Abstract:Reading comprehension is a significant concern for adolescents with learning disabilities (LD), particularly in secondary schools in the United States (US) where content is taught primarily through textbooks. Surprisingly little is known about the actual reading instruction for students with LD in secondary classrooms. Thus, the purpose of this study was to examine the reading comprehension instruction in US secondary special education classrooms. Eight special education teachers in urban high schools were observed and interviewed. Findings showed that teachers implemented a number of reading comprehension practices, not all were considered "best practice". The most frequently observed practices included reading aloud, questioning, seatwork, activating prior knowledge, and using graphic organizers. Explicit instruction in how and when to use reading comprehension strategies, however, was not observed. This study reveals the extent to which evidence-based reading comprehension practices are not making their way into secondary reading classrooms and offers insight into factors that teachers state as influencing their instruction for students with LD.
Developing academics’ capacity for internationalizing the curriculum (IoC) is essential but challenging. There is a lack of understanding of how the IoC framework can be implemented in reality and of how educational developers can facilitate the process. This collaborative autoethnography explores the cultivation over 3 years of a community of practice for developing academics’ IoC capacity facilitated by six educational developers in three universities in Hong Kong. The findings reveal a complex balancing act among various forces in the areas of domain, community, practice, power, identity, and broader context, the last three of which are insufficiently addressed in the literature. This article adds value by illustrating how IoC theories and communities of practice interact with multiple forces in the environment and our own agency, and are negotiated within a particular context.
“Flipped classroom” is one of the popular blended learning approaches in Higher Education (HE) with significant use of technology. A “flipped” course typically engages students to do pre-class online learning at their own pace; the teachers then design active learning activities to reinforce students’ online learning in a physical classroom setting. Although literatures suggest that active learning after self-directed online learning can take place not only in traditional lectures hall but also online learning spaces, there is a lack of studies that investigate how the “relocation” of the face-to-face component online would affect students’ learning. As the COVID-19 pandemic has suspended face-to-face teaching on HE campuses worldwide, this article seizes the opportunity to examine the difficulties and possibilities of conducting flipped learning totally online. By evaluating the delivery of a flipped course for 46 research postgraduate students in Hong Kong during the pandemic-stricken period, the teaching team of the captioned course summarizes how the paradigm shift of flipped learning from partially online to totally online simultaneously distort and create new dynamics of in-class interaction and collaboration. Recommendations on how to better implement and research “flipped learning totally online” as a pedagogy across multiple disciplines will also be highlighted.
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