The focus of the clinical educators shifted during their involvement in the project, from considering a) What their students should know and do; to encompass b) What students currently understood and did; to also include reflection on a third level c) How to enable students to move from their current understandings and behaviours to the desired learning outcomes.
It is a challenge for teacher educators to shift pre-service teachers away from traditional pedagogical beliefs towards constructivist ones.
That is why, in place of perfunctory praise, many educators are shifting to a teaching style in which they ask questions, give feedback, and show interest, but are spare with compliments.
While the protest began over teacher pay, educators have shifted their emphasis, pressing lawmakers to invest more in classrooms and saying their walkout is in the name of students who are not getting the resources they need to learn.
NEA leaders said this week that they hoped the success of educators could help shift debates around funding for public education and teacher pay across the nation, especially after teacher walkouts in West Virginia, Kentucky, Arizona, and Oklahoma turned attention to cuts to education budgets in those states and elsewhere.
Educators say the shift toward the new report card is substantive.
Many educators consider that shift a promising one, but fewer than half the states currently have the advanced student data tracking systems needed to measure student academic growth.
On that day, I sat in a small room while some stone-faced educators came in shifts to monitor my sitting behaviors and make sure I was working.
They bring in, "'a second shift of educators' -- a team of full-time trained educators and part-time volunteers with expertise in areas ranging from arts to engineering -- into schools to work with students on engaging, educationally sound projects".
"This is a further democratization of access to higher education," said Mr. Walker, who edited a book on the subject, "The Community College Baccalaureate: Emerging Trends and Policy Issues". One contributor to the book, Barbara Townsend, a professor of higher education at the University of Missouri at Columbia, is among educators who oppose the shift.
