21st Century Education for Special Needs Students

Education is a human right—including students who have conditions requiring special education services. The purpose of this chapter is to promote inclusive education for students with learning disabilities due to diagnoses such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism, and more. A literature review includes a discussion pertaining to the elements of appropriate teaching methods compatible with developing 21st-century competencies for general education and special education students within the same classroom setting. Relative to employing strategies of differentiation and scaffolding while increasing cognition through experience-based lessons, this chapter provides examples from the author's classroom instructional plans. The content through action (CTA) method is presented as an ideal approach conducive to integrating 21st-century competencies through experiential lessons to teach the required content to students of various abilities. The chapter ends with recommendations on creating systemic change through building a support system at an organizational level.

Instructional Plans: Grades 3–5

Chapter 6 presents three instructional plans that are geared toward grades 3–5. Instructional plans consist of planning necessities, standard alignment, alignment to philosophies approached in earlier chapters, as well as instructional procedures and assessments. Adaptations for other grade-level bands as well as potential extensions are available for each plan. This chapter includes the following instructional plans: Invent an Instrument Using Recycled Materials, Composing Using Light: Musical Automata, and Performing Music Using Light: Theremins and Oscillators. During Invent an Instrument Using Recycled Materials, students will design and build an instrument that they can use in performance. In Composing Using Light: Musical Automata, students will use the concepts of transferring energy and photosensitive circuits to compose a piece of music. In Performing Music Using Light: Theremins and Oscillators, students will use concepts such as voltage, resistance, and oscillation, to create their own electronic musical instruments that change pitch depending on exposure to light.

Instructional Plans: Grades K–2

Chapter 5 presents three instructional plans that are geared toward grades K–2. Instructional plans consist of planning necessities, standard alignment, alignment to philosophies approached in earlier chapters, as well as instructional procedures and assessments. Adaptations for other grade-level bands as well as potential extensions are available for each plan. This chapter includes the following instructional plans: Shapes of Electric Guitars, Sound Amplification and Speaker Building, and Measuring Length and Pitch. In Shapes of Electric Guitars, students will design guitar bodies and perform on them using available technology. In Sound Amplification, students will analyze and experiment with sound waves, eventually building their own small speaker. In Measuring Length and Pitch, students will measure pitched tubes to determine the mathematical relationship between pitches.

Instructional Plans: Grades 9–12

Instructional plans consist of planning necessities, standard alignment, alignment to philosophies approached in earlier chapters, as well as instructional procedures and assessments. Adaptations for other grade-level bands as well as potential extensions are available for each plan. This chapter includes the following instructional plans: Audio Engineering: Ratios in Recording, Designing a Chromatic PVC Instrument, Controlled Voltage: Composing, Performing, and Improvising with Subtractive Electronic Synthesis, and Sound Pollution and Its Effects on Local Bird Ecology. In Audio Engineering: Ratios in Recording, students will use a method of measuring and experimentation to maximize the sound quality of a given recording environment. In Designing a Chromatic PVC Instrument, students will design a one octave chromatic instrument using mathematical calculations and representations to create initial expressive statements and explain the relationships among the frequency, wavelength, and speed of waves traveling in the PVC pipes. In Controlled Voltage: Composing, Performing, and Improvising with Subtractive Electronic Synthesis, students will interface with the subtractive architecture of electronic instruments, the concept of controlled voltage, and the function of an electronic sequencer. In Sound Pollution and Its Effects on Local Bird Ecology, students will learn about modern sound pollution and the effect it has on many different forms of ecology. Students will determine at the end of their own study whether or not there were any observed correlations between these datas captured, and if other data could be used to claim causation.

Instructional Plans: Grades 6–8

Chapter 7 presents four instructional plans that are geared toward grades 6–8. Instructional plans consist of planning necessities, standard alignment, alignment to philosophies approached in earlier chapters, as well as instructional procedures and assessments. Adaptations for other grade-level bands as well as potential extensions are available for each plan. This chapter includes the following instructional plans: Building a Fretboard, Piezoelectricity Experiments, Composing Music Using Coding, and Performing Music Using Coding. In Building a Fretboard, students will calculate the location of each fret on a fretboard and build a scaled model. In Piezoelectricity Experiments, students will engage in found-sound exploration using crystals that convert kinetic energy into audible electric energy. In Composing Music Using Coding, students will make connections between coding and traditional music composition. In Performing Music Using Coding, students will make connections between coding and music performance.

Instructional Practices of Teachers in Integrating Critical Thinking and Problem Solving Skills in Mathematics Instruction

This qualitative research aimed to document the instructional practices, problems encountered, and suggestions offered by mathematics teachers in integrating critical thinking through problem-solving. To obtain the data, series of Focus Group Discussions (FGD) were conducted with seven (7) mathematics teachers and sixty (60) students in the Senior High School. Through the thematic analysis, four key themes were derived to present teachers’ teaching practices, problems encountered, and suggestions to intensify critical thinking promotion through problem-solving tasks. A Proposed Enhancement Plan for Mathematics Teachers was developed to hasten students’ exposure to activities that promote critical thinking and problem-solving. These activities involve enrichment sessions for mathematics teachers the problem-solving and refinement of instructional plans, particularly on strategies, assessment techniques, and instructional materials.

Impact of using the imaginative learning strategy on the comprehension level of historical events among the fourth grade students in Southern Badia Directorate: أثر استخدام استراتيجية التعلّم التخيلي على مستوى فهم طلبة الصف الرابع في مديرية البادية الجنوبية للأحداث التاريخية

The study aimed to identify the impact of using the imaginative learning strategy on the comprehension level of historical events among the fourth grade students. To achieve the objectives of the study, the semi-experimental approach was adopted due to its suitability to the nature and objectives of the research. The researcher prepared instructional plans for the lessons of the sixth unit of the fourth grade book through the use of the imaginative learning strategy. She also prepared a test for the comprehension of the historical events and applied it to a sample of (73) female students from Rashid Elementary Mixed School of the Southern Badia Directorate in Ma’an province, which was intentionally selected. The sample members were distributed to two groups: experimental who studied the book by using the imaginative learning strategy and the control group who used the traditional method. After conducting the statistical analysis, it was found that there was an impact on the use of the imaginative learning strategy on the comprehension level of historical events among the fourth grade students

Teaching Efficiency and Satisfaction of Clinical Practicum for College Students in Audiology Major

Purpose: This study investigated teaching efficiency and satisfaction with clinical practicum for college students in the audiology major. Through this research, the author seeks to improve quality and teaching methods in clinical practicum.Methods: Although a total of 140 participants who completed at least one course in audiology clinical practicum were recruited, the author analyzed only 131 surveys. The questionnaire consisted of general characteristics, audiology clinical practicum satisfaction, and teaching efficiency in audiology practicum education. All questions other than those related to general characteristics were prepared on the Likert 5-point scale.Results: Audiology clinical practicum satisfaction and teaching efficiency averaged 3.91 and 4.04, respectively. Audiology clinical practicum satisfaction and teaching efficiency based on participants’ characteristics showed statistically significant differences related to clinical practicum period, health status, interpersonal relationships, difficult interpersonal relationships in clinical practicum, satisfaction with college life, satisfaction with major, and satisfaction with audiology clinical practicum. There were significant positive correlations between the sub-factors of teaching efficiency and audiology clinical practicum satisfaction.Conclusion: In the audiology major, teaching efficiency and clinical practicum satisfaction were very similar to or higher than those in health departments, and teaching efficiency was found to have a significant effect on clinical practicum satisfaction. Therefore, the College of Audiology and the Korean Faculty Council for Audiology will develop and investigate specific clinical practicum instructional plans and clinical practicum guidelines that can improve audiology clinical practicum satisfaction, and the introduction of a systematic system to reflect these results should be actively considered.

21st Century Education for Special Needs Students

Education is a human right—including students who have conditions requiring special education services. The purpose of this chapter is to promote inclusive education for students with learning disabilities due to diagnoses such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism, and more. A literature review includes a discussion pertaining to the elements of appropriate teaching methods compatible with developing 21st-century competencies for general education and special education students within the same classroom setting. Relative to employing strategies of differentiation and scaffolding while increasing cognition through experience-based lessons, this chapter provides examples from the author's classroom instructional plans. The content through action (CTA) method is presented as an ideal approach conducive to integrating 21st-century competencies through experiential lessons to teach the required content to students of various abilities. The chapter ends with recommendations on creating systemic change through building a support system at an organizational level.

Video Production in Elementary Teacher Education as a Critical Digital Literacy Practice

This article reports on a two-year, funded, qualitative inquiry into the challenges and possibilities of integrating video production into pre-service teacher education as a critical digital literacy practice. This includes the skills, knowledge, and dispositions that lead to ability to critique and create digital texts that interrogate the self, the other, and the world (Ávila & Zacher Pandya, 2013). Video making holds out enormous potential given our increasingly diverse classrooms and the growing need to have students connect and collaborate within their own communities and globally (Dwyer, 2016; Ontario Ministry of Education, 2015, 2016; Spires, Paul, Himes, & Yuan, 2018; Watt, 2017, 2018; Watt, Abdulqadir, Siyad, & Hujaleh, 2019). Video is especially significant in light of the fact that it is replacing print text as a dominant mode of communication (Manjou, 2018). Multimodal composing such as video production is, in fact, considered by some to be the essential 21st century literacy (Miller & McVee, 2012), but much remains to be done to bring digital technologies as literacy into the elementary classroom. Qualitative data includes a focus group, questionnaires, observations, and content analysis of teacher candidate videos and instructional plans. This study considers how video production can be integrated into teacher education programs to engage cross-curricular expectations and critical digital literacy perspectives. It responds to the pressing question of how to do teacher education differently in the digital age.