Reflecting on their mission increases teachers’ growth mindset
Psychology
Peer-Reviewed PublicationIMAGE: ANKE HEYDER HAS DEVELOPED A SHORT AND SUCCESSFUL INTERVENTION FOR TEACHERS WITH COLLEAGUES. view more
CREDIT: © RUB, MARQUARD
All children can thrive
Whether or not students enjoy school and perform well in the classroom depends very much on the teachers, whose fundamental beliefs can be transferred to the learners. “The important factor is whether a teacher is convinced that all children can thrive and learn,” explains Anke Heyder. In psychology, this belief is referred to as the growth mindset. “The belief that a talent or fixed aptitude is necessary for learning success, that students will fail otherwise, is more likely a hindrance.” This so-called fixed mindset tends to reduce motivation, especially among students with poorer performance.
Even though these relations have been identified in many studies, a compact intervention designed to reinforce the growth mindset among teachers hasn’t been introduced as yet. “Our intervention is new, and it is both short and subtle,” points out Anke Heyder. “At its core is a brief reflection on your personal mission: why am I a teacher? How do I want to make a difference to my students through what I do?”
Survey on teacher beliefs
To test the intervention, the researchers recruited a total of 576 student teachers for their study. The participants were divided into groups. In the intervention group, they were asked to briefly reflect on and write down their mission, before completing a survey on their beliefs. In the control groups, they didn’t reflect on their mission but on a different question, and then answered the questionnaire.
“We showed that the beliefs of those participants who focused on their mission was significantly more inclined towards a growth mindset than that of the control group,” explains Anke Heyder. This result was unrelated to the subject the student teachers were pursuing. A survey one week later yielded the same result. “This indicates that the effect does last – at least for a while,” says Heyder. Follow-up research will be necessary to establish whether the effect is permanent. “I can only advise teachers, but also university lecturers and business leaders, to reflect on their own mission every now and then,” concludes the researcher. “Not only does this benefit the people for whom you are responsible, but there’s also evidence that it boosts your own motivation and job satisfaction.”
JOURNAL
Learning and Instruction
METHOD OF RESEARCH
Experimental study
SUBJECT OF RESEARCH
People
ARTICLE TITLE
Reflecting on their mission increases preservice teachers’ growth mindsets
Collaboration is key to creating a culture that supports children’s behavior in early childhood education
Peer-Reviewed PublicationWhen a child behaves in an unwanted manner, changing their behaviour often becomes a focus. Research, however, suggests that influencing the behaviour of adults who interact with the child would be more effective.
Researchers at the University of Eastern Finland and the University of Jyväskylä conducted an 18-month follow-up of 18 Finnish early childhood education and care (ECEC) centres that were piloting positive behaviour intervention and support (PBIS), which takes a research-based approach to creating an operational culture that supports the behaviour of all children. The PBIS approach sought to clarify the situation-specific behavioural expectations of the ECEC centres and provided training and coaching on how to comply with them. Children’s appropriate social behaviour was acknowledged as systematically as possible through positive feedback, and efforts were made to pay less attention to possible failures.
One ECEC centre, for example, managed to make its corridors less noisy and crowded by teaching children about personal space when moving in the corridors. Professionals working in the ECEC centre, on the other hand, were committed to acknowledging children’s success in considering personal space, and they gave plenty of individual and positive feedback whenever children moved about in the corridors in an orderly manner.
In some ECEC centres, children’s success with social behaviour was also reinforced with tokens. Collecting these tokens gave cause to collective celebration of achievement, or otherwise served as a pleasant collective activity.
Change takes time
According to Senior Researcher Noora Heiskanen of the University of Eastern Finland, the study showed that even when successful, development was a balancing act between many challenges.
“In order to support children in their behavioural challenges in the right way, the entire environment of ECEC, and the ECEC community, must commit to the change of pedagogical practices and understand its significance.”
The theoretical implementation of the new approach and its integration into the existing practices of ECEC centres require time, collaboration, and competence.
“It is not always easy for ECEC professionals to accept change, and enough time should be given to the adoption of the new approach. The ECEC centres piloting the PBIS approach succeeded in creating a uniform way of teaching social behaviour to children, specifically through the participation of the whole community, as well as through research-based, guided development.”
According to University Lecturer Anne Karhu of the University of Eastern Finland, the findings give good tools for a wider development of practices in ECEC.
“Review and development of the common practices plays a key role. The PBIS approach can be used to build an ECEC community that is welcoming to all children and that has research-based means to address possible challenges in children’s behaviour.”
According to Karhu, behavioural support should be integrated into all activities. In addition, social behaviour should be taught in a preventive manner, while also ensuring enhanced support for those who need it.
“The PBIS approach also provides a good basis for providing more advanced and more intensive behavioural support for children who need it.”
The joint research project between the University of Eastern Finland and the University of Jyväskylä will continue to develop and study these enhanced and individual forms of behavioural support, funded by the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture. Highlighting the importance of developing community-level practices, the findings are very topical in view of the discussion related to inclusion in ECEC, and in the educational system at large.
JOURNAL
European Journal of Special Needs Education
ARTICLE TITLE
Implementing positive behaviour intervention and support in Finnish early childhood education and care: leadership team’s perspective
We must insert joy back into education in the wake of COVID-19, researcher warns
Book AnnouncementEducation systems need major reform in the light of lessons learned from Covid, according to a leading education academic.
Klaus Zierer, Professor of Education at the University of Augsburg, Germany, and an associate research fellow at the University of Oxford, UK, has revealed ways in which the ‘collateral damage’ from school closures is still hitting children and young people particularly hard.
He examines the evidence in his new book, Educating the Covid Generation, publishing on May 17. The author believes policymakers are turning a blind eye not only to the physical, emotional and educational after-effects on children, but also to deep flaws in educational systems which have been exposed by the pandemic.
Flaws in the system
“The Covid-19 pandemic has shaken the education system and at the same time exposed known weaknesses in a dramatic way. We are stumbling through this crisis from an educational policy perspective… It is hard to avoid the impression that educational policy is turning a blind eye to this,” Professor Zierer says.
He suggests that three key flaws in education systems have been highlighted by the pandemic. They are:
- A too-narrow focus on easily-measured mathematical, scientific-technical and linguistic competencies.
- A tendency for schools to think mainly in terms of ‘effectiveness,’ which is only one element of a good education.
- A lack of ‘joy,’ which should be ‘the guiding principle for education and teaching.’
The book sets out five key elements for a more joyful education:
- Reasons: Children and young people need to know why their lessons should matter to them.
- Feelings: Children’s emotions should be taken into account, both in the classroom and in extracurricular activities.
- Activity: Learning that consists only of listening and executing is ultimately inhumane.
- Success: Children need to be given challenges through which they can gain a sense of achievement.
- Community: A new balance is needed between individual achievement and the experience of becoming a team player.
Professor Zierer also describes how his own family struggled during Covid – he has three school-age children who were then aged six, nine and 11.
“We have not fallen as a family but we have stumbled many times,” he says. “It fills me with concern that they have spent more time at home than at school between 2020 and 2022. How is a young person supposed to develop if they are cut off from the outside world, isolated from friends, quarantined again and again, and not allowed to do all the things that make life worth living?”
Teachers cooperation: team-knowledge distillation for multiple cross-domain few-shot learning
Peer-Reviewed PublicationIMAGE: THE ARCHITECTURE ILLUSTRATION OF THE PROPOSED TKD-NET ON 5-WAY 1-SHOT CLASSIFICATION. view more
CREDIT: HIGHER EDUCATION PRESS LIMITED COMPANY
Although few-shot learning (FSL) has achieved great progress, it is still an enormous challenge especially when the source and target sets are from different domains, which is also known as cross-domain few-shot learning (CD-FSL). Utilizing more source domain data is an effective way to improve the performance of CD-FSL. However, knowledge from different source domains may entangle and confuse with each other, which hurts the performance on the target domain.
To solve the problem, a research team led by professor Zhong JI in Tianjin University published their new research on 15 April 2023 in Frontiers of Computer Science co-published by Higher Education Press and Springer Nature.
The team propose team-knowledge distillation networks (TKD-Net) to tackle the CD-FSL, which explores a strategy to help the cooperation of multiple teachers. They distill knowledge from the cooperation of teacher networks to a single student network in a meta-learning framework. It incorporates task-oriented knowledge distillation and multiple cooperation among teachers to train an efficient student with better generalization ability on unseen tasks. Moreover, their TKD-Net employs both response-based knowledge and relation-based knowledge to transfer more comprehensive and effective knowledge.
Specifically, their proposed method consists of two stages: a teacher development stage and a multi-level knowledge distillation stage. They first respectively pre-train teacher models with the training data from multiple seen domains by supervised learning, where all the teacher models have the same network architecture. After obtaining multiple domain-specific teacher models, multi-level knowledge is then transferred from the cooperation of teachers to the student in the paradigm of meta-learning. Task-oriented distillation is beneficial for the student model to quickly adapt to few-shot tasks. The student model is trained based on Prototypical Networks and the soft labels provided by the teacher models. Besides, they further explore the knowledge embedded in the similarity and explore the similarity matrix of teachers to transfer the relationship between samples in the few-shot tasks. It guides the student to learn more specific and comprehensive information.
Future work can focus on adaptively adjusting the weight of multiple teacher models, and finding more ways to effectively aggregate the knowledge from multiple teachers.
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Research Article, Published: 27 March 2023
Zhong JI, Jingwei NI, Xiyao LIU, Yanwei PANG. Teachers cooperation: team-knowledge distillation for multiple cross-domain few-shot learning. Front. Comput. Sci., 2023, 17(2): 172312, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-022-1250-2
About Frontiers of Computer Science (FCS)
FCS was launched in 2007. It is published bimonthly both online and in print by HEP and Springer. Prof. Zhi-Hua Zhou from Nanjing University serves as the Editor-in-Chief. It aims to provide a forum for the publication of peer-reviewed papers to promote rapid communication and exchange between computer scientists. FCS covers all major branches of computer science, including: architecture, software, artificial intelligence, theoretical computer science, networks and communication, information systems, multimedia and graphics, information security, interdisciplinary, etc. The readers may be interested in the special columns "Perspective" and "Excellent Young Scholars Forum".
FCS is indexed by SCI(E), EI, DBLP, Scopus, etc. The latest IF is 2.669. FCS solicits the following article types: Review, Research Article, Letter.
JOURNAL
Frontiers of Computer Science
METHOD OF RESEARCH
Experimental study
SUBJECT OF RESEARCH
Not applicable
ARTICLE TITLE
Teachers cooperation: team-knowledge distillation for multiple cross-domain few-shot learning
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