African international doctoral students in New Zealand: Englishes,doctoral writing and intercultural supervision

While the experiences of international doctoral students, especially those from Asian countries, have been well researched, fewer studies have explored the experiences of African students in Southern countries like Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand. This article reports on doctoral writing and student and supervisor perspectives on English languages in a small study of supervisors and African students in New Zealand. It challenges deficit constructions of African students and illustrates how the growing internationalisation of higher education is adding to the complexities of doctoral writing, raising questions as to how students and supervisors recognise and navigate differences in Englishes and doctoral writing. It makes a number of recommendations about how supervisors might work effectively with African and other doctoral students.     

Distributed leadership: developing theory from practice

Hopes that the transformation of schools lies with exceptional leaders have proved both unrealistic and unsustainable. The idea of leadership as distributed across multiple people and situations has proven to be a more useful framework for understanding the realities of schools and how they might be improved. However, empirical work on how leadership is distributed within more and less successful schools is rare. This paper presents key concepts related to distributed leadership and illustrates them with an empirical study in a school‐improvement context in which varying success was evident. Grounding the theory in this practice‐context led to the identification of some risks and benefits of distributing leadership and to a challenge of some key concepts presented in earlier theorizing about leadership and its distribution.     

Factors of success: building and sustaining teaching professional development opportunities for doctoral students and postdocs

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the key issues and elements to consider in developing and sustaining teaching development programs for doctoral students and postdoctoral scholars in connection to a large multi-institutional, higher education reform network. Based on interviews with 47 participants at eight member institutions and the central administration of the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning (CIRTL), we found five major components: campus culture, the program’s organizational placement, program leadership, program logistics, and the benefits acquired from adopting and adapting network ideas, knowledge, and resources.     

Connecting theory and practice: Results from the teaching of Logo

This paper is concerned with pupils' learning of the concept of variable in the Logo programming environment and how this relates to teaching. Results from three research projects are described and compared in a discussion of how improvements in learning have been influenced by a refinement in teaching method. This refinement has been influenced, in part, by the theories of Vygotsky. Within this paper, details of the changes in teaching approach are described together with a discussion of the effects of these changes. The main conclusion drawn is that in mathematics education we need to make more explicit the underlying theories influencing our work, because these theories influence both the ways in which we work in the classroom and the ways in which we analyse our data.I am grateful to Celia Hoyles and Harvey Mellar for their comments on an earlier version of this paper. And I would like to thank the Economic and Social Science Research Council for their support for Project AnA (Grant Number R000232132).     

Bridging theory and practice: a conceptual framework for consulting organisations

A growing number of organisations are emerging as partners to districts pursuing systemic improvement. Given the critical role a consulting organisation could play in supporting system reform efforts, how does a district leader looking to establish a consulting partnership determine what characteristics in a consulting organisation may be more likely to yield success? This paper utilises an exploratory sequential mixed methods approach for two purposes: (1) to assess whether the quality domains of consultants most prevalent in the literature are consistent with multiple sources of expert knowledge at the point of practice and (2) to determine which, if any, quality domains of consultants are perceived as more important than others for partnership success. Overall, the findings corroborated that the domains identified through the literature are influential to partnership success. While no specific domain or set of domains emerged as most dominant, interpersonal skills and content expertise are foundational indicators that crosscut the other domains.     

Supporting student teachers in developing and applying professional knowledge with videoed events

Student teachers often struggle with handling events in the complex environment that is a classroom. This article reports on a study that investigates the potential of using video-based materials to support mathematics student teachers in developing and applying professional knowledge. Student teachers viewed videos of classroom events with possible teacher reactions to each event. This article reports on the discourse that occurred before and after the viewing of the four possible responses in terms of the content and the nature of the discussions. Results show that when the event focused on mathematics, the focus of the responses shifted from themselves as teachers to the learners. However, the converse was true when the event focused on generic classroom management issues. Additionally, the nature of both sets of responses became more evaluative and interpretive following the video clips of possible responses.     

Constructivist learning theory and human capital theory: shifting political and educational frameworks for teachers' ICT professional development

This case study discusses the influence of politics on educational technology policies and practices by tracing the effects of a change of governing political parties with differing ideologies and advisory constituencies. It begins by describing a democratic socialist government initiative based on social capital theory and emphasising connections among individuals. The information and communications technology (ICT) initiative is a peer mentorship model of teacher professional development using constructivist learning theory that emphasises activity‐based situated learning processes. The article then describes a shift in the political context with the election of a political party with a market orientation guided by principles of fiscal responsibility and free enterprise. The subsequent reformulation of educational policy draws from human capital theory and emphasises accountability and the measurement of students’ achievement of technological skills against standard learning outcomes. The significance of the political dimension on the development of educational policies for ICT is discussed, with the conclusion that the exclusion of particular constituent groups can result in narrowly defined educational needs.     

Personal theory and reflection in a professional practice portfolio

Portfolios are widely used in the assessment of professional learning. Although claims are made that portfolios promote reflection, the nature of such reflection and the mechanisms that promote it in the portfolio process are not well understood. A four‐year action research project investigated a professional practice portfolio for high stakes assessment in a post‐graduate programme for special education resource teachers (RTs) that was preparing them for a paradigmatically different role. This paper focuses on the requirement to submit a personal theory (PT) statement in the portfolio. Although tension between the summative and formative purposes of the portfolio was evident for some RTs, a more comprehensive understanding of reflection was evident and many RTs reported that articulating their PT (often for the first time in their career) impacted positively on their ability to reflect on practice.     

Understanding educational transfer: theoretical perspectives and conceptual frameworks

Educational transfer is an important and growing body of literature in the field of comparative education. Work from the last decade has focused on the stages of the borrowing cycle, and the context, causes and rationales for education borrowing. This recent work has contributed to earlier research on the role of multilateral organizations in education development and transfer. Rather than reviewing in comprehensive detail the substance, agents or mechanisms of educational transfer, this paper provides an overview of the field’s main theoretical lenses and conceptual frameworks, focusing on the stages, processes and forms of educational transfer. Throughout the paper we link related literature from disciplines other than education to account for education policy changes. The paper concludes with a discussion of future lines of research on educational transfer.

Developing conceptual frameworks for creativity, ICT and teacher education

This paper presents the first phase of a study in teacher education, which explored how a conceptual framework for creativity with information and communication technology (ICT) might be developed and expressed in professional development for primary education pre-service and newly qualified teachers. The Creativity and Professional Development Project (C&PD) involved 16 education ICT specialists in the final stage of their BA in an English University. They participated in the project to investigate their classroom practice in the use of ICT to promote creativity in the making of digital video movies, and to reflect upon the development of their pedagogy with ICT in primary classrooms. The analysis focuses on the student teachers’ experience of engaging in creative activities to prepare, teach and evaluate a school-based project, and identified themes of their understandings and personal experience of creativity, the contribution of ICT, and their reflections on professional development. This analysis raises the issue of designing learning experiences, which promote and support creativity with ICT in the context of teacher learning. A conceptual framework to describe creative practices with ICT in teacher education was developed from the study.