bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Mentor Teachers’ Work with Prospective Teachers in a Newly Formed Professional Development School: Two Illustrations
Authors: Yendol-Hoppey Diane
Published: February 2022

Background/Content

Since a large gap exists between the rhetoric of reform-minded teacher education and what actually transpires in student teachers’ field experiences, this study sought to fill a gap in current scholarship which has yet to document how mentor teachers, conceptualized as school-based teacher educators, shape and conduct their own work with student teachers assuming the role of full-year undergraduate interns.

Focus of Study

The purpose of this study was to explore how two successful mentor teachers enact their work with interns in a newly created inquiry-oriented professional development school.

Research Design

This investigation uses case study methodology informed by both ethnographic and phenomenological perspectives. Using these lenses and data collected over an eighteen-month period, the stories of two mentor teachers are captured and analyzed.

Conclusions

Three themes emerged within each case that characterized the unique work of each mentor. The three themes that shape the work of the first mentor offer insight into a conceptual illustration represented by a gardening metaphor. The three themes of the second case suggest a mentor as co-inquirer's approach to mentoring. A look across the cases augments our understanding of mentoring prospective teachers.
Language and Thought in Mathematics Staff Development: A Problem Probing Protocol
Authors: Kabasakalian Rita
Published: February 2022

Background/Context

The theoretical framework of the paper comes from research on problem solving, considered by many to be the essence of mathematics; research on the importance of oral language in learning mathematics; and on the importance of the teacher as the primary instrument of learning mathematics for most students. As a nation, we are not doing well enough in teaching our students mathematics, and we need to look to new perspectives about why this is happening.

Purpose

This paper looks at a promising tool for enabling students who are not skilled readers to approach problem solving tasks. But in sharing its usefulness with teachers in professional development, the instrument uncovered specific and serious gaps in teacher content knowledge. Group discussion, using the protocol, helped to clarify some of those gaps.

Setting

All three problem-probing sessions occurred during professional development activities for New York City Public School mathematics teacher leaders. The facilitator was Academic Director of a New Visions for Public Schools’ Middle School Mathematics Standards project, (MS)2, funded by NSF. The sessions were part of a variety of ongoing professional development activities, and occurred during the third year of a five year study. Therefore, the 12 to 20 participants of each session, though different from each other, all knew the facilitator.

Research Design

The research design was qualitative. Teachers were presented with a written problem and directed not to solve it. The discourse that followed flowed of its own accord, with participants speaking as they thought and responded to the facilitator and/or the other participants. Records of speakers’ words were transcribed in one case by hand, and in two other cases by audio tapes. The discourse was then analyzed by the researcher from two perspectives: what mathematical misconceptions were revealed and how the talk helped to clarify them.

Conclusions/recommendations

From preliminary explorations, the protocol seems an accessible and effective instrument for decoding and analyzing mathematics word problems by teachers who were not able to approach such tasks before. Also suggested was its potential value as an assessment instrument for teachers’ content knowledge. Further study is needed to determine what kinds of in-class supports teachers need to internalize the process and use this instrument on a regular basis with their students.
Offensive Speech in Educational Materials: Changing Words without Censorship
Authors: Mcgough Sarah M.
Published: February 2022

Background/Context

Diane Ravitch has focused on the extensive censorship occurring within the publication of school textbook and testing materials in her book, The Language Police (2003). This book, indicative of conservative frustrations with minority special interest groups, raises several key issues echoed throughout the larger educational movement in which she is located and serves as an excellent example to be more closely scrutinized. In attempts to assuage racism, sexism, and other types of discrimination, bias panels selected by publishers of educational materials often remove offensive speech and insert words and examples that run counter to many stereotypes.

Objective

This article examines Ravitch's approach to curtailing censorship in educational materials, with the purpose of offering a more nuanced account of harmful language in educational texts and an alternative approach to dealing with these texts in the classroom.

Research Design

This is an interpretive study that philosophically analyzes the account of language offered by Ravitch and other theorists of biased speech. I use Judith Butler's discursive account of language to address Ravitch's shortcomings and to theorize for the injurious nature of biased speech.

Conclusions

Although agreeing with Ravitch that censorship is alarming and should be curtailed, I argue that she undertheoriz.es language and fails to fully account for its harmful capacities. She operates with a representational view of language that leads her to conclude that educational materials should work to maintain a common culture that supposedly reflects the conditions of the real world, even if they do include harmful language. Building on Butler's work, I contend that schools can become potential centers for challenging harmful speech through the historical analysis of its ability to injure, and I suggest fruitful ways in which publishers can challenge biased speech, without censoring it, through their own reworkings of problematic words.
School Choice and Educational Privatization Initiatives in the 106th and 107th Congresses: An Analysis of Policy Formation and Political Ideologies
Authors: Debray-Pelot Elizabeth H.
Published: February 2022

This article is a policy analysis that considers how the policy option of using federal programs to promote educational choice was proposed and debated in the 106th and 107th Congresses. This debate was part of the reauthorization of Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) between 1999 and 2001. Over the past 20 years, Congress has debated numerous variants of private school voucher plans. The account demonstrates how the positions of the Clinton and Bush administrations, the 2000 presidential election, think tanks’ advocacy of educational privatization, and public opinion shaped congressional action. The article explains why private school voucher proposals failed to pass in two consecutive Congresses, when the Republicans held control of both houses for three of the four sessions. The article draws on interviews with congressional aides and members of interest groups during the ESEA reauthorization process, and it applies John Kingdon's framework on agenda formation to explain the persistence of alternatives for privatization within Title I. The issue of school choice in Congress reveals the limits of the GOP's ideological unity—that is, that there could be demands from Republican Party leadership to include vouchers in Title I, but President George W. Bush chose to steer his party away from those demands.
Ambivalent Partners: Power, Trust, and Partnership in Relationships between Mothers and Teachers in a Full-Time Child Care Center
Authors: Mcgrath Wendy Hobbins
Published: February 2022

Background/Context

There is much rhetoric regarding “parents and teachers as partners” despite little evidence that such partnerships, as described in the early childhood education literature, actually develop. The literature on parent-teacher partnerships does not examine parents’ and teachers’ interactions or what those interactions mean to them.

Purpose

This study focuses on the daily exchanges between mothers and teachers in a child care center during drop-off and pick-up times. In so doing, it examines aspects of parent-teacher partnerships and parent involvement that are absent in the current literature.

Setting

The setting for the study was an ethnically and economically diverse child care center in a large East coast city serving children from the ages of 2 to 5.

Participants

Participation in the study was voluntary in terms of interviewing and videotape recording; all mothers and teachers were observed. Thirteen mothers participated fully in the study. All of the staff agreed to be videotaped. I interviewed 12 of the 17 permanent staff members.

Research Design

The study was an ethnographic case study of mother-teacher relationships in a toddler room of a child care center. Embedded within the study was a microethnographic video analysis of mother-teacher interactions in the classroom during morning drop-off and evening pickup times. Fieldwork was conducted over the course of 1 year.

Findings/Results

The findings suggest that mothers and teachers in the center were “ambivalent partners.” In interactions with teachers, mothers’ trust in the child care arrangement was at stake. They looked to the teachers to provide them with information about their children which bolstered their trust in the center and made them feel connected to their child's experience. Teachers were less invested in trusting parents, and they appeared relatively unaware of how much power they had in their interactions with parents.

Conclusions/Recommendations

I found little evidence of mothers and teachers working as partners in the care of their children. Given the fluctuating power dynamic in parent-teacher relationships and the necessity of trust for parents, the development of partnership was framed in ambivalence. Mothers and teachers come to the table with different expectations, knowledge, and needs, but also with a desire to work together. That interest in working together could be fostered by the child care institution by structuring more time for parents and teachers to interact and by providing support and training for teachers in their relations with parents.
Human Capital or Human Connections? The Cultural Meanings of Education in Brazil
Authors: Bartlett Lesley
Published: February 2022

Background/Context

In the field of educational research, conventional wisdom holds that primary-level schooling, specifically literacy acquisition, promotes economic mobility for individuals and economic development for the nation. This belief is rooted in human capital theory, the causal argument claiming that state investment in schooling or training increases worker productivity and therefore workers’ incomes, owners’ profits, and (ultimately) national development through economic growth. The idea that literacy instruction yields economic and other forms of development, which features widely in global educational policy documents, constitutes what anthropologist Brian Street called an “autonomous” model of literacy, one that suggests that literacy instruction results in automatic “effects” on individual and national economic development.

Focus of Study

Arguing against human capital theory and other autonomous models of literacy, this article reveals how the outcomes of literacy schooling are mediated by complex social interactions and by the meanings that students attach to schooling.

Research Design

This article draws on 24 months of ethnographic research with highly impoverished literacy students from four literacy programs in two Brazilian cities.

Findings/Results

This article shows three things. First, the students interviewed for the study talked about education not only as book learning and formal study but also as sociability and manners. Second, they said that sociability and manners derive, in part, from schooling. Third, the students consistently remarked, and my observations confirmed, that the economic opportunities that attendance at school opened for them were the product of their development as “educated” people, which contributed to their efforts to extend and maintain social networks.

Conclusions/Recommendations

The data presented in this article suggest a need to reconsider key theories and dominant discourses about literacy and economic development that, rooted in human capital theory, predict a tight, causal link between learning to read and write and improved economic opportunities. Instead, I argue that the social, political, and/or economic benefits of literacy must be examined in light of a sociocultural, interactional model of education.
On Their Own and Presumed Expert: New Teachers’ Experience with Their Colleagues
Authors: Kardos Susan M. , Johnson Susan Moore
Published: February 2022

Background/Context

In order to develop effective strategies for retaining able and committed teachers, it is important to understand how new teachers experience their work with their colleagues. A previous qualitative study conducted by the authors and others presented a conceptual framework for understanding new teachers’ experiences of the professional culture of their schools. The prior work suggested that new teachers might be more likely to stay in teaching and remain at their schools when they work in what the authors called integrated professional cultures, which promote frequent and reciprocal interaction among faculty members across experience levels; recognize new teachers’ needs as beginners; and develop shared responsibility among teachers for the school.

Focus of Study

This study uses the concept of integrated professional culture to frame an inquiry about new teachers’ experiences at their schools and with their colleagues.

Research Design

The study examines the experiences of a representative random sample of 486 first- and second-year teachers surveyed in four states (California, Florida, Massachusetts, and Michigan). Participants were chosen using two-stage stratified cluster sampling. The mail survey achieved a response rate of 65 percent. The authors conducted descriptive analyses of the questionnaire data and summarized new teachers’ experiences in a series of comparative tables.

Conclusions/Recommendations

The data revealed that many novice teachers report that their work is solitary, that they are expected to be prematurely expert and independent, and that their fellow teachers do not share a sense of collective responsibility for their school. In integrated professional cultures, new teachers interact with experienced colleagues in an ongoing way. However, the authors found that approximately one-half (in CA and MI) to two-thirds (in FL and MA) of new teachers generally plan and teach alone. In integrated professional cultures, new teachers are recognized as novices and offered extra assistance; however, the authors found that less than one-third (MI) to less than one-half (CA) reported that extra assistance was available to them. Finally, in integrated professional cultures, teachers share a sense of collective responsibility for the school. However, less than half of the new teachers in the four states reported that teachers share responsibility for the students in their school. Taken together, these findings reveal that many new teachers work without the support of integrated professional cultures. Given these findings, the authors discuss in detail what policymakers and school leaders can do to address the critical challenge of supporting new teachers.
A Review of the Transition to College Literature in Sociology
Authors: Deil-Amen Regina , Turley Ruth Lopez
Published: February 2022

Background/Context

This review focuses on the transition to college literature in sociology published since 1983 with an emphasis on revealing the contribution that sociology has made to our understanding of under-represented U.S. populations and their transition into and completion of postsecondary education.

Purpose

The review is organized around four main themes: 1) college preparation, 2) college access, 3) financing college, and 4) college completion and/or retention. Five dimensions that cut across these themes are emphasized: 1) disadvantaged or underrepresented students, 2) parents, families, and social networks of these students, 3) institutions, 4) federal, regional, state, local, or other policies, and 5) systemwide or interactive factors.

Research Design

This is an analytic essay of prior analyses. These prior analyses include but are not limited to a range of methods, such as qualitative case study and secondary analysis of national, regional, and institutional data.

Findings/Results

This review finds that while most sociological research has focused on college preparation, with disadvantaged students at the center of this work, very little research has studied college financing.

Conclusions/Recommendations

Sociological studies relevant to the transition to college continue to strive toward that end, but the field still remains underdeveloped with regard to an emphasis on how the wider societal system of stratification and opportunity interact with individuals, social groups, and educational institutions in a dynamic interplay that affects opportunities for quality educational advancement. In some respects, the prominence of the status attainment framework has limited progress in the field of sociology. Although multilevel modeling affords the opportunity to consider not just the individual, but the individual embedded in particular educational contexts and other contexts, the role of institutional and systemwide factors requires further development among sociologists of education.
Reconsidering the Digital Divide: Using Online Content to Understand Teaching and Learning
Authors: Tettegah Sharon , Whang Eun Won , Collins Nakia , Taylor Kona
Published: February 2022

The key to change is empowering individuals, schools, and communities to believe in themselves, and to adapt technology to their own purposes (Solomon & Allen, 2003, p. xxiv).
Advocacy for Equity in Classrooms and Beyond: New Teachers’ Challenges and Responses
Authors: Athanases Steven Z. , De Oliveira Luciana C.
Published: February 2022

Background/Context

New teachers face an array of challenges in today's schools. Even when teachers leave credential programs with useful preparation, early-career jobs and contexts shape and constrain teachers’ goals and practice related to teaching diverse learners. Becoming change agents can be a tall order.

Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study

Considering this context, we sought to understand how graduates of one teacher credential program appear prepared to advocate for educational equity in their new jobs by asking three questions: (1) What challenges do new teachers identify in classes and schools that require advocacy for some youth? (2) In what ways do they respond to such challenges? and (3) What enables these acts of advocacy?

Research Design

A total of 38 graduates, all currently teaching, participated in five separate 3-hour focus groups of 5–10 teachers each. We used focus groups as a research tool to triangulate a range of other data, including artifacts and surveys. We sought teachers’ deep reflections on practice, on their preparation for advocacy work, and on their professional needs. We transcribed focus group discussions then subjected these to a series of procedures, including analysis of content and themes of teachers’ narratives.

Findings/Results

Teachers reported actions to address equity in a range of sites, with the classroom as the core site for teachers’ advocacy work. In complex narratives, teachers reported trying to meet learning needs of diverse students. English language learners’ needs especially prompted acts of advocacy in and beyond the classroom. These included instructional tailoring, out-of-class tutorials, hunts for better texts and tests, a library field trip, creation of a culture/computer club, heightened parent contacts, and launching of a bilingual parent group. Teachers’ acts of advocacy shared four crosscutting themes: a goal of equitable access to resources and support, convictions about equity, interceding on behalf of students in need, and engaging coadvocates. Teachers reported that these themes have grounding in their teacher credential program, which featured advocating for equity in its mission, goals, and practices. Those with bilingual education credentials engaged in more acts of advocacy beyond the classroom, and analyses suggest that this may be due to credential program experiences, life experiences, and the larger sociopolitical context for teaching English language learners.

Conclusions/Recommendations

Results challenge conventional models of learning to teach, documenting how teachers, even in the throes of the induction period, can focus on student learning and on ways to advocate in and beyond the classroom for those in need of someone interceding on their behalf, particularly when well prepared to do so.
Careers in Motion: A Longitudinal Retention Study of Role Changing among Early-Career Urban Educators
Authors: Quartz Karen Hunter , Thomas Andrew , Anderson Lauren , Masyn Katherine , Lyons Kimberly Barraza , Olsen Brad
Published: February 2022

Background/Context

Teacher retention, especially of qualified teachers within high-poverty schools, is an issue of local, national, and international concern. School staffing research has typically examined two groups: those who remain in full-time classroom teaching versus those who quit teaching altogether. This article complicates the teacher staffing picture and adds a third category of attrition: role changing, which is the phenomenon of teachers shifting into nonteaching professional roles in the field of education.

Purpose

We asked what proportion of teacher career movement within our sample was attributable to leaving teaching versus role changing. Further, we wanted to know the influence of race/ethnicity, gender, credential type, and age on role-changing patterns.

Research Design

To deepen our understanding of teacher career patterns, we conducted a 6-year longitudinal study that involved collecting survey data on teacher career movement, school experiences, and attitudes from 838 well-prepared urban educators in their first through eighth career year. These educators had all completed master's degrees in the teacher education program of a high-status urban public university and all began their careers as teachers. After collecting the data, we documented and diagrammed career patterns. In addition, we analyzed the influence of select time invariant covariates on the hazard probabilities of both role changing and leaving education.

Findings/Results

The study found that not only did teachers move into a variety of non-teaching roles within the field of education, but they also followed diverse career “pathways” along the way. Survival analysis substantiated prior research showing that Latino teachers have lower attrition rates from the field of education compared with White teachers, but this effect disappeared for role changing with the field. In terms of gender, the men in our population were less likely to leave education entirely than women but more likely to leave teaching for a role change in career years 3–8. Teachers with single-subject (secondary) credentials were more likely than their colleagues who held multiple-subject (elementary) credentials to leave teaching for a role change in education.

Conclusions/Recommendations

Set within the framework of teacher professionalism, we argue that role changing is a form of sanctioned attrition and that understanding movement among roles within the educational workforce is essential for crafting policies and incentives to keep well-prepared teachers rooted in careers that serve the nation's most under-served students.
A Song for Humanistic Education: Pedagogy and Politics in the Middle East
Authors: Herrera Linda A.
Published: February 2022

Background/Context

If we take as a given the desirability of an education that promotes principles of respect, pluralism, rational critical inquiry, compassion, innovation, and excellence, then humanistic pedagogies should be paramount to that educational vision. Yet humanistic education in the Middle East has been on the demise in past decades due to the intensification of political and economic injustices, sectarianism, nativism, and religious fundamentalisms, coupled with the prevalence of market-driven neoliberal education reforms.

Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study

This study draws on the life history and pedagogy of a music educator, an Egyptian Muslim violin teacher, to broach larger questions about humanistic and aesthetic education in the Middle East. The current context of geopolitical conflict and authoritarianism have reinvigorated a reactionary cultural politics in which music and the arts are often targeted as being corruptive, extraneous, or irrelevant to Arab and Islamic society. This inquiry presses upon the need for research that addresses notions about education and national culture during periods of political and economic conflict, and of the urgency to support and build those cosmopolitan educational spaces that are constricting at an alarming pace.

Research Design

The research is organized around a life history and includes interviews, classroom observations, secondary analysis, and historical analysis. Life history allows for an investigation of the influences and conditions that contribute to an educator's professional formation and pedagogic practices. It similarly provides a means by which to locate the teacher as a product of an historic period and, concurrently, as an active social actor who influences it.

Conclusions/Recommendations

Rather than serve as a “best practice” model, this study is intended to illustrate those pedagogic strategies that can nurture humanistic principles and lead to the cultivation of a cosmopolitan polity in the Middle East, particularly during periods of political conflict, growing sectarianism, and struggles for democratic change. For an education grounded in principles of openness and humanism may be among the greatest means for confronting the irrationalities, inequities, and injustices of our times.
I Pledge Allegiance to… Flexible Citizenship and Shifting Scales of Belonging
Authors: Mitchell Katharyne , Parker Walter C.
Published: February 2022

Background

Cosmopolitans and their critics often imagine a spectrum of affinities—concentric circles of belonging reaching from the self and family to the ethnic group, the nation and, finally, to all humanity. Debates over the role schools should play in educating “world citizens” versus national patriots follow suit: Should educators work to maintain the reputedly natural, warm, and necessary scale of national allegiance, or should they attempt to produce new subjects oriented to Earth and the human family?

Purpose

In this paper, we critique the spatial assumptions that underlie this discourse. We question the assumption that affinity is attached to particular scales, that these scales are fixed rather than flexible, and that they are received rather than produced. Our examination focuses on Nussbaum's celebrated proposal that civic education be freed from its national tether and allowed to embrace the whole world.

Research Design

In order to trouble the nation/world binary that is central to both Nussbaum's proposal and the arguments of its many critics, we undertook a qualitative case study of youth in a western metropolitan area in the United States. Working with a theoretical sample of public and private middle and high school teachers who wanted to learn what and how their students were thinking about patriotism, citizenship, and allegiance in the year following the events of September 11, 2001, we conducted focus group interviews in their classrooms in early 2003, as the invasion of Iraq was imminent.

Findings

These youthful citizens-in-formation generally expressed a historicized affinity— constructed, contingent, and impermanent. Some of them already, in advance of the proposed civic education reform, were imagining and producing allegiances that were multiple, flexible, and relational. These allegiances do not fit neatly into the spatial models of affinity that have been constructed in some contemporary and ancient literatures, especially those that force a choice between nationalism and cosmopolitanism. These young people displayed more flexibility than the linear inner-to-outer concentric-circles model would permit.
Blended Learning for Professional Development: An Evaluation of A Program for Middle School Mathematics and Science Teachers
Authors: Owston Ronald D. , Sinclair Margaret , Wideman Herbert
Published: February 2022

Background

Improving the subject matter knowledge and pedagogical skills of teachers of mathematics and science is a key priority for many jurisdictions. Blended learning is a promising, yet so far seldom used model for supporting teacher professional development. This model combines the advantages of traditional face-to-face interaction with the flexibility of online learning.

Purpose

In this study, we examine two one-year professional development programs for middle-school mathematics and science/technology teachers that employed blended learning. The goal of our research was to understand how the program affected teacher attitudes toward and pedagogical practices in these subjects and on student perceptions and learning of the subjects.

Participants

Participants in the study were 68 mathematics and 65 science/technology teachers in grades 6, 7, and 8 in several school districts in a large urban center, along with their students: 477 students from the mathematics teachers’ classes and 551 from the science/technology teachers’ classes.

Program

The blended learning program, known as the Teacher eLearning Project (TeL), began at the start of the school year with a module that consisted of a daylong face-to-face session followed by an eight-week online session. The first year of TeL focused on the mathematics teachers who had a total of three modules to complete; in the second year, science/technology teachers had two modules.

Research design

We used Guskey's (2000) five-level evaluation framework to assess the impact of the programs on teachers’ attitudes and knowledge, institutional support for the programs, changes in classroom practices, and student perceptions and learning of the subjects. Data were obtained using a pre-post design that included surveys, classroom observations, and key informant interviews.

Findings

Overall our results indicate that the program appeared to influence positively teacher attitudes and content knowledge in certain curricular areas and motivated many to transform their classroom practice to varying degrees. Despite this, student responses were mixed: students viewed mathematics less favorably by the end of the program, but became more positively inclined towards science/technology.

Conclusions

The blended learning model shows potential for teacher professional development, although further research preferably through controlled studies is needed. Aspects that need to be examined further include the nature of the online tasks given to teachers, the role of the online facilitators, the impact on student achievement, and the implications of providing teachers with less release time than was available in this study.
Contrasting Paths to Small-School Reform: Results of a 5-year Evaluation of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's National High Schools Initiative
Authors: Shear Linda , Means Barbara , Mitchell Karen , House Ann , Gorges Torie , Joshi Aasha , Smerdon Becky , Shkolnik Jamie
Published: February 2022

Background/Context

In 2000, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation began an ambitious initiative intended to catalyze the fundamental transformation of American high schools. This article summarizes the results of a 5-year national evaluation of the first stage of the foundation's initiative.

Purpose/Objective

This article focuses on two contrasting strategies to small-school reform: starting new small high schools, and converting large schools into smaller learning communities. For each strategy, it reports on the progress of the reform in its first several years, student outcomes, and key implementation factors that shape progress and outcomes for startup and conversion schools.

Research Design

The evaluation summarized in this article used a mixed-methods design. Data and analyses in this article come from surveys of teachers, students, and school leaders; case study site visits that collected a range of qualitative data; the collection and analysis of teacher assignments and student work; and district records of attendance and achievement.

Findings/Results

Results show that although both strategies have the potential to promote learning environments that are more personalized and that encourage students to work to higher standards, start-up schools in their first several years showed positive results in terms of attendance and some indication of student achievement gains, whereas these outcomes did not emerge for conversion schools during the timeframe of the study.

Conclusions/Recommendations

Results reported by the evaluation must be taken in the context of the typically slow pace of significant educational reform. Despite the many tasks facing start-up schools in their first 3 years and the challenges posed by limited budgets and incompatibilities with district systems, these schools were quickly able to establish strong and supportive school climates without apparent compromise to student academic achievement. Conversion school progress was slowed by an early focus on structural changes and the challenges of equitable reassignment of existing staff and students, with less initial clarity of vision for the learning environment or initial emphasis on instructional change. More evidence is needed concerning the long-term outcomes for students in these schools and the feasibility of creating small schools at scale, and therefore the degree to which either strategy is likely to support the ultimate goal of promoting educational excellence and equity for all high schoolers.
Assessment and Academic Identity: Using Embedded Assessment as an Instrument for Academic Socialization in Science Education
Authors: Brown Bryan A.
Published: February 2022

Overview

This research explores using a teaching approach that attempts to balance test preparation with creating “teachable moments” for students. This approach involves the use of a sequence of assessments to introduce topics through formative assessment in order to identify students’ understanding, and beginning instruction based on an evaluation of students’ knowledge and alternative conceptions. In an attempt to balance classroom instruction and large-scale test preparation, this science teacher attempted to use a teachable moment assessment approach as a teaching tool.

Setting

The study was conducted at a Northern California high school whose student population (N = 350) was 55% African American, 40% Hispanic, 2% Pacific Islander, 1% Asian, 1% Filipino and White, and 1% nonreporting. The ethnographic study was conducted with 1 teacher working with a classroom of 25 students in their first high school biology class.

Method

Over the course of 6 weeks of instruction, we documented the teacher's use of teachable moment assessments to promote students’ use of discourse in relation to the teacher's use of this approach to teaching. We videotaped each session over the course of 6 weeks and collected their classroom journals in an effort to conduct post hoc domain analysis of students’ discourse practices.

Findings

The findings suggest that using assessments as a pedagogical tool provided the teacher with an opportunity to isolate students’ learning in three areas: (1) students’ conceptual understanding, (2) their analysis skills, and (3) their use of science discourse. These results were consistent with the theoretical intent of developing students’ identity across conceptual, analytical, and discursive lines. These findings are indicative of the fact that sound classroom instruction and preparation for testing are not mutually exclusive. Future research must explore ways to promote synergistic relationships between teachable moment instruction and test preparation.
Student Perceptions of Small-Group Learning
Authors: Florez Ida Rose , Mccaslin Mary
Published: February 2022

Background/Context

Elementary school teachers regularly arrange students in small groups for learning activities. A rich literature discusses various types of small-group learning formats and how those formats affect achievement. Few studies, however, have examined students’ perceptions of small-group learning experiences. Our work extends the small-group literature by studying stories written in response to a picture of children in a small group by students who attend Comprehensive School Reform (CSR) schools about learning in small groups.

Research Question

We examined students’ responses to pictures of small-group situations. Story analysis was guided by the following questions: How do student stories portray small-group experiences? Specifically, do students’ representations focus on achievement or affiliation? Are their representations positive and optimistic, or negative and pessimistic? What motivational systems are attributed to story characters? What are their challenges, behaviors, and goals? What do story characters feel, and how do they manage emotions?

Population

Students (N = 183) in Grades 3–5 who attended three CSR schools.

Research Design

Data collection consisted of student stories in response to a picture of three children working in a group in a classroom. Project instruments and procedures are an adaptation of the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT).

Conclusions

Results suggest that students in these CSR schools held positive beliefs about their small-group learning experiences. The stories portrayed students as active, compliant participants who supported one another's learning, sometimes found their experiences personally meaningful, and were concerned with both achievement and affiliation. Students rarely represented competitive themes and never described rejection, being ignored, or giving up. Students told stories about small-group learning in school that sound like a typical day in most schools: They portray students who work together, support one another, and get the job done.
Chapter I Educational Implications of Microelectronic Networks
Authors: Davies Ivor K. , Shane Harold G.
Published: February 2022

I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.

Albert Einstein
Reflections on Tomorrow's Teachers
Authors: Joyce Bruce
Published: February 2022

Reflecting on the other recent attempts at reform of teacher education, Bruce Joyce urges twelve-month employment for professionals, major changes in classroom teaching, a unified professional development school, a reconceptualization of professional knowledge, and a coordination of the teacher education and the liberal arts curricula.
Tomorrow's Teachers
Authors: Shanker Albert
Published: February 2022

Believing that arguments about the number of years of teacher education required and whether they are better done in graduate or undergraduate contexts are not important, Shanker accepts the basic model of teacher education found in the Holmes Group report, which includes a liberal education, mastery of a subject, professional specialization, and a structured clinical induction program. However, he warns that the impending teacher shortage may fill our teaching ranks with just any warm bodies unless we all work toward making this model a reality and instituting a profession-based national teacher exam.
Tomorrow's Teachers: The Essential Arguments of the Holmes Group Report
Authors: Sedlak Michael W.
Published: February 2022

This abbreviated version of the Holmes Group report, written by one of the original coauthors of Tomorrow's Teachers, provides an overview of the proposals for the reform of teacher education that the contributors of this symposium are reacting to.
Computer as Material: Messing about with Time
Authors: Franz George , Papert Seymour
Published: February 2022

Computers began in education with a charismatic aura that cannot remain characteristic of their long-term presence. As they become part of the everyday toolbox that kids can dig into, will they have any special value?
Democracy, Scientific Knowledge, and Teacher Empowerment
Authors: Garrison James W.
Published: February 2022

A democracy is more than a form of government, it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience.

—John Dewey, Democracy and Education
The Prospects for General Education in University Professional Education
Authors: Mann Lawrence R. , Rhodes Frank H. T.
Published: February 2022

I am not arguing against professional education; I am arguing against narrow vocational training. The first is large, expansive, having the spirit of the liberal arts, setting skills as means within larger ends; concerned with not “the job,” but with life and with the social goals the profession promotes and the ethical standards it demands. The second is narrow, restrictive, developing specific skills in preparation for routine tasks sometimes very technical or scientific; it involves knowledge for specific ends, raising no questions of larger significance, impervious to social context, oblivious to moral choice. A liberal outlook may be nurtured within the context of professional education. It soon withers in the presence of vocational training.

Vital Speeches, 15 June 1984
An Early Childhood Center Developmental Model for Public School Settings
Authors: Haskins Guy P. , Alessi Samuel J.
Published: February 2022

When the federal court ordered Buffalo to desegregate, the school system took its mandate to be a curriculum and instruction challenge of the highest order. The result, Buffalo's highly successful Early Childhood Centers, is described and evaluated in this article in terms of student achievement, parental involvement, and racial balancing.
Welfare Reform: Serving America's Children
Authors: Moynihan Daniel Patrick
Published: February 2022

Senator Moynihan restates the critical problems of family, children, and poverty in America that have been his driving concern for decades both as an academic and as a politician. He urges us to view welfare reform as the art of the possible and to develop policies that will save our children.
Unplanned links, unanticipated outcomes: Urban refugees in Halba (Lebanon)
Authors: Fawaz Mona , Al-Hage Carla , Harb Mona
Published: February 2022

Much of the literature covering forced population displacement has neglected spatial implications, dealing with place as mere context. Building on a case study of the city of Halba (Lebanon) where it maps a process of contingent encounters through which disparate resources, individuals, and groups are stitched together to generate large-scale housing projects that shelter refugees, this paper demonstrates the importance of studying displacement through a grounded reading of the spatial transformations it implicates. The paper maps multiple private and public actors who exploit cracks and connect seemingly disparate material flows (e.g., humanitarian aid, public housing subsidies) and institutional systems (e.g., humanitarian, public, private, religious) in ways that catalyze and accelerate the production of housing in order to derive profit from the opportunities afforded by the refugee crisis. Thus, developers, buyers, residents, brokers, public agents, and other actors all support a flow of informal profitable exchanges that are far from seamless economic transactions, mixing instead capitalist profiteering with human solidarity, religious morality, or kinship obligations that all buttress the possibility of these encounters and their materialization into new configurations of urban quarters. The arrangements formed through these processes, the paper shows, are strongly reflective of existing social hierarchies and inequalities.
Describing consumer involvement, recruitment, retention in Australian occupational therapy university education: A cross sectional survey
Authors: Soon Yong En , Murray Carolyn M , Aguilar Alejandra , Boshoff Kobie
Published: February 2022

Introduction

Consumer involvement in occupational therapy programmes is one of the accreditation requirements of the Occupational Therapy Council in Australia. Consumers are direct recipients of occupational therapy services. Current knowledge about consumer involvement within occupational therapy education is minimal and mostly in mental health. This study identifies the trends for involvement and methods for recruitment and retention of consumers in Australian occupational therapy university education programmes.

Methods

Twenty-one occupational therapy programme directors in Australian universities were directly invited by email to participate in an online questionnaire. Prior to distribution, the questionnaire was piloted and the content validity tested. Analysis of closed-ended questions occurred using frequencies and percentages and content analysis occurred with open-text responses.

Results

Nine programme directors completed the questionnaire. Consumers were mainly involved in delivering lectures, sharing stories and having discussions in small groups. Consumers were recruited to programmes through collaboration with organisations and/or by direct approach. The main retention strategies included employing consumers as university educators and providing support before/during involvement.

Conclusion

Consumer involvement in curricula addresses university programme requirements and aims to prepare students for consumer-focussed practice. The findings inform educators about diverse ways of recruiting, retaining and involving consumers in their programmes.
Manitoba 2020: How centralizing the healthcare supply chain helped with pandemic management
Authors: Metge Colleen J. , Islam Md. Anisul
Published: February 2022

A case study design was used to understand Manitoba’s response to accessing Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) in the first wave of the global coronavirus pandemic. By evolving early on in the pandemic to a provincially led structure dedicated to the healthcare supply chain, Manitoba was able to avoid major shortages in access to PPE. Leadership was focused on the possibilities for action and implementation (ie, dynamic, adaptive, and collaborative) rather than trying to respond within the status quo (ie, a more linear and traditional approach). As a result, few structural items other than the creation of an effective, province-wide digital network to fully visualize the healthcare supply chain are needed going forward. Manitoba’s healthcare supply chain had a number of successes during the initial wave of the global pandemic including many new processes like the local production of PPE and the establishment of new supplier relationships.