The last class session of the academic term represents an excellent opportunity to solicit meaningful feedback from students who have just completed the course. To capitalize on the students' first-hand knowledge of their own experiences with our course and maximize the impact of the last class for our Canadian graduate-level genetics course, we…

Recently, scholars have called for a practice-based framework for teacher education and some have argued more narrowly for a framework built around "core practices of teaching." These efforts, in part, are intended to make teacher education practice public and available for collective improvement. The purpose of this paper is to…

The Teacher Educator Technology Competencies (TETCs) were created to help all teacher educators support teacher candidates as they prepare to become technology-using teachers. The TETCs largely focus on teaching "with" technology. However, one of the 12 competencies, TETC 9, offers an opportunity to delve into teaching "about"…

In response to calls for curricular change in foreign language programs and institutional requirements to evaluate programmatic effectiveness, this article presents a backward design approach to the redesign of an introductory French curriculum grounded in the framing concept of cultural literacy. In addition, data from student evaluations,…

This article presents the foundations to design a curriculum that integrates music and drama as strategies for the teaching of English as a foreign language. Besides promoting interdisciplinarity, this curriculum seeks to improve the language level of those children attending continuing educational programs at any higher education institution. The…

The purpose of this document is to descriptively summarize instructional staff responses to a survey administered by RAND in 23 personalized learning (PL) schools in Spring 2014. This work was performed at the request of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), as part of a multi-year evaluation contract. The 23 schools were selected from a…

This paper examines the importance of experiential learning for teachers-as-students and its impact on language instruction through personal experience of the author, a middle school Spanish teacher who participated in an International Teachers' Workshop in Belize focusing on environmental science education. The author compares the approaches of…

Although conventional psychology is often characterised as the science of the individual mind, it is also important to introduce students to the potential interdisciplinary and multi-dimensional nature of psychology. In this paper we outline the design, development, and delivery of an innovative course that employed an ecological framework to…

The paper describes the considerations that were taken into account in the development of a tentative English language textbook evaluation checklist. A brief review of the related literature precedes the crucial issues that should be considered in developing checklists. In the light of the previous evaluation checklists the developers created a…

Professional graduate program curricula are consistently evaluated for their efficacy as they relate students' needs and achievement. Particularly, teachers in the TESOL field are challenged to become effective in their profession by adapting and developing learning materials and designing successful curriculum that imparts all relevant concepts…

As a significant percentage of students in higher education today have one or more disabilities, it is important for instructors to be aware of what disabilities, and how disabilities, impact student performance. Students with a wide range of disabilities can encounter significant obstacles when experiential instructional methods are implemented…

This report presents the results of a needs assessment study on comprehensive drug education conducted for a small rural K-8 school. A brief review examines the literature on drug and alcohol abuse among rural youth. Parents, teachers, and students were surveyed to assess their needs, interests, and knowledge of drug and alcohol abuse. Twenty…

For twenty years, the DACUM (Developing a Curriculum) model has been used for the design of occupational programs at the secondary and postsecondary levels as well as the design of training programs for business and industry. Over the past five years, the Maryland DACUM Resource Center project has disseminated the DACUM model among the community…

In an attempt to improve its students' writing abilities, as well as their critical thinking skills, Lord Fairfax Community College, in Virginia, developed a program called "Thinking through Writing." The project designers believed that concept formation, classification, memory enhancement, and other learning/thinking skills could be…

An evaluation of Manitoba's French immersion programs at the levels of grades 3, 6, and 9 focused on program effectiveness in teaching listening comprehension and speech skills. The results for grade 6 are presented here. The first section describes the framework of the immersion curriculum and the listening and oral skills targeted in it. The…