sunal, C. S., McCormick, T., Sunal, D.W., and Shwery, C.(2005) Elementary Teacher Candidates' Construction of Criteria for Selecting Social Studies Lesson Plans for Electronic Portfolios.Journal of Social Studies Research. 29(1), 7-17. Maher, M. and Gerbic, P. (2009) E-Portfolios as a Pedagogical Device in Primary Teacher Education: The AUT University Experience. Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 34(5). 43-53. Panichpongsapak, R., Tesaputa, K., and Sri-ampai, A. (2016) Development of a Program to Enhance Curriculum and Learning Management Competency of Private Primary School Teachers. International Education Studies. 9(11), 172-180.
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