Scaffolding for Teacher Effectiveness

¶ … Teacher Preparation Programs Enabling Technology Literacy? Enabling teachers to excel in technology-rich classroom environments needs to expand beyond training on specific systems, skills or technologies. There needs to be a strong focus on using technology to transform the learning experience so that key concepts and frameworks are learned while also providing students with the agility and flexibility the need to excel (Sheets, Crawford, 2012).

Enabling teacher preparation programs is as much about understanding how students learn and integrating entirely new approaches to content and context delivery as it is about technology (Krueger, Kumar, 2004). In asking the question if teacher preparation programs are enabling future teachers to operate on technology-rich classroom environments the question also needs to be raised about how these technologies accentuate and strengthen core teaching strategies and learning initiatives.

The trade-offs of technology to teaching skills et factors revolves around the ethicacy of technology training today and its obligation to enable educators to better serve and strengthen their students (Clark, 2012). Deciding If Teacher Preparation Programs Enable Technology Literacy The contextual intelligence necessary to make the most use of advanced technologies must first be present for the scalable aspects of new teaching platforms to matter.

By contextual intelligence, it is the ability to train teachers to see how the optimal mix of technologies can be support and strengthen students to attain their learning objectives. The fundamental concepts of scaffolding apply to this aspect of teacher preparation as these techniques seek to provide teachers with insights into how best to apply individualized teaching and training strategies optimized for delivery with key technologies (Kavanaugh, Puckett, Tatar, 2013).

Insights into this aspect of teacher training and participation have shown that advanced subjects including statistics, calculus and other highly quantified sciences are all made more effective through the use of hybrid technology platform approaches (Ball, Levy, 2008). Combining online self-paced tutorials with scaffolding techniques to continually provide guidance and feedback to students as they progress towards learning objectives leads to higher levels of overall academic performance (Najjar, 2008).

The components of a successful scaffolding program need to concentrate on how technologies can be orchestrated for students to attain their short- and long-term strategic objectives while optimizing the use of current and future learning platforms (Mills, 2011). Instructors need to be trained on how to scale their teaching strategies to flex and stay in step with student's needs, suing technology as an overarching enabler of achieving greater educational effectiveness (Kavanaugh, Puckett, Tatar, 2013).

This aspect of a teacher's ability to scale beyond the constraints of a given type of technology and use the combination of teaching skills, scaffolding and real-time feedback to gauge how well a student is progressing is essential for their long-term development as well (Najjar, 2008).

In short, being able to manage these dual aspects of emotional intelligence (EI) so critically important for ascertaining what the unique unmet needs of students are, then aligning selected technologies to enable and accelerate each student's learning journey is the most critical skills et of all. This is why contextual intelligence of a given series of technologies is more important than just knowing a given set of technical skills alone.

There needs to be a balance of EI skills and technology expertise if learning objectives are going to be attained (Bader, Roy, 1999). While advances in video technology have been significant from the days of didactic teaching technologies (Bader, Roy, 1999) and scaffolding techniques have progressed quickly (Kavanaugh, Puckett, Tatar, 2013) there is still room for improvement for teachers to become learning strategists. This focus on how to orchestrate teaching technologies for student goals to be achieved is essential if technologies are going to be used to the fullest extent possible.

The shift away from technologies to outcomes is critically important for any teaching professional to be effective in accomplishing their goals and also helping students to excel and gain valuable, long-term knowledge. Conclusion The advent of advanced teaching technologies are making scaffolding or personalized instruction more attainable for teachers at all levels of experience and teaching skill (Kavanaugh, Puckett, Tatar, 2013).

In defining the metrics of success for equipping teaching professionals with technology, there needs to be a balance between how to create scalable teaching plans and how to integrate technologies for their achievement. Only after creating this level of overall balance can any teaching program succeed over the long-term. Using the metrics of scaffolding effectiveness commonly used to evaluate these programs, programs aimed at providing teaching professionals with a solid foundation for unifying their teaching strategies become more achievable (Najjar, 2008). References Bader,.