This open access book brings together theoretical, empirical, methodological, and practical insights from various countries on effective teaching. It particularly focuses on discussing issues pertaining to effective teaching behaviour including definitions and conceptualizations, measurement, differences, and importance to student outcomes from international perspectives. The book will draw upon the rich cultures with diverse contexts involving Asia, Australia, Africa, America, and Europe which serve as the background setting to better understand teaching quality from a wide spectrum of educational systems and performances. It shows that effective teaching behaviour can be conceptualized and operationalized uniformly using specific frameworks and measures, but also addresses some limitations that should be tackled. The book discusses promising ways to measure and compare effective teaching behaviour from classical test theory (CTT) as well as item response theory (IRT) perspectives. It indicates that effective teaching behaviour in diverse countries follows a systematic level of complexity, which provides an avenue for ongoing teacher education and teacher professional development. It discusses the interrelated domains of effective teaching behaviour including contemporary trends of differentiation. The book continues with examining similarities and differences in effective teaching behaviour across countries. It builds on the understanding of cultural traditions across countries as profoundly reflected in the classroom processes.

Learning and Teaching Around the World is a wide-ranging introduction to diverse experiences, practices and developments in global primary education. It explores different contexts for children’s learning, and methods and purposes of primary education, in settings across Africa, Asia, Europe, the Americas and Australasia, and addresses wider issues such as the rise of refugee learners and large multi-grade classes. With an explicit focus on comparative and international studies and improving the knowledge, understanding and practice of effective pedagogies for children’s learning, this book reflects on key issues such as: Standards for learner-centred education Patterns of inclusion and exclusion Defining ‘teacher professionalism’ The impact of global education agendas Language policy for schooling and assessment Learning and Teaching Around the World is an essential text for those wishing to develop a critical understanding of the experiences of primary teachers and children around the world. Aimed at both undergraduate and postgraduate education studies students, the scope of this book will support all students in developing knowledge of primary education and of the diverse needs of learners in an era of global movement of children and families.

This book brings together and compares the teacher education policies and practices of eight high-achieving countries to consider what creates high-quality teachers in today's world.

Within educational discourse, the idea that teachers should scaffold student learning is extremely widespread, yet it is often less clear what this means in the classroom beyond teacher-structured learning activities and the offering of support to students. Effective Teaching and Learning: Perspectives, Strategies and Implementation opens with a review on the use of the term scaffolding in teaching, and explains the purpose of scaffolding in the context of Vygotsky's developmental theory. The authors draw upon Vygotskys spatial metaphor for how learning activities could be positioned in relation to the learners current and potential levels of development. An analysis of the function of scaffolds, their role in classroom differentiation, and the logic of fading is provided. Following this, the authors report one small-scale study that explored an attempt to design materials using principles of scaffolding in an aspect of upper secondary physics known to present learning difficulties to students. The results demonstrate the difficulty of estimating the level at which to pitch learning materials intended to scaffold learning, but also suggest that such materials may contribute to shifting student thinking even when they are not optimally tuned. The results of this small-scale study indicate both the difficulty and the potential of transferring the scaffolding principle from dyadic contexts to formal classroom teaching. Continuing, our nderstanding of learning and the transmission of knowledge has influenced the design of instructional models. Todays models may appear simplistic, but actually contain very detailed components. Medical education has incorporated instructional designers to assist in developing curricula and to revamp older training programs. Thus, the authors aim to identify the more prominent instructional design (ID) models and their applicability to medical education. With many different instructional design models available, medical educators can be confused and dismayed when first trying to choose an appropriate ID model for educational development. Challenges that medical educators typically overlook, underuse, and overuse when selecting an instructional design model are described. The concluding chapter discusses the need for continuing engineering education and its unique challenges, engineers learning preferences (verbal-visual, learning strategy, and multimedia), the importance of prior knowledge, and instructional design strategies for developing more effective training materials for working engineers. This need has been well-documented and is critical for working engineers due to the breadth of processes and equipment they design and use, as well as rapid changes in technology.

If the quality of an education system can never exceed the quality of its teachers, then countries need to do all they can to build a high-quality teaching force.

Schools today have transcended from the chalkboard to the whiteboard and are populated by students who are not frightened to use the technology of this new age of learning. During this period of dynamic change, teachers must be ready to meet the challenges of preparing students for a global society characterized by diversity and ever-increasing expectations.