Yael Poyas

Learning to Teach: Enhancing Pre-Service Teachers' Awareness of the Complexity of Teaching-Learning Processes

Why is it so challenging to provide pre‐service teachers with adequate competence to cope with the complexity of the classroom context? Three key difficulties are frequently reported as reducing the effectiveness of teacher education programs: the construction of an integrated body of knowledge about teaching, the application of theories to practice, and the development of a cognitive lens for analyzing teaching–learning processes. To deal with these problems, we designed one semester‐long intervention course for pre‐service teachers, based on an Internet site, including video‐recorded authentic classroom literature teaching situations, transcripts of these lessons, interviews with school teachers and various experts in the field, and diverse tasks. The pre‐service teachers analyzed the episodes in depth, performed the required tasks, and participated in group and whole‐class discussions. The data comprised pre‐ and post‐analyses of an episode and mid‐semester tasks, carried out by the pre‐service teachers. We describe the context and the course procedure and discuss them in light of relevant pedagogies. A fine‐grain analysis of the data revealed the pre‐service teachers’ learning processes as they unfolded along the course: growing awareness of the complexity of classroom teaching, ability to base the analysis of the episodes on theories, and the initial construction of a cognitive lens to view classroom processes holistically. This was manifested in a shift from using lay theories to relating to academic theories, from the application of few concepts and theories while interpreting situations to the application of many relevant ones, from reporting discrete items and activities to reports based on a holistic, situated view, and from descriptions composed of non‐cognitive, behavior‐related statements to descriptions based on a cognitive view of classroom occurrences. The study has important implications for teacher education.

External Visual Representations in Science Learning: The Case of Relations among System Components.

How do external visual representations (e.g., graph, diagram) promote or constrain students’ ability to identify system components and their interrelations, to reinforce a systemic view through the application of the STS approach? University students (N = 150) received information cards describing cellphones’ communication system and its subsystem components. One group (n = 82) received a display of cards presenting this information in rich and diverse visual representations and a few text cards. Another group (n = 68) received a single representation display, of text only. Using these card sets, students were asked to identify the cellular systems’ components and relations, and to construct new interrelations. Findings showed that, mostly, multimedia enabled better identification and construction of relations of higher component diversity, accuracy, description, and novelty, using a larger number of information cards than did the textual display. Generally, findings suggested that components’ saliency and distinctiveness in the visual display afforded a better systemic view. However, curriculum designers and teachers should be aware of cases in which rich multimedia constrained performance.

Becoming a Community of Practice--The Blurred Identity of Clinical Faculty Teacher Educators.

Abstract The study discusses the professional identity and aspects of professional development of Clinical Faculty Teacher Educators (CFTEs) teaching methods courses in a College of Education during a time of change. The above aspects were revealed while analyzing data collected to evaluate an in‐service professional development course for CFTEs. Data concerning the participants’ satisfaction were obtained from questionnaires and semi‐structured interviews with course participants and course organizers. The findings indicate a high level of satisfaction with the course. However, more importantly, they delineate the unique characteristics of the course participants, namely CFTEs teaching various methods courses and mentoring student teachers entering the profession. These participants form a special professional group within the teacher education institution, and their professional identity seems to be closely linked to their previous or current teaching in schools. They are expected to verbalize and teach implicit knowledge and practical aspects of teaching, in the form of clear, explicit principles, to teachers‐to‐be. The CFTEs who teach methods courses have much in common, even though they are related to different disciplines. The current study re‐emphasizes the lack of clear standards and feedback tools when defining and assessing the work of CFTEs, and the need for developing a community of learners for on‐going discussion, sharing and forging a professional identity.

Teachers’ interpretations of texts-image juxtapositions in textbooks: From the concrete to the abstract

The paper examined expert literature teachers’ coping with a novel textbook, integrating literature with visual arts, which is a particular interdisciplinary case of text-image relations in textbooks. Examination was performed within the framework of teachers’ responses to curricular changes and of theory regarding strategies of interdisciplinary instruction. Data regarding teachers’ coping was collected via video recorded deep interviews and analysed qualitatively using the phenomenological approach. Findings revealed four phases of a recurring pattern of performance: (a) retrieving prior knowledge about texts, (b) cycles of processing and refinement (comprising comparing-identifying-matching, making meaning of elements in contexts, eliciting themes and deeply examining artworks’ devices), (c) mindful evaluation of the juxtaposition, and (d) pedagogical reasoning. Four potential roles of the textbook visual artworks, for promoting literature learning, were inferred. The study shed some light on the involvement of teacher cognition and culture of teaching in the reading, evaluating, and adapting of novel curricula. A deeper understanding of the factors involved in the introduction of novel materials, examined from a cognitive perspective, may inform teachers’ professional development and curriculum developers as well as promote implementations of curricular reforms.

Textbooks for the Teaching of Hebrew Language and Literature in Israel — A Mirror of Social-Political and Educational Changes

This study explores the developments in L1 language and literature textbooks used during the 50 years of the existence of the State of Israel. The current article focuses on textbooks for the teaching of language and literature in Jewish secular junior high schools in Israel. We discuss two different approaches to teaching the Hebrew language and literature: the functional-instrumental approach, spanning some 30 years, from the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 until the late 1980s of the 20th century, and the current scientific-multicultural-liberal approach. We chose four textbooks, two from the 1950s and two from the 1990s, to demonstrate the developmental changes from narrow vision to openness, and from focus on ideological values to focus on the discipline.

Representing Visually: What Teachers Know and What They Prefer

Visual representations (VRs) are perceived as crucial to science learning and teaching. Despite teachers’ central role in mediating between information (including visual information) and learners, teachers’ knowledge in the domain of information representation has received only limited attention. We aimed to examine aspects of VR knowledge and competence among 72 science and math teachers from diverse backgrounds, by investigating teachers’ self-generated VRs and preferred ready VRs to represent textual data. First, teachers were asked to self-generate a VR to accurately represent each of three given textual scenarios of different types. Next, in a multiple-choice task, teachers were asked to select the single VR that most efficiently represented each of these same three textual scenarios, from a set of four ready VRs per scenario. Teachers could select a VR type that resembled or differed from the type they had self-generated. Participants then reasoned about their self-generated products and their choices of ready VRs – in writing and in interviews. Content analysis was performed on the self-generated and the selected ready representations and on teachers’ written and transcribed interview responses. Findings revealed the impact of teachers’ lack of training in this area on their performance and products.