Strategies for Teaching Large Classes Effectively in Higher Education helps educators effectively harness the power of the large class to support student learning. The book features advice from instructors across disciplines, results from the initiatives they've tried, and scholarship to support their claims. The text emphasizes the ideas that a large class represents an opportunity and scholarly teaching can occur in a class of any size. The book begins
"This book seeks to develop a vision for higher education for the 21st century focussed especially, but not exclusively, on high-quality liberal education for undergraduates in a learning community rich in both classroom and extra-curricular engagement." --introd.
This guide combines theory on teaching methodology with advice on good teaching practice in order to help teachers face the challenge of larger numbers of students in their classrooms. It includes a number of case studies which explore innovative teaching methods.
This book explores the role of the teacher in dual language bilingual education (DLBE) implementation in a time of nationwide program expansion, in large part due to new and unprecedented top-down initiatives at state and district level. The book provides case studies of DLBE teachers who: (a) implemented the DLBE model with fidelity; (b) struggled to implement the DLBE model; and (c) adapted the DLBE model to meet the needs of their local classroom context. The book demonstrates the way teachers as language policymakers navigate and interpret district-wide DLBE implementation and the tensions that surface through this process. The research, conducted over four years using a variety of methods, highlights the challenges and opportunities faced by teachers implementing DLBE, and will be of interest to both teachers and administrators of DLBE programs as well as scholars working in bilingual education.
This book focuses on central issues that are key components of successful planning, development and implementation of LSAs. The book's main distinction is its focus on practice- based, cutting-edge research. This is achieved by having chapters co-authored by world-class researchers in collaboration with measurement practitioners.
Nearly the whole of America’s partisan politics centers on a single question: Can markets solve our social problems? And for years this question has played out ferociously in the debates about how we should educate our children. From the growth of vouchers and charter schools to the implementation of No Child Left Behind, policy makers have increasingly turned to market-based models to help improve our schools, believing that private institutions—because they are competitively driven—are better than public ones. With The Public School Advantage, Christopher A. and Sarah Theule Lubienski offer powerful evidence to undercut this belief, showing that public schools in fact outperform private ones. For decades research showing that students at private schools perform better than students at public ones has been used to promote the benefits of the private sector in education, including vouchers and charter schools—but much of these data are now nearly half a century old. Drawing on two recent, large-scale, and nationally representative databases, the Lubienskis show that any benefit seen in private school performance now is more than explained by demographics. Private schools have higher scores not because they are better institutions but because their students largely come from more privileged backgrounds that offer greater educational support. After correcting for demographics, the Lubienskis go on to show that gains in student achievement at public schools are at least as great and often greater than those at private ones. Even more surprising, they show that the very mechanism that market-based reformers champion—autonomy—may be the crucial factor that prevents private schools from performing better. Alternatively, those practices that these reformers castigate, such as teacher certification and professional reforms of curriculum and instruction, turn out to have a significant effect on school improvement. Despite our politics, we all agree on the fundamental fact: education deserves our utmost care. The Public School Advantage offers exactly that. By examining schools within the diversity of populations in which they actually operate, it provides not ideologies but facts. And the facts say it clearly: education is better off when provided for the public by the public.
