About This Issue

The goal of the Journal on Empowering Teaching Excellence (JETE) is to benefit faculty who teach by providing a place where they can share their ideas, practices, and research around teaching. The past few months, we have received many submissions that showcase the robust academic approach many of you are using to improve your classrooms and your level of professionalism. We have selected two especially focused articles that emphasize the use of meta-analysis to improve teaching in higher education.

Ekaterina Arshavskaya’s (2019) article, “Teachers’ stories about teaching: Collaborative dialogues as Open Educational Resources” uses social constructivist theory to examine the collaborative nature of learning and how this can be applied when training new or pre-service teachers. By pairing video examples of expert teachers modeling successful classroom strategies, novice teachers are prompted to engage in “thought-provoking and relevant discussions” about best practice. By using Open Educational Resources (OER) to create a video database, prospective teachers are presented with meta-analysis of classroom variables such as instructor-student relationships (from formal to more informal) or the effects of body language. As Arshavskaya points out, “such videos can create spaces for reflection, knowledge exchange, and inspiration.”

Diana Moss and Lisa Poling’s (2019) article also uses social constructivist theory to build upon pre-service math teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge “related to knowledge of student thinking through the use of professional noticing.” Moss and Poling advocate for the use of “professional noticing” when developing pre-service teachers. They argue that “the work of mathematics educators is to scaffold what is attended to and how that information is being interpreted by prospective teachers.” This practice fits with Vygotsky’s social constructivist theory by framing math teaching conceptually rather than procedurally. This article, like Arshavskaya’s, encourages a meta-analysis of instruction through noticing. Use of the “attend, interpret, and decide” framework is carefully outlined in this articles and leads the reader to a better understanding of ways to make sense of student work, respond to student thinking, and become better educators.

As we prepare for the upcoming Empower Teaching Excellence (ETE) Conference in Logan Utah on Aug. 14th, we thought it would be useful to continue this theme of meta-cognition, regarding striving for excellence in higher education, by including a section on the upcoming conference. We invite our readers to attend the conference, if able, and look for selected proceedings papers in the Spring 2020 issue. We also invite those who wish to share innovative teaching practices and efforts in the scholarship of teaching and learning to submit a paper to for one of our upcoming issues.

We thank this issue’s authors for their intelligent, thought-provoking work and welcome additional contributions to our future issues.

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