BackgroundEarly Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) teachers at urban preschools are potential key figures to promote healthy behaviours in disadvantaged young children and to engage parents in lifestyle-related topics. An ECEC teacher-parent partnership regarding healthy behaviours may support parents and stimulate their children’s development. However, it is not an easy task to establish such a collaboration and ECEC teachers need tools to communicate with parents about lifestyle-related topics. This paper describes the study protocol of a preschool-based intervention (CO-HEALTHY) to promote an ECEC teacher-parent partnership regarding healthy eating, physical (in)activity and sleeping behaviours in young children.MethodsA cluster randomised controlled trial will be performed at preschools in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Preschools will be randomly allocated to an intervention or control group. The intervention consists of a toolkit with 10 parent-child activities and associated training for ECEC teachers. The activities were composed using the Intervention Mapping protocol. At intervention preschools, ECEC teachers will carry out the activities during standard contact moments. Parents will receive associated intervention materials and will be encouraged to perform similar parent-child activities at home. At control preschools, the toolkit and training will not be implemented. The primary outcome will be the teacher- and parent-reported partnership regarding healthy eating, physical (in)activity and sleeping behaviours in young children. The perceived partnership will be assessed by a questionnaire at baseline and at 6 months. In addition, short interviews with ECEC teachers will be held. Secondary outcomes include the knowledge, attitude, food- and activity-related practices of ECEC teachers and parents. Furthermore, children’s eating, physical (in)activity and sleeping behaviours, and weight development will be assessed. A process evaluation of the intervention will be made.DiscussionThe intervention aims to provide a practical tool for ECEC teachers at urban preschools to promote an ECEC teacher-parent partnership regarding a healthy lifestyle in young children.Trial registrationNetherlands Trial Register (NTR): NL8883. Date registered: September 8, 2020.
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Professional development of teacher educators is an important topic, because teacher educators need to maintain and enhance their expertise in order to educate our future teachers (Kools & Koster, n.d. ; Dengerink, Lunenberg & Kools, 2015). How do teacher educators fulfil this task, especially within the hectic timeframe of everyday work? I asked four colleges to participate in a group to share their experiences, actions or behaviour in the organisation about their development in their profession of being a teacher educator. My purpose is to bring awareness and movement into that group. My research focusses on teacher educators in a large teacher education department in the Netherlands and the opportunities for action available to them. During this study we are currently creating a learning environment in which mutual cooperation increases the learning potential of all participants. In this group participants take or make time to learn, giving words to their scopes . Researcher and participants discuss and explore on the basis of equality, reciprocity and mutual understanding. By deploying methods borrowed from ‘Appreciative Inquiry’(Massenlink et al., 2008) the enthusiasm of a study group is raised and the intrinsic motivation of the participants stimulated. Our study group will convene three times. Its goal is to stimulate cooperation among teacher educators through optimisation of existing qualities, a method that could be described as empowerment, or a process of collective reinforcement ‘To learn’ involves experiencing that what one does really matters, as well as developing one’s own persona in the local community. Intervention, action, reflection and study group meetings alternate in the course of our research. In addition to audio and video recordings, data consists of reports drawn up on the basis of member checks. Data is analysed qualitatively by coding the interview texts and reports. After applying the codes, the researcher discusses the coding in a research group and with the participants of the study group (membercheck). Working collaboratively can offer learning challenges that catalyse growth as a professional, teacher educators become acquainted and approach each other from the perspective of their respective professional and functional responsibilities. This study offers perspectives for other teacher educators to recognize these possibilities in their own situation. Moreover the study offers a description of a way to organise collegial exchange. The research is related to the RDC professional development of teacher educators.
Situated learning plays a key role in internships and other practice-based learning settings in teacher education. The dominant assumption for a long time has been that the development of teaching competency is advanced most through practical teaching experience and post-lesson conferences between mentor and student teachers. It is through the reflection of teaching and classroom processes that student teachers are believed to develop their professional knowledge. The assistance of such reflection draws on mentor teachers’ teaching expertise. Mentor teachers, however, rarely explicate practical and theory-based knowledge underlying their practice and student teachers are not inclined to search for their mentor teacher’s underlying knowledge. As a consequence, the knowledge underlying effective teaching often remains implicit. The symposium brings together three novel approaches to assist teacher learning, which aim to make knowledge of teaching explicit. To bridge the gap between mentor and student teachers’ instructional concepts, the method of videobased tagging as a pre-requisite to initiate and structure professional dialogue is suggested and researched by van den Bogert, Crasborn, Bruggen and Eindhoven in The Netherlands. The second study by Staub, Waldis, Schatzmann and Futter investigates effects of an intervention with mentor teachers in Switzerland, suggesting the enactment of pre-lesson conferences and/or the use of a core concepts for lesson planning and reflection. A third study involving Germany and Switzerland by Kreis, Schnebel, Wyss, Wagner and Deiringer researches student teachers’ knowledge, beliefs and experiences related to collaborative lesson planning with peers. The shared assumption is that all three approaches enhance explicit communication on teaching and encourage professional dialogues that contribute to teacher learning in significant ways. Eliciting mentor and pre-service teachers’ practical knowledge using teacher-tagged classroom situations Bogert van den, Crasborn, Bruggen van & Jochems) Objectives The present study has a twofold objective. First, elicitation of mentor and pre-service teachers’ conceptualizations of videotaped classroom situations to clarify similarities and differences between practical knowledge of experienced and novice teachers. Second, exploration of ‘collaborative tagging’ as a new method to access mentors and pre-service teachers’ practical knowledge. Theoretical framework Teachers’ practical knowledge underlies overt teaching behavior, and is personal, unique, often tacit, and intertwined with teaching actions (Meijer, Verloop, & Beijaard, 2002). The ability to notice and interpret what is happening in a classroom is a basic aspect of teachers’ practical knowledge (Goodwin, 1994). Experienced teachers are more proficient in this essential perceptional process than novice teachers (Berliner, 2001; Sabers, Cushing, & Berliner, 1991). Consequently, proficient teachers may facilitate the professional development of novices. However, mentor teachers rarely explicate practical knowledge underlying their teaching practice (Edwards & Protheroe, 2004), and most pre-service teachers are not inclined to search for their mentor teacher’s practical knowledge (Penny, Harley, & Jessop, 1996). Hence, in this study we explored ‘collaborative tagging’ (Mika, 2005): a method where many people independently attach keywords called tags to e.g. videos, for categorization and fast future retrieval. Collaborative tagging has gained popularity since 2004 (Hammond, Hannay, Lund, & Scott, 2005), indicating the willingness and ease with which this activity is undertaken. In other studies (Cattuto, Benz, Hotho, & Stumme, 2008; Mika, 2005) network analysis of the co-occurrence of tags revealed the semantic relationships between the tags; a bottom-up taxonomy, or a so called folksonomy (Vander Wal, 2004). In this study, collaborative tagging was applied to explore the structure of teachers’ knowledge and compare conscious aspects of mentor and pre-service teachers’ practical knowledge. The main research questions were: • Which concepts do mentor- and pre-service teachers use to tag videotaped classroom situations? • To what extent do the generated tags and the relations between them differ between mentor- and pre-service teachers? • To what extent is collaborative tagging is helpful in gaining access to conscious aspects of mentors and pre-service teachers’ practical knowledge? Method Participants were 100 mentor-teachers and 100 pre-service teachers. The participants each ‘tagged” five video-fragments of different classroom situations. Data were analyzed with UCINET software as proposed by Mika (2005). Co-occurrences of tags were computed. Familiar measures of social network analysis (e.g. clustering coefficients, and (local) betweenness centrality) were used to describe each folksonomy, and to compare pre-service and mentor teachers’ networks of tags. Results and significance The study established that tagging is a promising new method to elicit teachers’ practical knowledge. The resulting folksonomies clarified similarities and differences between mentors’ and pre-service teachers’ practical knowledge. Results indicate that experienced teachers use more detailed and specific tags than pre-service teachers. This method makes a significant contribution to the methodology of the study of teachers’ practical knowledge. Folksonomies not only elicit individual teachers’ practical knowledge but enable researchers to discern common element’s in teachers’ practical knowledge. Moreover, in teacher education, folksonomies are helpful to initiate and structure professional dialogue between pre-service and mentor teachers.
The project Decolonising Education: from Teachers to Leading Learners (DETeLL) aims to develop a multi-site approach for interventions towards inclusion and decolonisation in order to change the hierarchical nature of higher education in the Netherlands. DETeLL identifies the model of the ‘traditional teacher’ as embodying the structural exclusions and discriminations built into the classroom and proposes the figure of a ‘Leading Learner’ as a first step towards a radical change in the educational system. In collaboration with the education departments in the Theatre and Dance Academy at ArtEZ, the post-doc will build up a research and teaching programme that engages with students and teachers in the faculty to create a prototype of an inclusive and diverse educational practice. RELEVANCE: Education should be the critical space in which changes occur in order to shape best possible futures. In DETeLL’s acceptation, decolonisation refers to a complete change in the way of thinking and behaving. It does not refer only to the urgency of dealing with historical colonial legacies embedded in society, but also to the subversion of the deeply oppressive colonial culture that (also unconsciously) regulates public and private living, whether this is related to gender, race, class or sexuality issues. RESULTS: 1) Create a theory and practice-based scientific base-line of decolonisation and art education; 2) Provide a definition of ‘Artist educator as Leading Learner’ following a practice- based methodology of intervention; 3) Design and Pilot a new teaching programme for theatre education at ArtEZ to be then upscaled to all educational departments in a follow-up project); 4) Produce a strong interdisciplinary and international output plan: 3 academic publications, 2 conferences, 4 expert group workshops. NETWORK: ArtEZ; University of Amsterdam (UvA); Ghent University; UCHRI; Hildesheim University; Cape Town University. The partners will serve as steering committee through planned expert group meetings.
A world where technology is ubiquitous and embedded in our daily lives is becoming increasingly likely. To prepare our students to live and work in such a future, we propose to turn Saxion’s Epy-Drost building into a living lab environment. This will entail setting up and drafting the proper infrastructure and agreements to collect people’s location and building data (e.g. temperature, humidity) in Epy-Drost, and making the data appropriately available to student and research projects within Saxion. With regards to this project’s effect on education, we envision the proposal of several derived student projects which will provide students the opportunity to work with huge amounts of data and state-of-the-art natural interaction interfaces. Through these projects, students will acquire skills and knowledge that are necessary in the current and future labor-market, as well as get experience in working with topics of great importance now and in the near future. This is not only aligned with the Creative Media and Game Technologies (CMGT) study program’s new vision and focus on interactive technology, but also with many other education programs within Saxion. In terms of research, the candidate Postdoc will study if and how the data, together with the building’s infrastructure, can be leveraged to promote healthy behavior through playful strategies. In other words, whether we can persuade people in the building to be more physically active and engage more in social interactions through data-based gamification and building actuation. This fits very well with the Ambient Intelligence (AmI) research group’s agenda in Augmented Interaction, and CMGT’s User Experience line. Overall, this project will help spark and solidify lasting collaboration links between AmI and CMGT, give body to AmI’s new Augmented Interaction line, and increase Saxion’s level of education through the dissemination of knowledge between researchers, teachers and students.
Higher education offers great flexibility as students are largely free to decide where, when, and how to study. Being successful in such an environment requires well-developed self-regulated learning skills. However, every teacher in higher education knows that students experience ample difficulty to self-regulate their learning. They struggle to set and plan learning goals, and to gain sufficient depth in learning when preparing for exams. These struggles can negatively impact their learning, well-being, academic achievement, and professional life. On top of the existing flexibility in higher education, a need for more flexibility in what students learn is becoming evident. That is, students have room for flexible learningapproaches (i.e., deciding what learning goals or materials to study and how) and/or flexible learning trajectories (i.e.,choosing what combination of courses to take). This places an additional burden on students’ self-regulated learning skills. We posit that for students to thrive in flexible higher education, practice-oriented research on supporting students’self-regulated learning skills is required. Our collaborative consortium will i) unravel how students can be optimally scaffolded within flexible learning approaches and flexible learning trajectories, ii) examine how to optimize teacher and technological support, and iii) study how student autonomy and motivation can be guarded. We will set up a practice-oriented research program with both qualitative and quantitative methods, including design-based research, action research, pre-post comparative intervention studies, and large-scale correlational research. The findings will impact higher education through (technological) design guidelines and intervention programs for educational professionals, andsupport-modules for students.
