word of the year 2016 …

… according to the Oxford dictionary, is post-truth:

“an adjective defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’.”

and it appears that the phrase post-truth politics has been around for at least a decade, but it’s popularised only recently. although it’s more closely associated with politicians, sometimes, post-truth (politics) is also not too far from us if we think about it. so, ignorance is bliss as always #成语有的就是正常的 #HGXG


(acknowledgement: oxforddictionaries.com)

ACLL 2017 paper

the conference proceeding is officially published 2 days ago on the IAFOR repository.

our paper titled: Blended Learning for In-service Teachers’ Professional Development: Lessons from the Experience of a Singaporean Chinese Language Teacher Educator which we wrote about:

(abstract) Traditional face-to-face workshop is a common avenue for the professional development (PD) of in-service teachers. Chinese Language (CL) teachers in Singapore also attend such workshops frequently. Research has however shown that such workshops often failed to establish sustained learning and produce little impact on teachers’ practice, as well as students’ achievement. To address this efficacy issue, a blended learning workshop for CL teachers was designed and conducted. Specifically, this study examined the experience of designing and implementing blended learning as seen through the eyes of a Singaporean teacher educator. This teacher educator had gone from being a participant to becoming an instructor of blended learning workshop. The role switching of the individual in different settings allowed acquisition of deeper insights into blended learning workshop as a PD approach. The considerations of the instructor, and the challenges she faced during design and implementation were described. The significance of this research lies in the lessons from the findings that could be useful for consideration when blended learning teachers’ professional development workshops for better outcomes are to be designed.

the full proceeding PDF can be found here.

the local mirror goes here.

teachers’ pd and change in teachers’ beliefs

as a note to self, extracting this from my own writing:

“Fives and Buehl (2012) have identified two salient features of professional development program that could encourage change in teachers’ beliefs — a focus on task or strategy, and the development of a community of practice among participants.” (p.338)

reference:
Fives, H., & Buehl, M. M. (2008). What do teachers believe? Developing a framework for examining beliefs about teachers’ knowledge and ability. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 33(2), 134-176.

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