Strategies for Improving Secondary Teaching

This online graduate secondary education course, Strategies for Improving Secondary Teaching, was originally developed six years ago when several C&I faculty were asked to develop online offerings in our graduate secondary education core certification courses. The original online course design consisted of a plethora of stand-alone weekly activities previously employed in mostly undergraduate education face-to-face classroom settings. After teaching the online course for several semesters and making numerous surface revisions to respond to the diverse needs of the adult online learners, I wanted to re-design the course to improve student learning. Pedagogical strengths of the original design were maintained and incorporated into the re-design, including the utilization of (a) clear learning objectives aligned with state pedagogical and professional responsibilities standards for 8-12, (b) active learning tasks requiring the production of learning artifacts, (c) multimedia support of content (video clips), (d) explicit scoring rubrics outlining performance criteria for all graded assignments, (e) use of learning modules to provide a central location for containing all of the instructions and resources necessary to complete weekly activities, and (f) use of university-wide Sakai group courseware (TRACS). Although the original online design had many strengths as outlined above, the course lacked cohesion and the ability to provide deep and meaningful learning to a diverse group of adult online learners.

The stand-alone nature of the weekly activities made the various aspects of the curriculum seem disjointed and unrelated. Although the curriculum seemed adequately "covered" in the various readings and activities, there was lack of integration of the curriculum into authentic practices that teachers normally experience. Additionally, the students enrolled in the course had a wide range of skills and expertise, ranging from initial certification post-baccealearate students with no training in pedagogy or experience in teaching to practicing certified teachers with numerous years of experience! I wanted to re-design the course to (a) meet the diverse needs of the seasoned teachers as well as initial certification students, (b) facilitate deep learning of the course content, (c) engage the students in authentic learning, (d) provide practice rich in use of technology tools, (e) mimic the type of professional development teachers often experience in practice (asynchronous, collaborative, and web-based), and (f) create and provide an ongoing resource for teacher education students well beyond the scope of the course.

Since project-based learning is built upon situated and collaborative learning, the course was designed so that the teacher education graduate students would participate in the kinds of authentic activities that teachers are expected to do on a routine basis--design units of instruction and develop daily lesson plans to effectively facilitate student learning. Students would learn and work together in an asynchronous computer-mediated environment around a semester-long project.  At the beginning of the course, students are divided into content area design teams and use wiki technology as their design studios to collaboratively create an instructional unit and corresponding lesson plans that illustrate the various models of teaching. As the graduate students are studying and investigating various models of teaching in their content area design teams, they fulfill rotating weekly roles including (a) visual summary virtuoso-- creating a visual representation of the model being studied; (b) multimedia master--providing multimedia resources to be used in the lesson plan illustrating the model that week; (c) discussion facilitator-- initiating, maintaining, and summarizing the team's weekly discussion, and (d) lesson plan facilitator-- creating a lesson plan illustrating the model of teaching. The team members collaboratively created these learning artifacts in the wiki environment, documenting their learning.

The technologies utilized in the course design were based upon the affordances that the tools offer. For example, our university's Sakai courseware (TRACS) is routinely used by students and instructors in both undergraduate and graduate education and in face-to-face, hybrid, and distance learning environments. TRACS functions as a gateway into the online course and provides a central course location and  repository for (a) course syllabus, (b) learning modules that encapsulate all of the weekly assignments and supplementary resources, (c) discussion forums to synthesize course content, and (d) a resources folder that organizes and holds various required resources. Other TRACS tools used in the redesign  included online assessments and surveys, digital drop box, online gradebook, and mailtool for mass email communication to enrolled students.

PB Works was chosen as the Wiki tool (instead of Wiki provided by TRACS) so as to allow the graduate education students the opportunity to transfer their skills in using a Web 2.0 tool (free) that they can then easily use as a teaching tool with their own students. The course wiki would serve as the graduate students' design studio. The inherent design of the wiki tool itself scaffolds the collaborative process and provides documentation for assessment of participation and contributions. The wiki would also serve as a portfolio, allowing the students to showcase their content area design team's learning artifacts over the course of the semester. Students participated in end-of-course Adobe Connect presentations to showcase their wiki portfolios and synthesize what they learned.

Screenshots/Files/Links (Optional)

Screenshots (or Other Supporting Materials): 

Concept Map Illustrating Design of Strategies Course