Student compliance will not mean ‘all teachers can teach’: a critical analysis of the rationale for ‘no excuses’ discipline

An increasing number of English schools are embracing an extreme approach to student behaviour dubbed ‘no excuses’ discipline, inspired by charter school chains in the United States. Proponents argue the approach is necessary to allow all teachers to teach and that it places responsibility where it should be: on the student. However, this rationale ignores the interactional nature of classroom disruption and discounts the role played by teachers and teaching. In this paper, I explain the concept of ‘cumulative continuity’ and then use this concept as a lens to make sense of classroom behaviour using observational data from a current longitudinal research project investigating the development of disruptive school behaviour. The aim of this paper is to highlight the importance of pedagogical contexts, the responsibility that adults have, and the fallacy of the notion that students must be forced to comply in a one-size-fits-all system because we cannot rely on all members of the teaching profession to do the same.     

Enhancing Teacher Performance: The Role of Professional Autonomy

Current teacher accountability initiatives such as those included in the “No Child Left Behind” legislation in the United States create particular difficulties that impact deleteriously on the performance of professional educators. The quality of public education is undermined when teachers are held accountable to an external authority rather than to themselves, their colleagues, and their professional associations. In this article, and in response to this concern, we argue that for teachers to strengthen their classroom performance, policy renewal is required on two separate fronts: first, we must restructure teachers’ working conditions to support autonomous professional activity related to education; and second, teachers, both individually and collectively, must accept the concomitant responsibility to pursue personal professional development to improve their pedagogical work.     

Teacher responsibility: shifting care from student to (professional) self?

The professionalisation of teaching in Australia is a policy shift that transpires within broader policy dynamics which are increasingly influenced by neoliberal logics. In this article we examine teacher responsibility through analysis of a new measure introduced in Victoria. This requires teachers to prove professional development hours in the area of teaching students with special needs in order to maintain their professional registration. Through our analysis of this policy move we draw out some tensions that emerge in relation to teacher responsibility, accountability and autonomy to reveal that (often hidden) neoliberal governing logics can operate to shift teachers’ focus from care of the student towards care of the (professional) self. With the theoretical support of Nel Noddings’ ‘ethic of care’, we argue that teacher responsibility to care can be torn between market-based regulations and the care of the student, paradoxically de-professionalising teachers’ work in the act of attempting to professionalise.     

Teacher Professional Standards: Controlling or developing teaching?

The issue of professional teaching standards has generated considerable interest from various quarters in Australia and elsewhere. In this paper, I am concerned with examining some of the claims made by advocates for the establishing of uniform standards for the teaching profession. To this end I identify three major claims derived from the Australian literature regarding the benefits that the application of a standards framework would make to the quality of teaching: the introduction of standards should improve the performance of teachers; the introduction of standards will improve the standing of teachers; and standards contribute to the on-going professional learning of teachers. Specifically, I argue that we need to look critically at the issue of professional standards for teachers and the claims that are made by their advocates. In particular, we need to ask whose interests are served by these standards and what are the effects of the imposition of these standards on teachers individually and collectively. Finally, we need to ask whether the standards judged as appropriate for today's teaching conditions and teachers will be equally appropriate in the future. Standards cannot and should not be frozen in time; they must be flexible to the changing conditions of teaching and learning as they occur inside and outside of schools.     

Challenging and Appropriating Discourses of Power: Listening to and Learning from Early Career Early Childhood Teachers of Color

ABSTRACT

The racial mismatch between teachers and students has become a salient issue in efforts to counter the historical failure of children of Color in American (pre)schools. To address this mismatch, scholars have argued for the critical need to recruit and retain teachers of Color. In this article, we propose that to successfully prepare teachers of Color so that they remain committed to the profession, we must learn from their experiences during their preservice preparation and their first years of teaching. Against the backdrop of normative institutional discourses shaping teachers and teaching, we sought to learn from the ways in which six early career early childhood teachers of Color reconciled their preservice teacher education experiences, identities, and beliefs about education with the construction of their identities as teachers. To do so, we asked: How do the discursive spaces of early childhood teaching and teacher education shape the practices, beliefs, and identities of early childhood teachers of Color during their teacher education programs and within their three first years of teaching? Through Critical Narrative Analysis of in-depth interviews, we sought to unveil the discourses that shape and are shaped by the experiences of early career early childhood teachers of Color. Findings indicate that instead of being colonized by institutional discourses and oppressed by others' perceptions, to remain in the profession, these early career early childhood teachers challenged and appropriated institutional discourses, reauthoring them agentively. Implications underscore the responsibility of teacher education programs in preparing teachers of Color to negotiate the ever-so-normative discursive space of early childhood teaching and teacher education, if they are to enter and remain in the profession.     

The Missing Link: The Lack of Citations and Copyright Notices in Multimedia Presentations

Many of the projects and assignments we have our students complete for our classes include a multimedia presentation. Why are we not teaching our students how to cite their sources for these presentations? Writing style (APA, MLA, or Chicago) does not matter. Regardless of whether it is a paper or multimedia presentation students should always cite their sources, otherwise plagiarism is occurring. This is a skill we must teach and demand that our students take responsibility for when completing multimedia presentations. This article covers a brief overview of copyright law, provides helpful resources for students and teachers, and outlines a model that can be used in citing sources in multimedia presentations. This model goes beyond the producer required credit slide to argue for the inclusion of “in product/text” citations for multimedia presentations.     

Teaching, morality, and responsibility: A Structuralist analysis of a teachers’ code of conduct

In this paper we conduct a Structuralist analysis of the General Teaching Council for England’s Code of Conduct and Practice for Registered Teachers in order to reveal how teachers are required to fulfil an apparently impossible social role. The GTCE’s Code, we argue, may be seen as an attempt by a government agency to resolve the political and ideological tensions that emerge in a society that grapples with the paradox of revering individual autonomy whilst simultaneously being dependent upon state-delivered services like a national education system. In such a situation it seems that teachers are a locus in which these tensions collide. However, the GTCE’s attempt to bridge the philosophical gaps provides an opportunity, we conclude, for teachers and teacher-educators to explore the differences between public myths of the teaching profession and the lived reality of life in the classroom.     

Epistemology of the Nakba in Israeli education

In Israel, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is the most fundamental political and moral issue current and future citizens face. If we accept the maxim that schools should prepare citizens for participation in determining the future of their state, Israeli students must be introduced to the historical, political and moral questions at the heart of the conflict. But this responsibility of Israeli schools and teachers is a highly contentious issue. The most important issue in Israeli political education is thus the hardest to teach. In this article I argue that, despite considerable educational and political risks, teaching Jewish Israeli students about the 1948 Palestinian Nakba (alternatively known as the Israeli War of Independence) holds substantial potential for their epistemic development as capable knowers. I begin by reviewing the political, dialogical, cognitive and epistemic deficits in Israeli education, highlighting how the Nakba is suppressed in history and citizenship education. By analysing the epistemic context of the Nakba in Israeli society and education, I present two pedagogical approaches for teaching controversial issues, arguing for an inquiry-based approach over the widely held approach. I demonstrate the benefits of an inquiry-based approach in the context of history education. In the final section of the article, I build on the case of the Nakba to argue for a new epistemic framework for Israeli citizenship education. I begin by outlining the shortcomings of the current epistemic framework of the subject and point to possible future directions for the subject.     

Teacher education through the history of mathematics

In this paper I consider the problem of designing strategies for teacher education programs that may promote an aware style of teaching. Among the various elements to be considered I focus on the need to address prospective teachers’ belief that they must reproduce the style of mathematics teaching seen in their school days. Towards this aim, I argue that the prospective teachers need a context allowing them to look at the topics they will teach in a different manner. This context may be provided by the history of mathematics. In this paper I shall discuss how history affected the construction of teaching sequences on algebra during the activities of the ‘laboratory of mathematics education’ carried out in a 2 year education program for prospective teachers. The conditions of the experiment, notably the fact that our prospective teachers had not had specific preparation in the history of mathematics, allow us to outline opportunities and caveats of the use of history in teacher education.     

Evaluate to improve: useful approaches to student evaluation

Many teachers in higher education use feedback from students to evaluate their teaching, but only some use these evaluations to improve their teaching. One important factor that makes the difference is the teacher’s approach to their evaluations. In this article, we identify some useful approaches for improving teaching. We conducted focus groups with award-winning university teachers who use student evaluations to improve their teaching, and we identified how they approach their evaluation data. We found that these teachers take a reflective approach, aiming for constant improvement, and see their evaluation data as formative feedback, useful for improving learning outcomes for their students. We summarise this as the improvement approach, and we offer it for other teachers to emulate. We argue that if teachers take this reflective, formative, student-centred approach, they can also use student evaluations to improve their teaching, and this approach should be fostered by institutions to encourage more teachers to use student evaluations to improve their teaching.     

也谈新建本科高校青年教师的教学动力

新建本科高线青年教师普遍存在教学动力不足的现象,主要表现为教师精力投入不足、重科研轻教研,这与学校的政策导向与教师个人的修养密切相关。提升青年教师教学动力,一方面需要学校改革完善相关制度、提高教学服务水平,另一方面青年教师自己要增强责任意识和教学自信,提高教学能力。     

Preparing the Next Generation of Science Teacher Educators: A Model for Developing PCK for Teaching Science Teachers

Science education doctoral programs often fail to address a critical piece—the explicit attention to the preparation of future science teacher educators. In this article, we argue that, in addition to developing skills and a knowledge base for research, doctoral students must be given the opportunity to observe, practice, and reflect on the pedagogical knowledge necessary to instruct science teachers. In particular, we contend that the construct of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) can be adapted to the context of knowledge for teaching science teachers. We use the PCK construct to propose a model for the development of knowledge for teaching science teachers, grounded in our experiences as doctoral students and faculty mentors. We end by recommending a vision for doctoral preparation and a new standard to be included in the ASTE Professional Knowledge Standards for Science Teacher Educators.     

Teacher professionalism: why are we still talking about it?

It is now more than 10 years after the publication of the monograph, The Activist Teaching Profession, which, at the time, could be described as a call to action for the teaching profession. I reflect here on how far has the profession progressed in responding to that call to action. The idea of a ‘call to action’ could be seen to born out of industrial rather than professional discourses: 10 years ago different factors were shaping teachers’ professional practice and identity and a call to action was a metaphor and a strategy to mobilize teachers. In this paper, I identify the factors that are still influencing and shaping the teaching profession and argue that different times require different responses and that current thinking and debates around teacher professionalism circulate around professional learning. In this paper, I argue that the time for an industrial approach to the teaching profession has passed. I make the case for systems, schools and teachers to be more research active with teachers’ practices validated and supported through research.     

The Collaborative Programme Between CTS,ICMI and UNESCO

Previous research has highlighted challenges associated with embracing an inquiry approach to science teaching for primary teachers, often associating these challenges with insecurity linked to the lack of content knowledge. We argue that in order to understand the extent to which primary student teachers are able to embrace science teaching informed by scientific literacy for all, it is important to take into account various, sometimes competing, science teacher and primary teacher Discourses. The aim of this paper is to explore how such Discourses are constituted in the context of learning to teach during a 1-year university-based Post Graduate Certificate of Education course. The empirical data consist of semi-structured interviews with 11 student teachers. The analysis identifies 5 teacher Discourses and we argue that these can help us to better understand some of the tensions involved in becoming a primary teacher with a responsibility for teaching science: for example, in terms of the interplay between the student teachers' own educational biographies and institutionally sanctioned Discourses. One conclusion is that student teachers' willingness and ability to embrace a Discourse of science education, informed by the aim of scientific literacy for all, may be every bit as constrained by their experience of learning science through ‘traditional schooling’ as it is by their confidence with respect to their own subject knowledge. The 5 Discourses, with their complex interrelations, raise questions about which identity positions are available to students in the intersections of the Discourses and which identity positions teacher educators may seek to make available for their students.     

Vocational teachers' gendered reflections on education,teaching and care

In this article, we discuss teachers' reflections on the relation between teaching and care in the two most gender-segregated sectors of vocational upper secondary education in Finland, namely Health and Social services and Transport and Technology. We first discuss the concepts around education, teaching, taking care for and caring about students, using theoretisations of care and feminist pedagogies. Using teacher interviews and field notes, we then analyse teachers' ambivalence about care work in the context of teaching, placing special emphasis on care as a gendered task, and then discuss the ‘moral panic’ or ‘worry speech’ about young people in vocational education from the perspective of caring about. The findings are reflected through earlier studies in lower secondary schools. We argue that even if teachers in vocational education, especially male teachers, tend to feel awkward about caring work, they cannot avoid it, and they do care about their students and regard care as a general responsibility.     

基础课分层教学的实践与思考

随着职业学校生源质量的普遍下降,生源的素质差异越来越大,基础课教学的改革势在必行。江西环境工程职业学院从基础课分层教学改革的实践中提出:基础课分层教学应因材施教;基础课教学目标的定位应与贯彻终身教育理念相一致;基础课教师应有强烈的角色意识。     

Student plagiarism and faculty responsibility in undergraduate engineering labs

In undergraduate engineering labs, lab reports are routinely copied. By ignoring this form of plagiarism, teaching assistants and lab technicians neglect their role responsibility. By designing courses that facilitate it, however inadvertently, professors neglect their causal responsibility. Using the case of one university, we show via interviews and observation that such routine copying and faculty negligence are rampant. We suggest the latter be explicitly recognized as a cause of student dishonesty, and argue that it must be rectified before faculty earn the right to reform students. We also suggest that these findings are representative of, and therefore generalizable to, many universities’ undergraduate engineering and science labs.     

Helping students to become capable learners

The main aim of this article is to argue that the need for teachers and their schools to prepare their students for life beyond their school-days must be met by requiring teachers themselves to both achieve this aim and produce the evidence of their students’ capability as learners. In so doing, they must change their classroom teaching from a focus on transmission of content knowledge to the active involvement of students in open-ended and collaborative learning. Achievement of this aim requires that some specific features of pedagogy be implemented in classrooms. In order to do this, teachers will have to develop the linked skills of design of activities, of guidance of students’ progress, of the adaptation of the design through teacher-student and student-student interaction, and of making assessments at the many stages of implementation and as a final summation of achievement. So a secondary aim of this article is to review the evidence for work which has studied the development of these skills with and by teachers.     

“Love, love, and more love for children”: exploring preservice teachers’ understandings of caring

The development of an ethic of care is seen as a central concern of teacher education, however little attention has been paid to the preconceived conceptions of caring held by preservice teachers. In this article we share the results of a recent study of a group of preservice elementary teachers in which we examined the understandings of the relationship of caring and teaching brought by these novices to their first field placement experiences. Rather than seeing our students’ partial and limited understandings as problematic, we argue that the student teachers’ preconceptions can be an ideal starting point for productive, educative dialogue about caring and elementary school teaching practice.