Robert W. Maloy

Arriving on a fast track: Perceptions of teachers from an alternative licensing program about their first four years in the classroom

Abstract In a 4‐year study of new teachers who completed the MINT (Massachusetts Institute for New Teachers) alternative teacher‐licensing program, we found that this particular fast‐track model recruited a group of highly committed new teachers. However, these new teachers expressed dissatisfaction with the effectiveness of their teacher education program. Many of the teachers tended to use traditional teaching methods. Some regarded their professional development and mentoring experiences as insufficient. Some believed their potential for school leadership was not being fully realized. A similar set of perceptions were reported by a group of new teachers who had completed college‐based teacher preparation programs, although the college program‐prepared teachers tended to give higher ratings to their teacher preparation program and to use a wider variety of teaching strategies in the classroom.

Wikis, Workshops and Writing: Strategies for Flipping a College Community Engagement Course.

This paper describes utilizing wiki technology, small group workshops, and reflective writing assignments to “flip” a community engagement/service-learning course for college undergraduates who are tutoring culturally and linguistically diverse students in K-12 schools. Flipped classrooms are gaining popularity in the teaching of science, accounting, and other traditionally lecture-based college courses. In this flipped structure, in-class faculty lectures and presentations are replaced by assignments in a wikispace featuring multimodal resources that students hear, view or read and write about weekly. During class, student rotate through a series of three learning workshops facilitated by faculty and student leaders.

Why 3D Print? The 21st-Century Skills Students Develop While Engaging in 3D Printing Projects

ABSTRACT The emergence of 3D printing has raised hopes and concerns about how it can be used effectively as an educational technology in school classrooms. This paper presents the results of a survey asking teachers from multiple grade levels and subject fields about the impact of 3D projects on student learning. Teachers were asked about the kinds of 3D projects they were doing with students and what skills or knowledge students were developing by participating in those projects. Participants reported that their students developed a number of skills while working on 3D printing projects, including 3D modeling, creativity, technology literacy, problem-solving, self-directed learning, critical thinking, and perseverance. Parallels between teacher-identified skills and widely cited lists of 21st-century skills suggest that 3D projects are a promising approach to preparing students for life and work in a digital age.

4MALITY: coaching students with different problem-solving strategies using an online tutoring system

4-coach Mathematics Active Learning Intelligent Tutoring sYstem (4MALITY) is a web-based intelligent tutoring system for 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade students who are learning math content from the state of Massachusetts (USA) required curriculum framework. The goal of 4MALITY is to personalize help for students by offering them problem-solving strategies authored from multiple points of view. Four virtual coaches (Estella Explainer, Chef Math Bear, How-to Hound, and Visual Vicuna) are designed to capture the character and content of these different problem-solving approaches with language, computation, strategy, and visual hints. A preliminary study was run with 102 students in fourth and fifth grade math classrooms over a period of two months. The results showed that the effect of using 4MALITY produced a statistically significant increase in post-test scores. We explored student performance, help-seeking behavior and meta-cognitive strategies by gender and math ability and report these results.

“On the Run, in the Real”

Teacher candidates describe their year in an immersion preparation program.