How students learn

Sample

Sophia R. Cohen

"This book illustrates the experiences of elementary school teachers across one year's time as they participated in a teacher development seminar focused on mathematics, and as a result changed their beliefs, their knowledge, and their practices. It explores these experiences as a means of understanding the learning that takes a teacher from a more traditional teaching practice to one that is focused on the ideas and understandings that students and teachers have of the subject matter." "The work emerges from and reports on a unique data set from a two-year study of teacher learning that was funded by the Spencer and MacArthur foundations. The teachers whose work is at the center of this study were participants in the Developing Mathematical Ideas seminar (DMI), a mathematics teacher development seminar for elementary school teachers. This seminar is one example of intensive, domain-specific professional development. In this seminar teachers study elementary mathematics content to deepen their own understanding of it, they study the development among children of the ideas central to elementary mathematics, and they experience a teaching and learning environment consistent with the pedagogy envisioned by the National Council for Teachers of Mathematics' Principles and Standards for School Mathematics. The seminar is a nationally available teacher development curriculum, thus interested educators can gain access to the resources necessary to offer similar seminars in their own communities." "Teachers' Professional Development and the Elementary Mathematics Classroom: Bringing Understandings to Light will be widely interesting to a broad audience, including mathematics teacher educators, teacher education researchers, policy makers, and classroom teachers. It will serve well as a text in a range of graduate courses dealing with teacher cognition/knowledge for teaching, mathematics methods, psychology of learning, and pedagogical theory."--Jacket.

Sample

Parker J. Palmer

"Teachers choose their vocation for reasons of the heart, because they care deeply about their students and about their subject. But the demands of teaching cause too many educators to lose heart. Is it possible to take heart in teaching once more so that we can continue to do what good teachers always do - give heart to our students?"--BOOK JACKET. "In The Courage to Teach, Parker Palmer takes teachers on an inner journey toward reconnecting with their vocation and their students - and recovering their passion for one of the most difficult and important of human endeavors."--BOOK JACKET.

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Pierre Bourdieu

"Homo academicus es el libro más personal de Pierre Bourdieu, porque en él aplica su capacidad interpretativa a su propio ámbito: el mundo universitario. En este sentido, el análisis que propone tiene una impronta casi autobiográfica, pero sobre todo un marcado compromiso intelectual. Bourdieu demuestra que el campo de la universidad es el lugar de una constante lucha de poderes que se desarrolla siguiendo una lógica específica: el poder académico y el prestigio intelectual o científico son los dos polos de esa lucha, y las disciplinas y las prácticas dominantes y dominadas se distribuyen en torno a ellos. ¿Cómo se manifiesta este juego de fuerzas e intereses? En los conflictos entre facultades o entre disciplinas; en las pujas por lograr horarios de clases, recursos económicos y personales; en la reproducción del cuerpo de profesores universitarios, en la endogamia de ese cuerpo y en sus modos de reclutamiento y selección; en la exclusión de los adversarios. Pensar que la producción intelectual está exenta de determinismos o que surge del ejercicio libre e independiente del pensamiento es una ilusión: esa producción está condicionada por la ubicación y la trayectoria en el espacio académico, y quienes se consagran al saber (los que lo construyen y lo transmiten, pero también los estudiantes) no deberían soslayar esta evidencia." --Contratapa.

Sample

Linda Flower

Based on five years of close observation of students, writing and collaborative planning -- the practice in which student writers take the roles of planner and supporter to help each other develop a more rhetorically sophisticated writing plan --foremost cognitive composition researcher Linda Flower redefines writing in terms of an interactive social and cognitive process and proposes a convincing and compelling theory of the construction of negotiated meaning. Flower seeks to describe how writers construct meaning. Supported by the emerging body of social and cognitive research in rhetoric, education, and psychology, she portrays meaning making as a literate act and a constructive process. She challenges traditional definitions of literacy, adding to that concept the elements of social literate practices and personal literate acts. In Flowerʹs view, this social cognitive process is a source of tension and conflict among the multiple forces that shape meaning: the social and cultural context, the demands of discourse, and the writerʹs own goals and knowledge. -- Publisher description.