Research Aim

Presenting several long-term projects in cities in Israel, enabling school clusters (10 schools and more) to experience deeper learning and teaching in specific subject matter or generally in all the schools' teaching through the use of Attentive Teaching mode of instruction.

Theoretical framework

The need for Deeper Learning in American schools is emphasized in Mehta and Fine (2019). The pedagogy is the goal of the exceptional schools that they analyze, looking for the combination of: mastery, identity and creativity. Attentive Teaching (Schur & Guberman, 2023) cultivates the individual nature of the understanding that students experience in the classroom allowing the students to connect their knowledge, identity and creativity with observations and understanding of environments or texts or concepts in any subject matter and any age.

Methods

Implementation of Attentive Teaching in schools, starts with enabling leading teachers to get two years of training in Attentive Teaching, and then lead the school implementation of the teaching and learning method for two or three more years.

Findings

Three Long term projects of implementations of Attentive Teaching will be described:

1. in Arab East Jerusalem 15 primary schools

2. English Attentive Teaching in 12 high-schools in Arab East Jerusalem

3. Intervention in 10 primary and high-schools in Kiryat Shemona, the northern part of Israel

The leading teachers experience mediated interactions where they draw and explain their points of view of the learnt topic. Products from their experiences will be presented.

Relevance to the Conference theme and specific strand

As the conference deals with quality teaching and influencing equity in society, the presentation relates to an implementation of innovative teaching and learning in areas of low socio-economical populations, with the aim of influencing whole areas in long term projects.

The passive learning phenomenon, common in teacher-centred classrooms, persists in classrooms globally despite continuous calls for learner-centred pedagogies. The educational landscape is in dire need of a shift to not only promote learner-centredness but also to move towards autonomy-supportive pedagogical approaches. This paper aims to elucidate and explore the potential of the ‘Altered Flipped Classroom Pedagogy’, a context-specific active learning intervention, to enhance learner engagement and participation in an everyday high school classroom. It originates from Bergman and Sams’ seminal work on the topic. It was, however, ‘altered’ to meet the needs of the South African context, where only an estimated 20,35% of the public high schools in the country have access to technology for teaching and learning purposes. The Flipped classroom was selected as instructional pedagogy as it is founded on socio-constructivist theories of learning that increase the potential for active engagement. Additionally, the research is situated within Self-Determination Theory, as the design of the intervention addresses learners' need for autonomy, relatedness and competence. Using volunteer sampling, high school teachers attended an online training session and received a training manual before implementing the intervention. Data was primarily collected via semi-structured interviews and triangulated using three alternative qualitative methods after undergoing the process of thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006). The primary findings demonstrate the potential of the AFCP to increase learner engagement, participation, and motivation. Further findings also highlight the positive effect on learner autonomy and the activation of learners’ self-determined behaviours thereby increasing the richness of learners’ learning experiences. When learners become more autonomous, they grow their ability to think independently, to problem solve and to take greater ownership of their learning. This intervention directly speaks to curriculum design for equitable teaching as it was developed to suit various educational contexts within the diverse South African educational landscape.

Research aims

There is very limited research on the impact of poverty on students in further and higher education in the UK. This research addresses the poverty experienced by students in Higher Education, focusing on an undergraduate initial teacher education (ITE) degree programme in a Scottish university.

Methods

Drawing on literature from America, key themes of poverty in higher education emerged: the cost of higher education; housing insecurity; the demands of part time work and food insecurity. In regard to the researched ITE programme the key themes that emerged were clothing poverty, transport poverty, food poverty and fuel poverty. This was revealed by mixed methods research. First, survey responses from 218 students (41%) on an ITE undergraduate programme (total n= 532). Second, follow-up interviews with ten student volunteers.

Findings

Findings demonstrated (1) that the students had a clear understanding of the effects of poverty, (2) the increased cost of living featured heavily in all the interviews and students mentioned how much the cost of everyday essentials had increased and they did not believe that this would improve soon and (3) the distinctive professional nature of the ITE degree programme makes specific demands on students, particularly in relation to clothing and transport.

Relevance

This research has revealed highly original findings that are being disseminated to the ITE community in Scotland and the wider UK, in order to raise awareness and attempt to improve equity and inclusion in teacher education.