A teacher is a person who helps students to acquire knowledge, competence or virtue.
Grading in education is the attempt to apply standardized measurements of varying levels of achievement in a course. Grades can be assigned as letters, as a range, as a percentage, or as a number out of a possible total.
Special education is the practice of educating students in a way that provides accommodations that address their individual differences, disabilities, and special needs. Ideally, this process involves the individually planned and systematically monitored arrangement of teaching procedures, adapted equipment and materials, and accessible settings. These interventions are designed to help individuals with special needs achieve a higher level of personal self-sufficiency and success in school and in their community which may not be available if the student were only given access to a typical classroom education. Special Education is separate from a 504 plan, as a 504 plan allows students with disabilities to participate in the general education classroom and special education services involve a special classroom that has a class of students only with disabilities that receive special education services. Some students with an IEP go into a special classroom, and some students with an IEP can participate in general education classes with accommodations and/or modifications.
Educational assessment or educational evaluation is the systematic process of documenting and using empirical data on the knowledge, skill, attitudes, and beliefs to refine programs and improve student learning. Assessment data can be obtained from directly examining student work to assess the achievement of learning outcomes or can be based on data from which one can make inferences about learning. Assessment is often used interchangeably with test, but not limited to tests. Assessment can focus on the individual learner, the learning community, a course, an academic program, the institution, or the educational system as a whole. The word 'assessment' came into use in an educational context after the Second World War.
Minimally invasive education (MIE) is a form of learning in which children operate in unsupervised environments. The methodology arose from an experiment done by Sugata Mitra while at NIIT in 1999, often called The Hole in the Wall, which has since gone on to become a significant project with the formation of Hole in the Wall Education Limited (HiWEL), a cooperative effort between NIIT and the International Finance Corporation, employed in some 300 'learning stations', covering some 300,000 children in India and several African countries.
A Sudbury school is a type of school, usually for the K-12 age range, where students have complete responsibility for their own education, and the school is run by a direct democracy in which students and staff are equal citizens. Students use their time however they wish, and learn as a by-product of ordinary experience rather than through coursework. There is no predetermined educational syllabus, prescriptive curriculum or standardized instruction. This is a form of democratic education. Daniel Greenberg, one of the founders of the original Sudbury Model school, writes that the two things that distinguish a Sudbury Model school are that everyone is treated equally and that there is no authority other than that granted by the consent of the governed.
Cooperative learning is an educational approach which aims to organize classroom activities into academic and social learning experiences. There is much more to cooperative learning than merely arranging students into groups, and it has been described as "structuring positive interdependence." Students must work in groups to complete tasks collectively toward academic goals. Unlike individual learning, which can be competitive in nature, students learning cooperatively can capitalize on one another's resources and skills. Furthermore, the teacher's role changes from giving information to facilitating students' learning. Everyone succeeds when the group succeeds. Ross and Smyth (1995) describe successful cooperative learning tasks as intellectually demanding, creative, open-ended, and involve higher order thinking tasks. Cooperative learning has also been linked to increased levels of student satisfaction.
Project-based learning (PBL) is a student-centered pedagogy that involves a dynamic classroom approach in which it is believed that students acquire a deeper knowledge through active exploration of real-world challenges and problems. Students learn about a subject by working for an extended period of time to investigate and respond to a complex question, challenge, or problem. It is a style of active learning and inquiry-based learning. PBL contrasts with paper-based, rote memorization, or teacher-led instruction that presents established facts or portrays a smooth path to knowledge by instead posing questions, problems or scenarios.
The Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) is a Crown agency of the Government of Ontario in Canada. It was legislated into creation in 1996 in response to recommendations made by the Royal Commission on Learning in February 1995.
Learner autonomy has been a popular concept in foreign language education in the past decades, especially in relation to lifelong learning skills. It has transformed old practices in the language classroom and has given origin to self access language learning centers around the world such as the SALC at Kanda University of International Studies in Japan, the ASLLC at The Education University of Hong Kong, the SAC at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and ELSAC at the University of Auckland. As the result of such practices, language teaching is now sometimes seen as the same as language learning, and it has placed the learner in the centre of attention in language learning education in some places.
An open classroom is a student-centered learning space design format which first became popular in North America in the late 1960s and 1970s, with a re-emergence in the early 21st century.
In education, response to intervention is an approach to academic intervention used in the United States to provide early, systematic, and appropriately intensive assistance to children who are at risk for or already underperforming as compared to appropriate grade- or age-level standards. RTI seeks to promote academic success through universal screening, early intervention, frequent progress monitoring, and increasingly intensive research-based instruction or interventions for children who continue to have difficulty. RTI is a multileveled approach for aiding students that is adjusted and modified as needed if they are failing.
Inclusion in education refers to a model wherein students with special needs spend most or all of their time with non-special needs students. It arise in the context of special education with an individualized education program or 504 plan, and is built on the notion that it is more effective for students with special needs to have said mixed experience for them to be more successful in social interactions leading to further success in life. Inclusion rejects but still provides the use of special schools or classrooms to separate students with disabilities from students without disabilities. Schools with inclusive classrooms do not believe in separate classrooms. They do not have their own separate world so they have to learn how to operate with students while being less focused on by teachers due to a higher student to teacher ratio.
An 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 in addition to their native language or any other languages they may speak. Some educational advocates, especially in the United States, classify theses 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.
Grade skipping is a form of academic acceleration, often used for academically talented students, that enable the student to skip entirely the curriculum of one or more years of school. Grade skipping allows students to learn at a level appropriate for their cognitive abilities, and is normally seen in schools that group students primarily according to their chronological age, rather than by their individual developmental levels. Grade skipping is usually done when a student is sufficiently advanced in all school subjects, so that they can move forward in all subjects or graduate, rather than in only one or two areas. There are alternatives to grade skipping.
The jigsaw technique is a method of organizing classroom activity that makes students dependent on each other to succeed. It breaks classes into groups and breaks assignments into pieces that the group assembles to complete the (jigsaw) puzzle. It was designed by social psychologist Elliot Aronson to help weaken racial cliques in forcibly integrated schools. The Jigsaw method is beneficial for students learning.
Age segregation in schools, age grading, or graded education is the separation of students into years of education by approximately the same age. It is based on the theory that learners of the same age at the same level of social and intellectual maturity should be taught at the same pace. Here, schools classify learners according to age cohorts with the expectation that those with similar age share needs, abilities, and interests. It also forms part of the standardized learning organized in stages and progresses in predictable and known ways.
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. Students vary in culture, socioeconomic status, language, gender, motivation, ability/disability, learning styles, personal interests and more, and teachers must be aware of these varieties as they plan in accordance with the curricula. By considering varied learning needs, teachers can develop personalized instruction so that all children in the classroom can learn effectively. Differentiated classrooms have also been described as ones that respond to student variety in readiness levels, interests, and learning profiles. It is a classroom that includes and allows all students to be successful. To do this, a teacher sets different expectations for task completion for students, specifically based upon their individual needs.
Multi-age classrooms or composite classes are classrooms with students from more than one grade level. They are created because of a pedagogical choice of a school or school district. They are different from split classes which are formed when there are too many students for one class – but not enough to form two classes of the same grade level. Composite classes are more common in smaller schools; an extreme form is the one-room school.
The gradual release of responsibility (GRR) model is a particular style of teaching which is a structured method of pedagogy framed around a process devolving responsibility within the learning process from the teacher to the eventual independence of the learner. This instructional model requires that the teacher, by design, transitions from assuming "all the responsibility for performing a task...to a situation in which the students assume all of the responsibility". The ideal result is a confident learner who accepts responsibility for their own learning and directs this learning through the cognitive processes involved, moving through the academic spectrum, to independent choice. As Buehl (2005) stated, the GRR model "emphasizes instruction that mentors students into becoming capable thinkers and learners when handling the tasks with which they have not yet developed expertise".
