School of Education
Permanent URI for this community
Browse
Browsing School of Education by Subject "21st Century Skills"
Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
Results Per Page
Sort Options
- Developing Workforce Skills in K-12 Classrooms: How Teacher Externships Increase Awareness of the Critical Role of Effective Communication Bradley BowenBowen, Bradley D.; Shume, Teresa (Springer Open, 2020)This study investigates how participating in a teacher externship program increases the awareness of how effective communication plays a critical role in an industrybased environment. It also studies the teacher participants’ commitment to changing their classroom practices as a result of acquiring this awareness. The program of focus, the Educators in Industry: K-12 Externship Program, is a 4-week summer work experience for K-12 educators in an engineering, design, or process-driven work environment, coupled with collaborative reflective practice. Participants also take three credits of coursework split over the summer and fall which requires them to design and implement classroom activities based on their externship experience. In this qualitative study, various forms of data were transcribed and analyzed using a thematic analysis approach. The results provide empirical evidence that teachers who participated in the teacher externship program developed a deep awareness of the importance of using effective communication in the workplace as well as a commitment to redesigning their classroom practices in order to engage their K-12 students in communicationfocused learning activities.
- Educators in Industry: An Exploratory Study to Determine how Teacher Externships Influence K-12 Classroom PracticesBowen, Bradley D.; Shume, Teresa (2018)This exploratory study investigates the impacts of industry- based externships for K-12 teachers, and reports teachers’ perspectives on how these experiences influenced K-12 classroom practices. The program of focus in this research study is the Educators in Industry: K-12 Externship Program. For four weeks in the summer, teacher-participants are placed at a company whose primary focus is engineering, continuous improvement, manufacturing, or other design or process-oriented activities. Participation in the program also involves completing an accompanying 2-credit university course in the summer, and a 1-credit follow-up course in the fall. In this qualitative research study, transcripts from individual interviews with teacher-participants were analyzed using a grounded theory approach. Results from this study provide empirical evidence that teachers who participated in an industry-based externship program demonstrated an increased understanding of the fundamental importance of skills for problem solving, collaboration, and communication in today’s workplace environments, and expressed commitment to creating classroom opportunities for students to develop these skills through active learning in relationship to authentic, “real world” contexts.