With a straight eye: An interview with Charles Causley

Charles Causley is one of the most distinguished contemporary British poets. He was born in Launceston, Cornwall (in South-Western England), where he still lives. During 1940–46 he served on the lower deck in the Royal Navy, an experience which still influences his poetry. In 1967 he was awarded the Queen's Medal for Poetry. In 1977, he received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Exeter and, in addition to awards for different collections of poetry, he was further honoured (in 1986) by the Queen for his services to poetry. He is an experienced and very popular performer at poetry readings. Much of the following interview, recorded in December, 1987, grows out of his long experience as a teacher of young children in his home town.Brian Merrick teaches English and Drama in the School of Education, Exeter University. He is coauthor (with Geoff Fox) of the widely circulated article, Thirty Six Things to do with a Poem,CLE, 12(1), Spring 1981, and coauthor (with Jan Balaam) ofExploring Poetry: 5–8 (NATE Publications, 1987).     

Twenty-four things to do with a book

During a summer workshop course, a group of teachers in British Columbia recently considered ways of encouraging the response of readers in their classes. Time was limited, and their ideas reflect a sustained brainstorming session rather than an attempt to produce a definitive list. More-idiosyncratic ideas which depended upon the peculiar skills of individual teachers have been omitted, as have highly specific illustrations relating to particular books. A dance drama version ofWatership Down, for example, was not seen as a readily transferable classroom activity.The suggestions below are for individual work, for work in pairs, groups, or with the whole class. The Canadian teachers were concerned to confirm a climate in which books were readily handled, shared and exchanged as a central and regular practice of the class.Geoff Fox has taught in secondary schools in both England and America. He has been Visiting Professor at Harvard University and the University of British Columbia and is on the staff at Exeter University. He has collaborated on several books, both for the classroom and for teachers, and is Secretary to the U K Editorial Committee ofCle.     

Do transitional classrooms really provide transitional time?

In the United States, kindergarten marks the beginning of formal schooling for more than 3 million children each year (Shepard & Smith, 1986). At the end of the kindergarten year, most of these children demonstrate expected levels of achievement and are promoted to traditional first-grade classrooms. Others are labeled unready or immature for successful performance in today's academically rigorous first grade. In most elementary schools, the placement for these at-risk children is either retention in kindergarten or social promotion to first grade. An alternative in approximately 17% of the nation's elementary schools is assignment to a transitional classroom between kindergarten and first grade (Educational Research Service, in press). This additional year of instruction is often viewed as a gift of time — time for children to mature and make a gradual transition from kindergarten to first grade.Judith E. Stroud is Assistant Professor of Elementary Education, Ball State University, Munice, IN. R. Ann Williams is Professor of Elementary Education, Ball State University, Muncie, IN.     

Reading,writing, and relationship: Toward overcoming the hidden curriculum of gender,ethnicity, and socio-economic class

Summary In sum, through our projects these two students, the other 17 students, and myself, were making sociology of education relevant to our emerging personhood — to the person we are always becoming. It became less an abstract course title and more something we engaged in as part and parcel of our lives. In effect, we were beginning to develop a more community-oriented education by attempting to overcome what Jim Harding (1978, pp. 287–289) has characterized as the self-defeating polarizations of form and content of learning, of theory and practice, of political and personal matters.For me, there is no turning back. I do not think I'll ever again feel comfortable in a learning environment that is not moving toward the less-structured end of the continuum. Such an environment will not eliminate the hidden curriculum of institutional sexism, racism, and class bias which permeates this society and its schools at all levels. But as the data from this research indicate, constructing such an environment in your own classroom can make a difference — can be a long beginning step toward bringing inequities grounded in gender, ethnic, and socio-economic differences out of hiding. Then, and only then, can people openly acknowledge these differences and work on keeping some of the most destructive consequences that flow from them from being transmitted as miseducation from generation to generation.     

Reflective lesson planning in refresher training programs for experienced physics teachers

This paper reports on some aspects of a refresher training program for experienced physics teachers that is based on Dewey's idea of reflective teaching. The program introduces experienced teachers to a reflective lesson planning model, and a more constructivist approach to physics teaching, and provides them with the opportunity to develop and experience their own strategies during micro-teaching sessions. Three instructional strategies developed by participants in the program and the corresponding suggestions/comments made by their peers in follow-up discussions are presented and analyzed in this paper. The authors, who have coordinated or taught the course, are convinced that the program provides considerable impetus for experienced teachers to redevelop their innovative capacity.     

On defining quality of education

In this paper quality of graduates is distinguished from quality of education, which is renamed efficiency of education. The first concept is defined in a quantitative manner, the second by way of a set of 66 statements concerning the efficiency of education derived from judgements about the effectiveness of particular teaching methods in the achievement of different types of teaching objectives.Paper presented at the conference on Efficiency of Teaching Methods in Higher Education, organized by the University Teaching Methods Unit of the University of London, 6–7 April, 1976.     

Connecting Teacher Beliefs to the Use of Children’s Literature in the Teaching of Mathematics

This article presents examples that illustrate how teachers use childrens literature in the teaching of mathematics. The examples are related to four curriculum ideologies that have influenced mathematics education in the USA for the last 75 years. It discusses why it is relevant to help teachers understand the ideological positions that influence their use of childrens literature during mathematics instruction, summarizes the four ideological positions, and presents results of a study of how teachers ideological positions relate to their use of childrens literature in the teaching of mathematics. The study examines two research questionsCan an instructional tool be developed that will highlight for teachers the different ways in which they and others use childrens literature to teach mathematics? and Can that instructional tool stimulate teacher discussion and reflection about their own beliefs and the ideological nature of the instructional environment in which they learned (as students) and teach (as teachers)? Study results indicate that both questions can be answered in the affirmative.     

Focusing Improvement and Quality Assurance: Work Samples as Authentic Performance Measures of Prospective Teachers’ Effectiveness

The authors suggest that the gap between common evaluation practice in teacher preparation and the consensus reform goal of high levels of student learning for all students is an impediment to reinventing teacher preparation, professional development, and the professionalization of teaching. In the context of Oregons six-year-old educational transition to a standards-based design for schools and schooling, prospective teachers in Oregon have, since 1989, been required to design, develop, and implement teacher work samples as credible evidence of their effectiveness in fostering student learning as a condition for recommendation for an initial teaching license. This article describes teacher work sample methodology and evidence for its reliability and validity in evaluating the performance of prospective teachers. In short, this article describes a methodology that responds to one critical part of the National Commission on Teaching and Americas Futures challenge to reinvent teacher education and improve student learning.     

Visions for ICT, Ethics and the Practice of Teachers

The failure of educational computing is often attributed to deficiencies of practice: resisting teachers and lack of will, competence and sincerity on behalf of the teaching profession. But the complexity of school life and teachers work has been underestimated by the entrepreneurs of educational computing. Theoretically there is a need to approach this area from a different angle. We will suggest there is a need to reframe the issue of ICT in schools with educational policy and discourse with education, rather than with technology in mind. In order to reach that goal there is a need to inculcate technology as an ordinary part of teachers vocabulary about their own work and as a part of their professional ethos. Teachers need to examine the moral values inherent in their practices and use those values as bases for debate. Not taking up these issues and instead adopting defensive stances is dangerous to the profession. The danger is that defensiveness can be seen by others outside the school as rigidity and play into the hands of those who are impatient with teachers. It would serve teachers well if they had a more robust ability to communicate the nature of the difficulties they face and how they deal with them.     

Computers and school reform

Part of the vision of school reform is to reconstruct schools as learning communities in which students and teachers pursue topics of interest. Computers can provide powerful tools for students in learning communities where inquiry, data gathering, interpretation, thinking, and judgment take place. Changing beliefs in educational goals and great support for teachers will be necessary if we are to realize the potential of computers in restructured classrooms. The greatest possibilities exist in new Professional Development Schools, where university faculty join school teachers in joint efforts to restructure learning environments. New evaluation procedures are also needed if competencies associated with information retrieval and use are to be assessed.     

Whitehead and a new look at teaching elementary science

If Whitehead is right, science teachers who try to increase student interest by making the science they teach more pure and by covering more material are going about their work in just the wrong way. Science, for purposes of precision in measurement, translates the dynamic world of feeling and force, of causal efficacy (for example, the San Francisco earthquake), into a static representation spatialized and given presentational immediacy (for example, the Richter scale). But notice that the Richter scale isn't very interesting (even as abstract art) apart from its connection, via symbolic reference, to the earthquake. Such reference is essential to give both a sense of reality and a feeling of interes to the subject, but it makes the science less pure, and it takes more time to cover the material. An example of teaching pure and impure formal logic is given as a case study.     

Educational “excellence” versus teacher “professionalism”: Towards some conceptual clarity

The educational literature of the last several years is replete with both continuing calls for educational excellence reforms and for enhancing and upgrading the teaching profession. Importantly, both types of calls rely on the contribution of science. The educational research-and-development community continues to push for and believe in the notion that educational innovation is based on scientific advances in understanding child development and school functioning. Similarly, many teachers and teacher educators continually call for increased classroom autonomy and social status among teachers, based upon the supposedly scientific nature of their professional training. This paper takes issue with both of these points, arguing that the origin and success of most educationally innovative policies have as their origin the changing political, economic, and social forces visible in the country during the history of American education. Relatedly, since the science of teaching and learning takes a back seat in issues of school policy, teachers cannot and will not be able to convince the public and those in authority in the school that their insights and practices derive from any privileged understanding of the real needs of children. Arguing that teachers should, in fact, have more input into policy decisions in education, the paper concludes with a review and discussion of various strategies currently visible for improving the autonomy and control of classroom educators.     

Using problem solving teaching styles to prepare candidates for the CXC basic proficiency examinations

Two Grade 10 classes in an urban Jamaican High School were taught over a period of one academic year in two problem solving styles: an Explicit Style derived from Charles, and an Implicit Style derived from Isaacs. At the end of the academic year there was no significant difference in their performance on a problem solving test, or on the Problem Solving Profile of the Caribbean Examinations Council's Basic Proficiency papers. The two classes performed much better than the population who sat the Basic papers on the tasks measuring Recall and Algorithmic Thinking but only moderately better than the population on tasks measuring Problem Solving.The teaching project described in this paper was supported in part by grants from the Research and Publications Fund Committee of the University of the West Indies (Mona), and the Wolmers Trust, Kingston. The author wishes to thank the Registrar and the Pro-Registrar of the Caribbean Examinations Council for permission to use the CXC papers and data in this study. A modified version of this paper was presented at the 63rd Annual Conference of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics held in San Antonio, Texas in 1985.     

Toward Identifying Pedagogical Knowledge for Mentoring in Primary Science Teaching

Final year preservice teachers' perceptions of their mentoring in primary science teaching were gathered through surveys from three separate studies. The three studies (n = 59, n = 331, n = 60) provided an indication of the degree of mentoring preservice teachers perceived they received with mentoring practices linked to Pedagogical Knowledge. This research argues that mentors require pedagogical knowledge of primary science for guiding mentees with planning, timetabling, preparation, implementation, classroom management strategies, teaching strategies, science teaching knowledge, questioning skills, problem-solving strategies, assessment techniques, and developing viewpoints on science pedagogy. The key study findings (n = 331, from nine Australian universities involved in primary teacher education) indicated that 55% or more mentees had not received Pedagogical Knowledge for primary science teaching in each of the associated mentoring practices (mean score range: 2.60–2.91, standard deviation range: 1.10–1.32). The study concludes that mentors require further professional development to ensure that preservice teachers (mentees) receive adequate pedagogical knowledge for teaching primary science, which will involve significant collaboration between universities and schools.     

Paranoia: A few final remarks

Paranoid is given a tolerably clear meaning. It is suggested that conceptual understanding must be the first step before seeing how far unconscious or other pressures distract teachers and others from retaining a firm grasp of concepts. Concepts are not relative.     

A “model” proposal for reform in teacher training

The present paper uses as a point of departure two of Benton and Hoyt's (1990) survey items concerning undergraduate teaching and their finding that Holmes Group and Division 15 members favored more sweeping changes in teacher education whereas TESCSU members favored more incremental changes. It: (a) suggests that reform is unlikely to succeed without change in the behavior of those who teach prospective teachers; (b) suggests ways in which educational psychologists can improve the effectiveness of teachers and teacher training; and (c) questions whether moving teacher training to the graduate level will in fact improve such education.     

Fostering Distributed Science Learning Through Collaborative Technologies

TACTICS (French and Spanish acronym standing for Collaborative Work and Learning in Science with Information and Communications Technologies) is an ongoing project aimed at investigating a distributed community of learning and practice in which information and communications technologies (ICT) take the role of collaborative tools to support social construction of knowledge. This community is composed of researchers, graduate students, and high-school teachers and their students, from six schools and four universities in Canada and Mexico. It set out in fall 2000 to develop a community around the general topic of integrating concepts in science school subjects. Once a prototype community is established, it can become a terrain where different aspects could be studied. Subsequently, researchers could gradually take a back seat allowing as well as ensuring the autonomy of the school members involved and, thereby, the viability of the learning community. The set up of the proposed prototype distributed science learning community was therefore an essential yet far from trivial first step. This paper discusses the process of setting up the community and the lessons learned.     

The economics of bonded service: The case of graduate secondary teachers in Victoria,Australia

In the six Australian states the main form of recruitment of teachers for government schools has been through the award of teacher scholarships or studentships to entrants to teacher training. The teacher trainees in return have bonded themselves to undertake a period of teaching. The object of this paper is to measure some of the costs and benefits of the scheme that has operated in the state of Victoria.A range of present values of the cost of training a cohort of male university entrants and the subsequent salary bill in teaching of the survivors have been estimated with the aid of a Markov chain model. The estimates are based on data on survival in training and in teaching. and salary and allowance data at the turn of the decade Alternative estimates were made of the salary bill at higher salary rates which might be offered in place of the studentship scheme and which could be considered likely to yield at least as large a quantity of teaching service. Even under the tight labour conditions at the end of the sixties the studentship scheme appeared to be a very expensive method of recruitment. When consideration is given to other costs and benefits in teaching and to society generally the case against the studentship appears even stronger.An earlier and more detailed version of this paper was given at the Third Conference of Economists, Economic Society of Australia and New Zealand, Adelaide, May 1973: it is based on Burke (1972, Ch. 10). Tables of estimates and accompanying methodological notes are available from the author. I am grateful to C. Selby Smith and Gary P. Sampson for comments on early drafts.     

Certifying effect and consumer effect: Some remarks on strategies employed by higher education institutions

The term certification, as used in discussions concerning higher education, is clarified and a distinction made between terminal awards which do have a genuine certifying effect in the sense of procuring admission to a profession and those which do not. Institutions wishing to increase the value of the certifying effect of their awards, seek to do this by stimulating applications for entry to their institution. The longer the queue at the gate the greater the prestige of the terminal award. The ability to influence the certifying effect of an award does not, however, lie with the teaching institutions alone; business, the employers and the professions can, and increasingly do, determine the relative value of awards and of different ways of preparing for the exercise of a particular profession. The case of the business schools in France is described to illustrate how teaching institutions once they are established seek to increase the certifying effect of the diplomas they award by actually reducing the number of graduates. The numerus clausus, as applied to medical schools, provides another example of the same phenomenon. Such strategies lead to what the author describes as consumer effect. Once admittance to a prestige institution has been gained, entry to a position of influence and possibly affluence, is more or less assured. Students in such institutions, in both capitalist and communist countries, have exploited this by persuading teaching staff to acquiesce in a reduction of the demands made by the course, though some directors of institutions have begun to respond by failing more students, seeking to re-establish positions surrendered in the days of student unrest and by these and other means seeking to reduce consumer effect. Teacher training colleges provide an interesting example of institutions having a low but certain certifying effect, producing a high consumer effect. The possibility of deriving a general theory from the proposition put forward in the article is discussed.This is an improved version of an article published earlier in French: Effet certifiant et effet clientèle. Quelques remarques sur les stratégies des institutions d'enseignement supérieur dans les pays développés, ESPRIT, nov./dec. 1978. Translation: Sylvia Collot.