Write and you’ll get happiness…

As it turned out the writing process was not finished with the end of the first year… At first, it seemed very nice to have a lot of time and not so many tasks, but reality is not so happy as it seems. Understanding that you should write constantly your thesis is spoiled by the constant necessity to do your job; and the challenge of the right choice is  very complicated. What is the most important thing? Work or Study?

I think, people in the same situation can understand the problem. Both things are important and another idea-how to make your time management not perfect, but suitable… So, there is the only way out-to search and find time at work and in the evenings, when you are not able to do anything…

Despite all of the issues and obstacles, the writing is moving ahead step be step. One of my own problems is proof-reading: I do not like re-read, because every time I have to change something and every time the work seems to be endless. One more problem is the usage of citation: which one to choose, how to apply it in the writing, following the APA-style and so on. Sometimes, it seems that to use my thoughts will be enough to express the ideas, but not enough to support the work with quotes of well-known researchers…

In conclusion, I would like to say: it is important in any case of writing of any tasks to read the rubrics before starting your work. Then it is necessary to re-read your writing, it will help to see drawbacks and improve the style as well as develop ideas. Every time doing this you will be successful and you will have feeling of happiness because of well-done work!

 

Thesis writing or something else…

Last year thesis writing was a very far event, nevertheless seeing my colleagues, spending most of the time on reading and writing it, impressed me greatly. I said to myself that I would manage the time and spend every suitable moment to read and write. The reality is different…

The first thing I ‘d like to advise is learn to make preferences in executing work duties as well as urgent issues. When you are responsible for a lot of things to do at work and do not have opportunity to  look through the university mail, you have to choose the important and not very important affairs. Advice: look through the whole list of work, deadlines and make own calendar, but do not forget to look at it and  follow it.

The second, leave the time to read and learn at home mostly than at work or do it at work during the break. The difficulty is to make yourself arrange time  and strictly follow the deadlines.

Challenging questions for me are: time-managements and seeking for the articles for the literary review. During October and November I have to look for the readings twice. At first I found enough articles about team teaching, but there were no appropriate ones from the point of view of national and international  teachers, working together. Majority of information was connected with team teaching in inclusive classrooms or in schools where migrant children study. Only last week I came across what I needed: research works reflecting the experience of Asian countries.

One more struggle is the APA-style, the more I try to follow it, the more problems I have, but again it maybe only my struggle with the time.

The thing to improve should be the time of deadlines, because one week is too short time to do tasks, the approximate time is 10 days.

 

To be a researcher is interesting…

Feeling that you can be a scientist is great, if we suppose to do it for our pleasure or we are not limited by the deadlines.

The most memorable event from the first session was to collect data by having the interview with any students around the Nazarbaev University. I still remember how students were looking at me, when I asked them to answer the questions of the survey or participate in the interview. The challenge of the age was the first one. The next challenge  was the limit of the time, because the deadline was the next day and we had to write the transcripts, make coding and analyse the received information. That part of the research process was the most complicated, the only thing that helped us was our working in groups; we could do everything separately and then by exchanging materials and sharing ideas we could improve our group work.  Another challenge was to choose the research method, the Qualitative or the Quantitative, that was a big question…

This time, as the person, who has known and learnt research rules to some extent, I am not so embarrassed, because I have some experience and asking your group-mates to participate in the research is not a problem. My favourite research method is Qualitative one, because I understand how to arrange the information, collect and analyze  data, defining the instruments for this. As any other researcher I realize that in the real field of work there will be problems with finding people to participate in the project; limit of time and small scale of the data, which will be as a case study.  This small research helped me only to refresh my knowledge and practice and again we feel  the lack of time, our everlasting story…

Is innovation on the lessons only technology’s usage?

“All learning has an emotional base.” Plato

It is well-known fact that the more we use technology, the more advanced we become. Our students are the representatives of the “digital generation” and we are happy, because they are able to orient in the world of technologies:  students are able to find the information in the Internet, they are able to create own presentations with a great deal of imagination, they are able to design own sites and know how to make friends on-line. Like most teachers, I also like to give tasks connected with searching something for the subject on the lessons by using the laptops. The tasks can be different in length and ideas. Students like them. However, I personally do not consider the usage the technology as innovative as it was 5 years ago as well as I do not welcome greatly digital devices in the primary school’s lessons, because of possible health problems.

While seeking for the material, I have crossed the video connected with innovation in such a sphere of education as communication. As it turned out educators abroad are discussing the idea of creating the positive school environment through engaging students in the social and emotional learning.  There are different directions in it and one of them is mindfulness.“Mindfulness is a technique to improve mental well-being that involves focusing on the present moment while accepting any thoughts and feelings that occur” (http://www.macmillandictionary.com/thesaurus-category/british/meditation-and-hypnosis).  The important idea of it is to learn –self at first and then other people, to teach how to keep temper through listening to –self. There are a lot of followers of this educational trend, but I would like to attract your attention to the Susan Kaiser’s speech in TEDxtalks.

Her video is called “Teaching the ABCs of Attention, Balance and Compassion: Susan Kaiser Greenland at TEDxStudioCityED”.  She gives the definition of the mindfulness as the remembering of different kinds, explaining that everything depends on the angle of our looking at inside and outside worlds and emotions. The practice, which she used in her work as a teacher of Mindfulness, helps students to be attentive to themselves and travel from inner emotions to the real life using own experience to solve problems.

Watching this video made me  realize that knowledge of the situation and awareness of it as a present moment and place through listening to inner personality can lead to the positive assumption of the events and people around. I think, our students have to learn how to communicate in the real world, which differs from the virtual one. Susan mentions that in her program “Love with Legs” she teaches students to look at their inner world, imagine and then feel emotions connected with it and their being as persons. The seven strategies are divided into three groups: Attention (focusing, choosing); Balance (quieting and seeing) and Compassion (caring, connecting) and before using them students should stop trying to feel themselves.  All these is the part of the Emotional Intelligence, which is considered to be even more important than IQ-Intelligence, because it provides students with better social protection, attention to people around by developing the social and emotional skills. Various programs are being developed around the world and special classes for all ages of students are being conducted at schools. I strongly agree with the opinion that our students really need to be educated emotionally to know empathy and understanding the alive world of reality.

This practice is connected with International Baccalaureate education greatly and our school, being teaching the IB,  has IB learner profile, where we can find such qualities as being inquirers, knowledgeable, thinkers, communicators, principled, open-minded, caring, risk-takers, balanced and reflective. The strategies of mindfulness and IB Learner profile are linked closely and lead to development and improvement of  confidence and communication abilities; at the same time they help students to realize themselves in the future life and career by developing skills in problem-solution from the primary school.

Reference:

Cherry K.,  What Is Emotional Intelligence? Definitions, History, and Measures of Emotional Intelligence, retrieved from http://psychology.about.com/od/personalitydevelopment/a/emotionalintell.htm

Kaiser, S., Teaching the ABCs of Attention, Balance and Compassion:  Greenland at TEDxStudioCityED- retrieved from

GOOD QUESTION: “WHERE ARE YOU IN THE OVERALL WRITING?”…

“Definition of the literary review:The process of reading, analyzing, evaluating, and summarizing scholarly materials about a specific topic.The results of a literature review may be compiled in a report or they may serve as part of a research article, thesis, or grant proposal.”, taken from the site: http://grammar.about.com/od/il/g/literaturereviewterm.htm

Trying to answer the question where we are in our thesis writing, I have found out that I am at the first step. I have defined the theme of the thesis and have chosen some resources to begin thinking of what I exactly would like to research.I know what I want to discover, but the question is if the negative opinion is a possible issue for discussion.

Being at the starting point of creating process of my ‘masterpiece’, it is high time work out the schedule of writing and its plan. To think about it made me the idea of Laura Berisheva who has said in her blog, that  the main problem of all of us is the lack of time and I have to agree that if you are working and doing a lot of everyday routine, it is impossible to be fully engaged in the thesis writing process.

Well, what am I going to do next? I think it is better begin with the reading different resources I have,  in order to realize their value for my topic. I am not sure that I have  primary resources, because as it turned out there are different approaches to the theme of team teaching and it is discussed widely. Another my concern is whether I can find information or statistics connected with the team teaching of teachers of different nationalities and cultures, so far I have found only one article with impressions about working in Kazakhstan with local teachers, but it is the international teacher’s experience. As the conclusion to this idea – I have more hesitations than information…

Nevertheless,  I hope  that this year writing of literary review will be a little bit easier than the last year, when it was something incredibly difficult and mysterious. The main problem of the last year was to understand how to connect the information from different resources with own thoughts clearly. The other one was difficulty in finding a lot of statistics suitable for the research, because scientists are not interested in the reasons why students do not want to become professional teachers after having worked at school while studying.

This year I have changed the theme and hope to have enough data to develop theme of collaborative teaching.

APA Style…

The first thing emerging in the head, while speaking or reading about the academic honesty, is APA style. I have heard about it at  NIS. The school received accreditation of Diploma Program IB and one of the strict requirements was this type of citation in everything, even for taking pictures from our favourite Internet. Students were taught how to use it in works, reports, projects and presentations.  I did not great attention to some specific things of it, but began to ask the students not to forget about APA.

My own experience of serious usage of  it began at Nazarbaev University and I thought it is not difficult, but I was not right.  I have problems with APA even now, because as it turned out APA style is different and to start using it we should take into account the type of its edition, because there is the difference between the sixth and the tenth editions (as a sample).  My problem is the more I try to use APA correctly,  the less it happens, so every time I have to write something, my headache is citation rules. In connection with it I always ask only one question: “To what extent is it necessary and why?”

I agree, it is very honest and important to inform others where you have taken good idea or justification, but there are various styles. What is the purpose to use only APA?  Having participating in on-line seminar about working with the searching systems for materials and journals for publications, I learn that almost all scientific journals use  such styles of citation, which are different from one another greatly. So, if we decide to send our article to the chosen journal, the most important thing will be to find out the style of reference. BE ATTENTIVE!

NO LIMITS IN THE OWN PACE OF GAINING EDUCATION?!

“But today’s world is belongs to the ‘i Pod, text messaging, Wiki’s, Facebook and Blogs’ generation. These speedy changes have forced everyone, peoples or institutions to make immediate changes. Education institutions are too trying to pull alongside to these changing technological time.”, Prof. Héctor Álvarez-Trujillo, “Benefits and Challenges for the Online Learner”

Having known some information about innovative type of education “online learning”, I came across the article about the beginning of its history in the well-known and reputable newspaper “The Guardian” called “From the archive, 11 September 1964: ‘Open university’ of air and mail” (The Guardian, September 11, 2015).

The article is interesting, because it gives the notion that online education is not so new as we can suppose. Great Britain began its launching in 1964 in one particular college of Cambridge University and it was announced as “An Open University”, earlier the title was “University of the Air”.  The aim of that was to meet the demands of the people wanting to get the education, but not having the time (businessmen) or conditions (housewives) and etc. it was mentioned that the courses would be well composed and the college would have to give own certificates about qualifications. The main part of the programs would be delivered to the students by television and radio as well as they would be offered to organize the groups of listeners to have lectures of professional speakers. As everything costs money, the college applied for about £2 millions a year from the government and it was said that any student would pay only 250 000 pounds. It was in 1964.

In the article, published in the Forbes (26 of May, 2015), by Lucie Lapovsky (writing about financial issues in the High Education), there is a short analysis of the contemporary state of the online education. The author provides the readers with results of the surveys about e-learners’ success in  academic achievements in comparison with the traditional styles of education. Lucie underlines that according to the research of some famous agencies (such as the Babson Survey Research Group and co-sponsored by the Online Learning Consortium (OLC), Pearson and Tyton Partners) the popularity of the on-line courses is quickly increasing during the recent years and it gives the opportunity to colleges and universities to introduce own on-line curriculum either to develop the range of them or to get profits without financial risks. It is noticed by the author that this type of learning is very convenient for students, who are eager to get education abroad without leaving own country and the educational establishments which are widening the number of the programmes saving some amounts of money. It is admitted that the face-to face and distance kinds of education are almost the same and soon there will not be any difference for employers what certificate is more worth while selecting specialists.

Both articles are the reflection of the society assumption of online learning at different periods of its implementation.

The serious  scientific research by the group of educators from different schools and universities of the USA,The Effects of Distance Education on K-12 Student Outcomes: A Meta-Analysis, makes it possible to have the inside look at the online learning and its effectiveness in comparison with the traditional studying at school. The aim of this work is to investigate some aspects of the distance education and the context impact on it as well. As the result, the educators have come to a conclusion that there is no big difference in students’ outcomes depending on the style of learning. The researchers have analysed everything connected with teaching and learning in the frames of the community of online schools under the name “K-12”, which provides different educational courses and services for almost all types of students’ needs, taking into account the economical, physical, age and other backgrounds. The work states that the distance learning also develops such important skills as critical thinking, problem-solving, self-organization, time management and others. The elearning is described not only as usage of advanced devices on the lessons, but mostly as the systematic subject courses with on-line discussions and practical exams. The authors raise the issue of the faculty qualification for on-line learning as one of the important factors of the students’ successful learning. This research is a good sample of writing a thesis at the same time.

As for my understanding of this case study, I agree with those who emphasize the idea that the traditional and new mode of on-line learning should be provided  on the equal base and the learners should choose themselves the appropriate type of studying. To my mind, the main strengths of the elearning are the flexibility of schedule, time and opportunity to follow the course on the own  pace in any educational establishment all over the world; the development skills in self-organization, self-responsibility and time-management, which are very helpful during the whole life. If we look at the access to this type of learning we can see that it is very suitable for inclusive education as well, especially when students  are not able to attend school classes because of physical disability or preference of home-education.

The weaknesses are in the quality of provided programs and data; the professionalism of teachers or consultants; the technological equipment with different softwares; healthy and psychological problems and etc. Some scientists are worrying about participation of on-line learners in the social communication limited by being alone while elearning, because of lack of discussions and collaborative work.  The question which should be answered is: what age is suitable to begin on-line learning?

Reference:

From the archive, 11 September 1964: ‘Open university’ of air and mail. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/sep/11/open-university-distance-learning-launched-1964

Lapovsky, L. (2015) Online Learning: What Next? Forbes. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/lucielapovsky/2015/05/26/online-learning-what-next/2/

Cavanaugh,C.,Jo Gillan, K., Kromrey J.,  Hess M. and Blomeyer R.,The Effects of Distance Education on K-12 Student Outcomes: A Meta-Analysis. Retrieved from http://faculty.education.ufl.edu/cathycavanaugh/docs/EffectsDLonK-12Students1.pdf

Prof.  Álvarez-Trujillo, H.,  Benefits and Challenges for the Online Learner. Retrieved from http://www.ponce.inter.edu/cai/Comite-investigacion/Estudiantes-Invitados/Benefits_Challenges_Online_Learner.pdf

struggling with modern types of “computer mediated communication”

Dear friends,

I was lucky to join you here, because i am not among confident users of modern types of communication and honestly, do not like them. However,it helps be one of the members of the “digital generation” )))). Well, at first, some words about last year problems the most frustrating of which was internet connection with Moodle, the mail and so on, because every time to solve any of these problems I got the answer “You have to visit the IT department”. I hope not to have such problems this year.

As for courses we had last year, I think they all were useful and interesting, but coordination of deadlines was not very nice as well as the dates for writing. I would like to repeat my idea-one week for doing any task is not enough, more reasonable period is 10 days, it will allow us to read and write more accurately having time to think of the ideas.

One more year and greater challenge-writing THESIS… Till the end of August I was sure to continue my proposal about the demotivation of graduating students to become teachers as professionals, but one conversation changed my mind and I decided to investigate the topic of team-teaching. The draft title is “How  collaborative teaching is understood and implemented in Kazakhstan educational environment”. Having looked some articles and videos I learned that there is no pure notion of team-teaching, because it is one of sides of so called “collaborative teaching”  (two teachers are planning and conducting lessons).This type of teaching is used to provide better opportunity  to learn for all students through creating situation of success for pupils, who are quite different in skills and abilities to study. Collaborative teaching is important in the enclusive education, because the learning problems and barries can be solved in the lesson (one teacher is explaining, another one is helping students who need additional explanation or time to think).

There is a lot of information about main directions and approaches in this pedagogical sphere, but it is also true that this way of teaching is hardly researched in Kazakhstan environment. The international teachers are actively invited not only to Nazarbaev Intellectual schools, but mainstream ones as well. The International faculty  have to pass the selective contest and it means that now our educational officials understand that we need not “english-speakers”, but professional subject- teachers with academic background and working experience. It is fine to have the chance of working  and learning something  new together at the same time, but nevetheless there can be problems in the views and methods of teaching in our national environment. The problems appear when schools are working due to the international programs and should follow the national standards of education as well.  In this case the questions are to what extent  we should use the rules of the international methodology in our schools and how effective  collaborative teaching is if international teachers work without paying attention to the national peculiarities of the school curriculum; these are  only some aspects and I am sure that while doing the research I will come across more interesting and complicated points.