International Student Teaching Research Articles

Elementary Education Teacher Candidates’ Integration of Technology in the Design of Interdisciplinary Units

In this paper the authors evaluate 85 elementary education teacher candidates’ integration of technology into interdisciplinary units that the candidates wrote during the semester before their full-time student teaching internship. An inductive analysis of the units revealed that teachers used a wide variety of technologies with a large dependence on Internet-based technologies, interactive whiteboards, and iPad applications. Further analyses found that most of the technology uses were lower-level and focused on only basic skills. However, chi-squared tests for independence found statistically significant relationships between numerous factors and when technology was used in ways that addressed higher-order thinking skills. These factors included the structure of the lesson plans, the content of the interdisciplinary units, when the technology was integrated into the multi-lesson unit, and when the technology was integrated into specific phases of the lesson. Implications for teacher education programs and research that focuses on teacher candidates’ TPACK are provided.

A Tale of Two Kindergartens: New Zealand and the United States

Cultural exchange among nations and peoples cultivates empathy, knowledge sharing, and global thinking. However, we must always keep in mind the diverse history, demographics, cultural mores, and attitudes that affect national and local policies, routines, and interpersonal interactions. Knowledge sharing among pre- and inservice teachers in different cultures can broaden viewpoints and influence classroom management and teaching and learning strategies. As we make our way through the 21st century, global citizenship becomes increasingly important for the leaders of tomorrow. All teachers should be prepared to equip students for living and working in a globalized world and facing the complex challenges of inequality, climate change, rapid urbanization, and more. This article describes an international student teaching experience.

Consolidating the Literature on Mutual Adjustment in the Learning and Teaching of International Students and Academic Staff

Consolidating the Literature on Mutual Adjustment in the Learning and Teaching of International Students and Academic Staff

The exploration of pulse-taking teaching of international students

Pulse-taking, as one of the four diagnostic methods of inspection, auscultation and olfaction, inquiry and pulse-taking, can fully embodies the characteristics of traditional Chinese medicine. Pulse-taking is the teaching key point for the international students. However, because the pulse theory and literature is quite profound and abstract and there is a long distance between the class teaching and clinical practice, the teaching of pulse-taking is also the difficult point for the international students. Therefore, the pulse-taking teaching should focus on the interesting teaching, the culture of traditional Chinese medicine of pulse, image teaching and practice training. Key words: International students; Pulse-taking; Teaching

Supervision in Physical Education Teacher Education Programs: Making the Case for Paired Placements

Many student teaching experiences in physical education teacher education programs face challenges related to supervision and realistic preparation for the workplace. This article suggests paired placements as a model for effective supervision and increased collaboration during the student teaching internship.

Learning among nursing faculty: insights from a participatory action research project about teaching international students.

It is imperative that nursing education addresses the issues arising from globalization. The adjustment challenges faced by international nursing students globally highlight the need to understand how nursing faculty experience and teach nursing classes with a mix of domestic and foreign students. This article reports on a participatory action research (PAR) study to examine and enhance the scholarly teaching of international nursing students. The overarching research question for this PAR was: How did participation in a PAR study contribute to shared learning and professional development of nursing faculty teaching international students? Five major themes were identified across the PAR: creating sharing spaces, recognizing and respecting diversity, developing and acknowledging teaching capabilities, utilizing precious time, and valuing the research. In summary, PAR was a useful approach to engage faculty in research by providing a process and a space to address concerns about the teaching and learning of international students.

Teacher Preparation for the Global Stage: International Student Teaching

As globalization lessens the distance between peoples and diversifies the common classroom, teacher education programs lag behind in producing globally-minded educators. One approach used by some teacher education programs to remedy this issue is to offer international student teaching experiences. While the literature related to these programs is rather positive, information related to why students choose to participate in international student teaching experiences and the challenges they encounter while abroad is limited. This study attempts to fill this gap in the literature. Drawing on interview and documentation data from current (n=3) and former (n=2) participants, as well as two program administrators, this multiple-case study utilizes a cross-case analysis to draw conclusions within and between the cases. Programmatic recommendations that are applicable to both faculty members and study abroad professionals are included.

Book Review: Cross-Cultural Teaching and Learning for Home and International Students: Internationalisation of Pedagogy and Curriculum in Higher Education

Book Review: Cross-Cultural Teaching and Learning for Home and International Students: Internationalisation of Pedagogy and Curriculum in Higher Education

The Impact of International Student Teaching Experience on Teacher Identity and Cultural Competency

The Impact of International Student Teaching Experience on Teacher Identity and Cultural Competency

Developing Culturally Competent Teachers: An International Student Teaching Field Experience

This study offers a theoretical construct for better understanding how experiential learning enables student teachers to acquire social and cultural variation skills, develop cultural empathy in the K-12 classroom, and the transference of these skills to new educational situations. An Australian and United States research team used a phenomenological approach to explore the connections between the skills student teachers acquire and the application of these newly developed skills to professional practices. Participants were a group of United States pre-teachers who enrolled in a 5 week teaching experience in Australia. Findings show that participation in cultural based events is part of a complex decision making process. The variety of cultures that now exist in schools requires new teachers to obtain and apply a skillset that promotes manoeuvrability through, and an understanding of the many definitions of culture. A better understanding of this process may strengthen curricula and improvements in teacher education program delivery and further enhance higher education study-abroad international partnerships.

Book Review

Cross-Cultural Teaching and Learning for Home and International Students - Internationalisation of Pedagogy and Curriculum in Higher Education

Type of instructional delivery and second language teacher candidate performance: online versus face-to-face

Research conducted over the past decade has consistently reported no significant differences in learning outcomes for students of fully online or face-to-face (F2F) instruction. Only a small number of these studies, however, have focused on courses in second language (L2) teacher preparation programs. Even fewer studies have compared the impact of online and F2F instruction on classroom practice. To fill this void in the research, an investigation was conducted of the impact of method of instructional delivery on the performance of teacher candidates in a Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL) program during their culminating student teaching internship. Focusing on a group of TESL interns who completed either online or F2F methodology training, a mixed methodology was used to compare student teacher outcomes on two key performance assessments and to compare university supervisor perceptions of student teacher performance. While the type of instructional setting was not found to significantly impact the teaching performance of the interns, interview data suggested that support from a cooperating teacher and prior experience working with students of diverse language and cultural backgrounds strongly influenced the teacher candidates’ instructional practices.

US elementary preservice teachers’ experiences while teaching to students in Taiwan

The idea to prepare prospective teachers to teach in increasingly diverse US schools still raises a number of questions about how an international student teaching experience can be important and beneficial to student learning. What do preservice teachers perceive to be the benefits from an international student teaching experience? What do preservice teachers perceive as challenges during an international student teaching experience? This paper shares findings from a phenomenological study of four U.S. elementary preservice teachers’ experiences during a five-week international student teaching opportunity in Taiwan. The findings of this study support the scholarship of teaching and learning that is grounded in the quest to understand the connection between students’ experiences and learning (Hutchings, 1999). The findings could further provide insights into the implementation process and the support that student teachers need in order to gain a successful experience from an international student teaching opportunity provided by the teacher education program.

An Examination of Music Student Teaching Seminars at Midwestern Universities

This study was designed to (a) provide teacher educators and researchers with information about the structure and content of music student teaching seminars by gathering data on current practices and (b) examine whether the perceived needs of music student teachers were being met through the content and structure of the student teaching seminars. Music education professors ( N = 45) participated in a researcher-designed survey that included questions pertaining to the student teaching internship and accompanying seminar course. Results indicated that seminar instructors addressed student teacher responsibilities and preparation, classroom management, and employment more extensively than any other areas. Professional portfolios, résumé writing, and mock interviews represented the most common seminar activities. Findings suggest that with the exception of classroom management, the topics that instructors addressed most extensively in the music student teaching seminar did not align with the perceived needs of music student teachers, as reported in extant research.

Evaluation on International Student Teaching Quality Guarantee System

This paper builds an evaluation index system by analyzing the influential factors of international student education quality and defines the calculation methods and evaluation standard. Finally, we builds international student education quality guarantee system evaluation model based on rough sets and support vector machine, and verifies the science and feasibility of this model by instance.

Internationalisation, higher education and educators' perceptions of their practices

Internationalisation of higher education is big business in Australia, yet, despite the growing body of literature informing learning and teaching of international students, challenges remain. While language and pedagogical differences are well documented from the students' perspective, less known are the challenges to educators and their practices in responding to these named issues. This article explores some implications for educators and their practices, when international students come to study in an English-language university in Australia. A small research project focusing on educators' perspectives reveals the pedagogical challenges, difficulties and differences in approaches to teaching large numbers of international students. Implications for educators are discussed, focusing on the need to respond to policy and institutional demands to participate in these international collaborations, and to engage in building sound and equitable educational provision.

Competency-based training, global skills mobility and the teaching of international students in vocational education and training

In Australia, all vocational education and training (VET) qualifications must be based on competency-based training (CBT) and training packages. Yet, since 2005, there has been a major expansion in the number of VET international students in Australia, 85% of whom are from Asia. Given this development, the teaching and learning contexts in which competency-based training and training packages are located are becoming increasingly diverse and no longer reflect the traditional training characteristics and boundaries that apply for domestic students. This paper examines the relevance of training packages and CBT for teaching international students in the Australian VET sector. It draws on interviews with teachers and international students from 25 public and private training providers in Australia. The discussion of the findings aims to assist the VET sector create a curriculum framework that supports flexibility, adaptation and responsiveness so that international students’ divergent and shifting study purposes and complex learning characteristics can be catered for effectively. This contributes to helping the sector remain viable in a context in which a VET course is no longer a pathway to migration.

English Teacher Candidates Developing Dialogically Organized Instructional Practices

Although mounting research evidence suggests that dialogic teaching correlates with student achievement gains and with high levels of student engagement, little work in English education addresses the challenge of supporting new teachers in developing dialogically organized instructional practices. In a design-based study, we examine a curricular intervention designed to cultivate development of dialogically organized instructional practices, defined as instruction that provides students with frequent opportunities to engage with core disciplinary concepts through sustained, substantive dialogue. The curriculum invited secondary English teacher candidates to repeatedly enact dialogically organized instruction and to receive feedback from peers using video and Web 2.0-based technologies across a year-long student teaching internship. In English methods seminars, eighty-seven participants from two cohorts generated over 300 five-minute video clips, associated planning documents, transcripts, and reflections. We coded documents for student participation, evidence of planning for dialogic instruction, and classroom discourse variables associated in previous research with greater student engagement in substantive classroom interaction. We find that those who planned for dialogic instruction using dialogic tools were significantly more likely to have higher ratios of student utterances in relation to teacher utterances. The use of dialogic tools—conceptualized as those practical tools mobilized in teacher planning and practice with potential to mediate dialogically organized instruction in a given classroom situation—explained more of the variance in student participation than did any other factor. Attention to such tools may help English teacher candidates enact dialogically organized instructional practices.

A Call to Action: What Student Teachers Can Teach Us

This qualitative study uses six years of survey data, collected from student teachers in a graduate level university initial teacher licensure program, to illuminate student teachers’ experiences with their cooperating teachers during their student teaching internship. The data, comments made by student teachers about their experiences with their cooperating teachers, were used to answer this research question: What are student teachers telling us about their experiences with their cooperating teachers? Using the constant comparative method of qualitative analysis (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) the survey data consisting of answers to the open form question “My cooperating teacher could have been more helpful to me by . . .” was analyzed and coded revealing six themes. Examples of student teacher comments are included. The paper concludes with recommendations for using the comments and resulting themes for a cooperating teacher education and development program.

Perceptions of Teaching Ability During the Student Teaching Experience in Agricultural Education

The purpose of this study was to describe the views student teachers in agricultural education at Oklahoma State University had regarding their 12–week student teaching internship. Using Q– methodology as a research approach, 28 interns rank–ordered a Q–set of 36 statements describing various aspects of teacher responsibilities and performance. The completed Q–sorts were factor analyzed resulting in three distinct teaching views found in the sample: Emerging Teacher, Self–Assured Teacher, and Determined Teacher. The Emerging Teacher view recognized areas needed for growth and development but also recognized their progress toward becoming a professional. The Self–Assured Teacher view had a high level of comfort and confidence in their teaching ability, which extended to their views on developing lessons and teaching across the agricultural education curriculum. The Determined Teacher view recognized confidence but not comfort in their teaching ability. Teaching did not always come easy for them, but they recognized they were getting better. Study results suggested all three groups attained their views from different sources of self–efficacy. Recommendations were made to provide continued training and/or professional development tailored to each view, as well as, to seek the viewpoints of the cooperating teachers.