American Journal of Education

by Jennifer Goldstein

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Scholars and practitioners have long criticized teacher evaluation as ineffective. Peer assistance and review (PAR) alters traditional teacher evaluation, as master teachers conduct summative as well as formative assessment of beginning teachers and veteran teachers in need of intervention. Relying on data from a longitudinal case study of one urban district, this article describes key components of teacher evaluation with PAR, in particular how it differs from teacher evaluation as typically conducted by principals.

August 28, 2016

We all communicate with others all the time -- in our homes, in our workplaces, in the groups we belong to, and in the community. No matter how well we think we understand each other, communication is hard. Just think, for example, how often we hear things like, "He doesn't get it," or "She didn't really hear what I meant to say." "Culture" is often at the root of communication challenges. Our culture influences how we approach problems, and how we participate in groups and in communities. When we participate in groups we are often surprised at how differently people approach their work together.

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Culture is a complex concept, with many different definitions. But, simply put, "culture" refers to a group or community with which we share common experiences that shape the way we understand the world. It includes groups that we are born into, such as gender, race, or national origin. It also includes groups we join or become part of. For example, we can acquire a new culture by moving to a new region, by a change in our economic status, or by becoming disabled. When we think of culture this broadly, we realize we all belong to many cultures at once.

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Our histories are a critical piece of our cultures. Historical experiences -- whether of five years ago or of ten generations back -- shape who we are. Knowledge of our history can help us understand ourselves and one another better. Exploring the ways in which various groups within our society have related to each other is key to opening channels for cross-cultural communication

Peer review of teaching has become an accepted educational procedure in Australia to quality assure the quality of teaching practices. The institutional implementation of the peer review process can be viewed as genuine desire to improve teaching quality or an imposition from above as a measure of accountability and performativity. One approach is to conduct the peer review process as a team or a triad, involving a group of three academics. This article reviews this process of peer review through the eyes of the participants. The results of the study indicate that the peer review process upon which this study is based, has the potential to not only significantly impact academics' pedagogy but to improve teaching confidence and associated benefits in regard to evidence based teaching for promotional opportunities.

by Rajiv D. Banker, Indranil Bardhan, & Ozer Asdemir

In this study, the authors found that Information Technology (IT) and more specifically Collaborative Product Commerce (CPC) fosters greater collaboration between design teams, which in turn has a significant impact on product quality as well as reduces the costs associated with research and development. In addition, the study suggests that these cost savings can also be associated with “design turnaround time” and “greater design reuse” as well as lower documentation costs.

The significance of this study to this topic is two-fold. First, it will serve as a model of the R&D process in profit-driven, hard science oriented industries. I believe such a model is needed as most of the other sources that support collaboration don’t go so far, and using such a model as an example could help to change the way education views its evaluation process in a positive maner. The model contains and defines the pieces and parts of the collaboration process – specifically, “explicit” and “tacit” knowledge which go along with the traditional collaboration process of engineering design which is labeled as “socialization.” In addition, other pieces include the process of taking horizontal and vertical feedback, “externalization” and “internalization,” and putting it together into an improved product, that is “combination”

There is likely to be bias against these ideas by the audience of this topic, educators, as they are likely to not be able to see the relevance of collaboration in engineering design and the same in the field of teaching.

by Todd Bryant

The article provides a wide array of means in which collaborative technologies can improve Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), ranging from the humanities to the hard sciences. The most significant aspect of this source is that it identifies the need for more interactive features to be involved in collaborative learning projects, which could be considered innovative when it comes to collaborative learning, as most of the MOOCs have and continue to follow the top-down, lecture/listen format. This source is valid from both being possible content on my webpage as well as proving to be a valid source for the construction of my online project.

The downside of the source is largely focused on “higher” education rather than all education, however, the article does address new ideas in the hard sciences such as math by suggesting simulations to organize collaborators around specific, real-world questions that require a solution given data sets and other issues. Also, at first glance this source appears to be related to improving student performance by collaboration rather than teacher professional development. However, it is important to note that teachers often model teaching strategies when they do professional development.

by Veronica Diaz, Malcolm Brown, & Janet Salmons

This source was part of an EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) which explored the use of collaborative learning in the classroom. EDUCAUSE is a nonprofit organization that promotes the use of Information Technology in higher education. The organization’s mandate may be a hint of a particular bias towards more use of IT in education rather than less. This source describes the use of, and examples for, five common collaborative technology tools that can be used for learning and that I believe could be extended to teacher professional development. Those tool are: blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, polling, and concept mapping.

The most significant aspect of this source is that is creates a clear connection between collaborative technologies and learning, after all the idea of learning through the use of collaboration technologies goes to the very heart of the topic. In addition, the tools used in this presentation are akin to the typical tools used in our education system. For these reasons, the source is likely to appeal to topic’s potential audience, that being educators themselves. The downside of the source is that EDUCAUSE goes so far as to specify its approaches as applied to “higher” education rather than all education, and also the content is not perfectly, specific to the topic of mathematics learning, but the study is very relevant and can be applied to that specific topic.