The Ohio Resource Center (ORC) for mathematics, science and reading, a project of the State University Education Deans, has been funded by the Ohio General Assembly and established by the Ohio Board of Regents to:
Identify effective instructional and professional development resources and best practices and disseminate them to schools, school districts and higher education institutions.
Support sustained professional development for teachers and administrators in the effective adoption of best practices and teaching resources.
Foster an integrated educational research and development capacity for Ohio through collaboration with colleges and universities involved in teacher preparation.
The role of the ORC is to identify best practices, to disseminate this information to a wide variety of user audiences, and then to assist with implementing, institutionalizing and sustaining these pre-K to 12 practices across the Ohio educational system. ORC uses proposal processes and subcontracts with two- and four-year higher education institutions and other pre- K to 12 education providers for aggregating best practices information, developing interactive data and knowledge bases, disseminating best practices information, and conducting applied research on needed areas critical to the state educational system. Best practices determined through ORC represent a variety of practices, suitable for different purposes and for different audiences, but certified through a peer-review process that assures the validity of each practice for its intended purpose. ORC also makes important contributions to communication with public and business stakeholders of education and to the expansion of the knowledge and databases for informing educational policy.
The ORC provides links to peer-reviewed instructional resources that have been identified by a panel of Ohio educators as exemplifying best or promising practice. Available resources also include content and professional resources as well as assessment and general education resources that will support the work of pre-K to 12 classroom teachers and higher education faculty members. The resources are correlated with Ohio's academic content standards and with applicable national content standards.
The administrative site for the ORC is located in and administered through the College of Education and Human Ecology of the Ohio State University. Many two- and four-year public and private higher education institutions and several other agencies are involved in the design of ORC's structure, the development of its products, and the delivery of its services. ORC operates primarily as a virtual best practice center, with working groups and research teams drawn from faculty at Ohio colleges and universities in cooperation with schools and school districts across the state. ORC's resources are available primarily via the web and are coordinated with other state and regional efforts to improve student achievement and teacher effectiveness in pre-K to 12 mathematics, science and reading. The website is organized around Ohio's academic content standards.
K–12, from kindergarten to 12th grade, is an American English expression that indicates the range of years of publicly supported primary and secondary education found in the United States, which is similar to publicly supported school grades before college in several other countries, such as Afghanistan, Australia, Canada, China, Ecuador, Egypt, India, Iran, the Philippines, South Korea, and Turkey.
Education in India is primarily managed by state-run public education system, which fall under the command of the government at three levels: central, state and local. Under various articles of the Indian Constitution and the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009, free and compulsory education is provided as a fundamental right to children aged 6 to 14. The approximate ratio of public schools to private schools in India is 7:5.
Student-centered learning, also known as learner-centered education, broadly encompasses methods of teaching that shift the focus of instruction from the teacher to the student. In original usage, student-centered learning aims to develop learner autonomy and independence by putting responsibility for the learning path in the hands of students by imparting to them skills, and the basis on how to learn a specific subject and schemata required to measure up to the specific performance requirement. Student-centered instruction focuses on skills and practices that enable lifelong learning and independent problem-solving. Student-centered learning theory and practice are based on the constructivist learning theory that emphasizes the learner's critical role in constructing meaning from new information and prior experience.
Openness is an overarching concept or philosophy that is characterized by an emphasis on transparency and collaboration. That is, openness refers to "accessibility of knowledge, technology and other resources; the transparency of action; the permeability of organisational structures; and the inclusiveness of participation". Openness can be said to be the opposite of closedness, central authority and secrecy.
Education policy consists of the principles and policy decisions that influence the field of education, as well as the collection of laws and rules that govern the operation of education systems.
Open educational resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials intentionally created and licensed to be free for the end user to own, share, and in most cases, modify. The term "OER" describes publicly accessible materials and resources for any user to use, re-mix, improve, and redistribute under some licenses. These are designed to reduce accessibility barriers by implementing best practices in teaching and to be adapted for local unique contexts.
Teacher education or teacher training refers to the policies, procedures, and provision designed to equip (prospective) teachers with the knowledge, attitudes, behaviors, approaches, methodologies and skills they require to perform their tasks effectively in the classroom, school, and wider community. The professionals who engage in training the prospective teachers are called teacher educators.
The scholarship of teaching and learning is often defined as systematic inquiry into student learning which advances the practice of teaching in higher education by making inquiry findings public. Building on this definition, Peter Felten identified 5 principles for good practice in SOTL: (1) inquiry focused on student learning, (2) grounded in context, (3) methodologically sound, (4) conducted in partnership with students, (5) appropriately public.
English-Language Learner is a term used in some English-speaking countries such as the US and Canada to describe a person who is learning the English language and has a native language that is not English. Some educational advocates, especially in the United States, classify these students as non-native English speakers or emergent bilinguals. Various other terms are also used to refer to students who are not proficient in English, such as English as a Second Language (ESL), English as an Additional Language (EAL), limited English proficient (LEP), Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CLD), non-native English speaker, bilingual students, heritage language, emergent bilingual, and language-minority students. The legal term that is used in federal legislation is 'limited English proficient'. The instruction and assessment of students, their cultural background, and the attitudes of classroom teachers towards ELLs have all been found to be factors in the achievement of these students. Several methods have been suggested to effectively teach ELLs, including integrating their home cultures into the classroom, involving them in language-appropriate content-area instruction early on, and integrating literature into their learning programs.
The Ohio Library and Information Network (OhioLINK) is a consortium of Ohio's college and university libraries and the State Library of Ohio. Serving more than 800,000 students, faculty, and staff at 88 institutions with 117 libraries, OhioLINK's membership includes 16 public universities, 23 community/technical colleges, 48 private colleges and the State Library of Ohio. OhioLINK serves faculty, students, staff and other researchers via campus-based integrated library systems, the OhioLINK central site, and Internet resources.
An open-source curriculum (OSC) is an online instructional resource that can be freely used, distributed and modified. OSC is based on the open-source practice of creating products or software that opens up access to source materials or codes. Applied to education, this process invites feedback and participation from developers, educators, government officials, students and parents and empowers them to exchange ideas, improve best practices and create world-class curricula. These "development" communities can form ad-hoc, within the same subject area or around a common student need, and allow for a variety of editing and workflow structures.
Developmentally appropriate practice is a perspective within early childhood education whereby a teacher or child caregiver nurtures a child's social/emotional, physical, and cognitive development. It is also described as a philosophy in child education that is based on child development knowledge where professionals base their instruction and care on research, standards, and recognized theory.
Student engagement occurs when "students make a psychological investment in learning. They try hard to learn what school offers. They take pride not simply in earning the formal indicators of success (grades), but in understanding the material and incorporating or internalizing it in their lives." Since the U.S. college dropout rate for first-time-in college degree-seeking students is nearly 50% It is increasingly seen as an indicator of successful classroom instruction, and as a valued outcome of school reform. The phrase was identified in 1996 as "the latest buzzword in education circles." Students are engaged when they are involved in their work, persist despite challenges and obstacles, and take visible delight in accomplishing their work. Student engagement also refers to a "student's willingness, need, desire and compulsion to participate in, and be successful in, the learning process promoting higher level thinking for enduring understanding." Student engagement is also a usefully ambiguous term for the complexity of 'engagement' beyond the fragmented domains of cognition, behaviour, emotion or affect, and in doing so encompass the historically situated individual within their contextual variables that at every moment influence how engaged an individual is in their learning.
Susan Neuman is an educator, researcher, and education policy-maker in early childhood and literacy development. In 2013, she became Professor of Early Childhood and Literacy Education, and Chair of the Department of Teaching and Learning at NYU's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.
Differentiated instruction and assessment, also known as differentiated learning or, in education, simply, differentiation, is a framework or philosophy for effective teaching that involves providing all students within their diverse classroom community of learners a range of different avenues for understanding new information in terms of: acquiring content; processing, constructing, or making sense of ideas; and developing teaching materials and assessment measures so that all students within a classroom can learn effectively, regardless of differences in their ability. Differentiated instruction, according to Carol Ann Tomlinson, is the process of "ensuring that what a student learns, how he or she learns it, and how the student demonstrates what he or she has learned is a match for that student's readiness level, interests, and preferred mode of learning." According to Boelens et al. (2018), differentiation can be on two different levels: the administration level and the classroom level. The administration level takes the socioeconomic status and gender of students into consideration. At the classroom level, differentiation revolves around content, processing, product, and effects. On the content level, teachers adapt what they are teaching to meet the needs of students. This can mean making content more challenging or simplified for students based on their levels. The process of learning can be differentiated as well. Teachers may choose to teach individually at a time, assign problems to small groups, partners or the whole group depending on the needs of the students. By differentiating product, teachers decide how students will present what they have learned. This may take the form of videos, graphic organizers, photo presentations, writing, and oral presentations. All these take place in a safe classroom environment where students feel respected and valued—effects.
A virtual learning environment (VLE) in educational technology is a web-based platform for the digital aspects of courses of study, usually within educational institutions. They present resources, activities, and interactions within a course structure and provide for the different stages of assessment. VLEs also usually report on participation and have some level of integration with other institutional systems. In North America, VLE's are often referred to as Learning Management Systems (LMS).
Open educational practices (OEP) are part the broader open education landscape, including the openness movement in general. It is a term with multiple layers and dimensions and is often used interchangeably with open pedagogy or open practices. OEP represent teaching and learning techniques that draw upon open and participatory technologies and high-quality open educational resources (OER) in order to facilitate collaborative and flexible learning. Because OEP emerged from the study of OER, there is a strong connection between the two concepts. OEP, for example, often, but not always, involve the application of OER to the teaching and learning process. Open educational practices aim to take the focus beyond building further access to OER and consider how in practice, such resources support education and promote quality and innovation in teaching and learning. The focus in OEP is on reproduction/understanding, connecting information, application, competence, and responsibility rather than the availability of good resources. OEP is a broad concept which can be characterised by a range of collaborative pedagogical practices that include the use, reuse, and creation of OER and that often employ social and participatory technologies for interaction, peer-learning, knowledge creation and sharing, empowerment of learners, and open sharing of teaching practices.
MERLOT is an online repository and international consortium of institutions of higher education, industry partners, professional organizations and individuals. MERLOT partners and members are devoted to identifying, peer reviewing, organizing and making available existing online learning resources in a range of academic disciplines for use by higher education faculty and students.
The Education Facilities Clearinghouse (EFC) is a program of the United States Department of Education (DoED) which provides support to educational facilities "on issues related to planning, design, financing, construction, improvement, operation, and maintenance" through technical assistance and training as well as dissemination of research on these issues. The program was established in 1998 and in the past has been implemented as the National Clearinghouse for Educational Facilities (1998–2010) and the American Clearinghouse on Educational Facilities (2010–2013). As of 2014 it is administered by the George Washington University Graduate School of Education and Human Development and is funded through a competitive grant sponsored by the DoED.
Educator effectiveness is a United States K-12 school system education policy initiative that measures the quality of an educator performance in terms of improving student learning. It describes a variety of methods, such as observations, student assessments, student work samples and examples of teacher work, that education leaders use to determine the effectiveness of a K-12 educator.
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