‘Becoming co-operative’ – challenges and insights: repositioning school engagement as a collective endeavour

ABSTRACT

This article explores how a school’s decision to become co-operative affects its engagement relationships with students and parents. The findings stem from a wider study exploring approaches to engagement in a recently converted co-operative academy, a large secondary school in a northern English city. The article surfaces the possibilities and tensions that occur as the school seeks to reposition itself in the English education marketplace, with a co-operative model that explicitly sets out to promote mutualisation, not privatisation; ‘we’ rather than ‘me’. The process of becoming co-operative is examined by exploring the underlying purposes of the school’s engagement with students and parents and the relationships that emerge as a result. The study surfaces the issues faced as a co-operative school seeks to enact thicker, ‘collective forms’ of democratic engagement against a backdrop of English education policy based on individualistic notions of democracy as freedom of choice. The findings point to the need for a different policy understanding of school engagement, an understanding that suggests engagement is about the process of developing more equitable, collaborative relationships with stakeholders and rests on the repositioning of students, parents and community members – from ‘choosers’ and ‘consumers’ to a collective public in education.     

Becoming a female leader in higher education: investigations from a regional university

Issues of gender imbalance in leadership have long been a significant issue in universities, as is the case across most industries. This paper explores the experiences of seven females who have successfully achieved senior leadership positions at a regional university in Australia. While the experiences of these women differ in many ways, there are certainly similarities in the challenges and adversities that they have faced, and their perceptions of what has allowed them to experience success in their leadership roles. This paper provides a number of recommendations for women aspiring to be leaders in higher education, such as committing to ongoing development, taking opportunities when presented, developing resilience, developing a track record, and seeking support, and also recommendations for institutions.     

From school leader to educational leader

ABSTRACT

This study builds on research which contends that just as effective principals must lead across a broad purview of responsibilities in order to build successful schools, so too must middle leaders. Decentralisation of school management has resulted in an expansion of school principals’ responsibilities, contributing to a further distribution of leadership responsibility to middle leaders. This conception of middle leadership requires a shift in understanding of the nature of middle leaders’ work. There is vast potential for middle leaders to contribute to their schools beyond subject administration, yet the research base yields limited insight on such work and on how middle leaders can be supported to accomplish it. This research finds that middle leaders who expand their leadership responsibilities do so in contexts that utilise school mission, policy enactment and organisational design as platforms for enhanced middle leadership.     

Becoming your own leader: From leader to possible failure and back again—A pragmatic approach

Many people resign themselves to play “follow the leader” and allow others to make decisions that have major impact on their professional and personal lives. Nevertheless, we can, if we choose, take control of our own future and become our own leader and thus decide what we will do and accomplish. This article provides the concepts and tools to take control of your own life and become your own leader. It is built on the performance accomplishments in organizations and in the rest of life.     

Managing senior management team boundaries and school improvement: an investigation of the school leader role

The present study purpose was to investigate the unique role and activities of school principals in managing their senior management team (SMT) boundaries. The study examined how school principals’ internal and external activities mediate the relationship of principals’ personal factors from the Big Five typology, the team and contextual characteristics of functional heterogeneity and goal interdependence to SMT effectiveness and school outcomes of teachers’ absenteeism, school violence and academic emphasis. The results of the structural equation model from a sample of 92 schools indicate that internal activities fully mediate the relationship between principal extraversion and conscientiousness, SMT functional heterogeneity, intra-and inter-team goal interdependence to SMT effectiveness. The external activities were found to fully mediate the relationship between principal extraversion, SMT functional heterogeneity, intra-and inter-team goal interdependence to school outcomes. By concluding that both internal and external activities remain fundamental to overall effectiveness, this study may provide principals with boundary management techniques and practices. The findings may encourage principals to establish priorities and allocate their time, resources and attention effectively both inward and outward the SMT boundary so as to improve SMT and school outcomes.     

Becoming real: adult student impressions of developing an educational researcher identity

This study investigated the inner experiences of adults learning to become educational researchers. Through narrative analysis of doctoral students’ tales of memorable early encounters in conducting research, insight was gained into the self-questioning tension, conflict, and drama often experienced. A discussion about how to utilize students’ reflective writings to provide appropriate developmental support in doctoral programmes is provided.     

Junior high school physics: Using a qualitative strategy for successful problem solving

Students at the junior high school (JHS) level often cannot use their knowledge of physics for explaining and predicting phenomena. We claim that this difficulty stems from the fact that explanations are multi‐step reasoning tasks, and students often lack the qualitative problem‐solving strategies needed to guide them. This article describes a new instructional approach for teaching mechanics at the JHS level that explicitly teaches such a strategy. The strategy involves easy to use visual representations and leads from characterizing the system in terms of interactions to the design of free‐body force diagrams. These diagrams are used for explaining and predicting phenomena based on Newton's laws. The findings show that 9th grade students who studied by the approach advanced significantly from pretests to post‐tests on items of the Force Concept Inventory—FCI and on other items examining specific basic and complex understanding performances. These items focused on the major learning goals of the program. In the post‐tests the JHS students performed on the FCI items better than advanced high‐school and college students. In addition, interviews conducted before, during, and after instruction indicated that the students had an improved ability to explain and predict phenomena using physics ideas and that they showed retention after 6 months. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 47: 1094–1115, 2010     

Activity genre: a new approach to successful inclusive teaching

In this paper, I examine why constructivist practice in mathematics education, while appealing to pre-service teachers' hearts and minds, does not necessarily deliver the empowered and liberated students that many educators and policy developers seem to take for granted. I argue that this may be so because constructivist practice, although it fosters the construction of important and necessary intellectual knowledges, reinforces power/ knowledge relationships of teacher authority that these students experienced at school. I draw on a post-structuralist analysis of my own constructivist practice in teacher education to show how investments of power/knowledge and subjectivity were played out to effectively maintain the status quo , severely limiting the students' experiences and appreciation of problem-solving or investigative ways-of-being in mathematics (education). In the conclusion, I suggest steps that might be taken in teacher education to help students recognise the powerful constitutive effects of discourses and to think about the kinds of classroom relationships that might be most engaging and enabling for learners.     

Clones,drones and dragons: ongoing uncertainties around school leader development

This article examines a number of key issues around successful school leadership and leader development. Three metaphors are used to frame, track and analyse recent research and commentary in the area – these are clones, drones and dragons. Although development mechanisms rarely fall neatly within one category, the metaphors provide a useful way to examine some of the ongoing uncertainties around leader development. Clones duplicate what others think they know about successful leadership. Drones carry cloned knowledge and are controlled ‘from afar’ by centralised authorities or other ‘outsiders’. Dragons take organic forms which can mutate in terms of shape, colour and form in line with more localised needs. As such, they aim to nurture leaders who lead change successfully within their communities with reference to but not dictated by standardised knowledge. Issues flowing from interactions between these categories form a set of questions or tensions faced by systems and leaders themselves.     

Science in the schoolhouse: the critical role of the school leader

School-level administrative support has been identified as an essential component of programs that promote research to practice. In this discussion, I address the critical role that school leaders play in supporting special educators and ensuring effective instruction for students with learning disabilities. Emphasis is placed on the need for teachers to be supported by administrators who are knowledgeable about special education and for administrators to receive the preparation and guidance they require to support science in contemporary schools.     

Inclusion: developing an effective whole school approach

There is very little research that specifically looks at how autism spectrum disorders are perceived in various communities. This qualitative research was conducted with parents who had children on the autistic spectrum belonging to four different ethnic communities (White British, Somali, West African and South Asian – 63 in total) and living in the UK. The study found that the importance that the parents give to various social skills varied on the basis of their cultural background and the gender of the parent. This is an important aspect to consider while providing support and services to individuals on the autism spectrum and their family members if the services have to be appropriate for their needs. This consideration would also enable the individuals on the autism spectrum to develop appropriate social skills required within their cultural groups. This is a preliminary study and further research on the topic is required.     

Becoming an urban science teacher: How beginning teachers negotiate contradictory school contexts

Teacher attrition rates are high in urban schools, particularly for new science teachers. Little research has addressed how science teachers can be prepared to effectively bridge the divide between preparation and urban teaching. We utilized the theoretical frameworks of social justice, identity, and structure-agency to investigate this transition. Specifically, we examined the Urban Science Teacher Preparation (USTP) program as a critical case of “well-prepared” urban science teachers. Study participants included one cohort of four teachers. Data, primarily from individual interviews, a focus group, and written reflections, were collected from participants during pre-service preparation and their first year of teaching. The USTP program nurtured the development of a professional identity aligned with teaching science for social justice, with a unique emphasis on identifying structural injustices in schools. Findings indicate all four teachers used their identities to negotiate school policies and procedures that restricted student opportunities to learn science through three processes: deconstructing the context, positioning themselves within and against the context, and enacting their identities. These findings suggest the importance of USTP programs to provide teacher candidates with political clarity for teaching for social justice and sustained induction support to resist school socialization pressures.     

The place of forest school within English primary schools: senior leader perspectives

Focussing on the place of Forest School in English primary schools, we explore the perspectives of school leaders. We use Biesta's model of educational purpose as a critical lens to consider possible justifications for the inclusion of Forest School in the curriculum. Four distinct accounts, based on an analysis of in-depth interviews, illustrate a range of participant responses: risk, intervention, respite and the right thing. One of these, we contend, represents a tentative step towards a form of resistance on the part of a school leader in the face of current pressures to follow a diminished set of educational purposes.     

Discerning contextual complexities in STEM career pathways: insights from successful Latinas

Cultural Studies of Science Education - This paper introduces the concept of contextual mitigating factors (CMFs) as a theoretical construct to help understand how Latinas who demonstrated success...