The Soviet Teachers I Have Seen

After more than two months' visit and study in Soviet Russia, I deeply understand that in socialist countries the profession of people's teacher is one of the most respected professions. The secondary school students we met, especially girl students, were all willing to choose teaching as their profession. According to the headmaster of the First Normal [Teacher Training] School in Moscow, each year during the period of entrance examinations, he would personally conduct interviews with each of the applicants. In the conversation he would introduce the conditions of the school and ask the applicant's opinions. If he should discover that a student had not applied to the normal school on [his or hers] own initiative, or had no great interest in the education of young children, he would dissuade the applicants from taking the entrance examination. Nevertheless, each year applicants who take the entrance examinations to the normal school are very numerous even though these applicants all have the qualifications to apply to other schools. From this we can tell how much the young people of Soviet Russia love the teaching profession.     

Mentoring empowers gifted/Learning disabled students to soar!

The Wings Mentor Program, established by the Division of Accelerated and Enriched Instruction of Maryland's Montgomery County Public Schools, was developed to provide additional support to students with gifts who also have learning disabilities (GAD) and highly able students who were not succeeding in the classroom. Students realize their creative and intellectual potential when paired with mentors who nurture them by increasing their knowledge and skills in an area of interest. The mentors, who have a background in education and/or experience working with children, are carefully screened and selected based on their knowledge in a specific field, and their ability to share their skills with young people. Mentors communicate with the classroom teachers so that the successful strategies can be transferred and applied to the classroom setting. The article includes an analysis of the program's components, the mentor/student/teacher partnership, and training practices.     

Who makes higher education graduates ready for work? The case of teacher education in Slovenia

This paper starts by focusing on the problem of students' transition to working life in the domain of teacher education. Second, it problematises the teacher educator concept. Particular attention is paid to the question of which professionals regard themselves as teacher educators, and why. Third, it presents young teachers' acquisition of working experience and their transition from education to work in Slovenia as linked to three processes: practical and developmental work in schools during studies, traineeship period, and continuous professional learning. The general findings indicate that teacher education, training and professional development are all characterised by a sharp division between the role of academics (transmitters of theory), and senior teachers (facilitators of teachers' practical experiences). In our findings we demonstrate that young graduates lack a well-considered and integrated acquisition of practical experience as they move from education to the labour market. The paper is concluded with a call for better understanding the role of academics in preparing graduates for the world of work.     

青少年极端偏差行为的心理分析与教育策略

我国青少年的自杀、杀人与弑师等极端偏差行为具有不断增多的趋势.生命意识的缺失、应对挫折能力的不足、情绪不稳定与归因偏差是导致青少年极端偏差行为出现的心理因素.要预防和减少青少年极端偏差行为的出现,就必须以生命意识教育为核心、培养青少年应对外界挫折的能力、培养青少年的情绪智力与归因能力,促进青少年形成健全的人格.     

How African American Parents Understand Their and Teachers' Roles in Children's Schooling and What this Means for Preparing Preservice Teachers

Preservice teachers are socialized by their own raced, classed, and gendered experiences to expect “caring parents” to behave and contribute in certain ways to their children's schooling. Preservice teachers who come from widely divergent backgrounds from the communities in which they serve can sometimes be skeptical of parents who are not involved in children's schooling in ways that are familiar from their own upbringing. Moreover, much of the existing scholarship on parent involvement and the transition to school takes a top-down approach that discounts the important knowledge parents bring to the table. This is a study of African American parents of young children who were preparing to transition to kindergarten or first grade that proposes an alternate conversation about what we can learn from parents when we examine their ways of framing and enacting “involvement” in their children's school lives. African American parents and caregivers (N?=?25) participated in qualitative interviews. Thematic analyses of the interviews revealed that participants constructed preparation for the transition to school broadly, as preparation for the “real world.” I will discuss the implications of the study for teaching, teacher education, and future research, so that preservice teachers and teacher educators can begin to build a greater imagination for parent involvement.     

教你正确用(二十二)

Mother's Day--母亲节 Mother's Day falls on the second Sunday in May every year. This is the occasion we show appreciation to our mothers and to people who have worked so hard to take care of us. Today, I'm sharing thoughts from a friend about mother, love,and the study of English. When we were young students, a teacher touched our heart,and we all miss her very much on this special day in May.     

Apple Jumper,Teacher Babe,and Bland Uniformer Teachers: Fashioning Feminine Teacher Bodies

A student teacher group's conversation about teacher clothing as reflective of certain kinds of reprehensible or desirable teacher identities provoked the writing of this article. I use a feminist poststructuralist analysis to explore the three categories of women teachers' dress suggested by the student teachers as signifiers of women teachers' subjectivities discursively produced within the contexts of schooling. The article also challenges the three categories as constructions produced by this student teacher group in their positionality as young, White, middle-class, heterosexual female novice teachers in the Southeast region of the United States. This inquiry highlights the limitations and constrictions of women teachers' institutionalized subjectivities and suggests ways in which these limitations and constrictions offer sites for resistance, specifically in relation to clothing choices that shape and reflect a feminine teacher body.     

北京市中小学青年教师专业素养现状调查与分析——以“京教杯”参赛青年教师为研究对象

以网上问卷调查的方式,对849名参加"京教杯"比赛的青年教师进行专业素养现状调查。结果发现:"京教杯"参赛青年教师对学科知识的理解尚不够深入,反思能力低于其他能力,教育观念还需深化,情感素养亟待提升。制约参赛教师专业发展的主要因素是"工作繁忙、缺乏自主时间""缺乏专业指导""缺乏教育资源"等。基于此,我们需要整体、全面地认识中小学青年教师的专业素养,提升其情感素养,营造良好的成长氛围,提供专业支持与指导,激发其自我实现的内驱力,促进其自主成长。     

Listening to Student Concerns: An Instructional Strategy to Expand Student Perspectives

It is well documented in the literature that relationships influence the lives of young children (birth to second grade). Consequently, it is essential that young children's caregivers and teachers build professional relationships with children's parents, because these relationships influence the children's present and later learning environments both at home and in school. While listening to parents is a well-established value in the field of Early Childhood Care and Education, details about what “listening to parents” means seem less clear in the literature, research, and our own pedagogy as early childhood educators. Incidentally, teacher candidates and advanced teacher students (hereafter referred to as “our students”) sometimes voice concerns related specifically to listening to parents. Yet, answers to such concerns also seem limited in the literature and the research. Therefore, the intent of this reflective position paper is threefold: to provide my fellow teacher educators with three literature-based reasons to share with our students about why it is important to listen to parents; to indentify familiar comments, concerns, and feelings that our students have voiced about listening to parents; and to provide five practical cooperative-learning activities that will potentially influence our students' practices.     

A sense of place

Conclusion Places shape the stories of our lives. These stories become ongoing “ecological conversations”—i.e., expressions of the dialogue between ourselves and the environment (Lutts, 1985). When this conversation ends, so will our future. The development of healthy environmental awareness and concern starts with a feeling response to nature. Such a response comes primarily by way of firsthand positive experiences in the out-of-doors, especially in environments fostering a “sense of place” experience. Attention to creating a sense of place for young children can thus prove helpful in fostering a lifelong commitment to the natural environment. In designing “sense of place” play and learning spaces for young children, we are, indeed, designing the future as well.     

‘I have got too much stuff wrong with me’ – an exploration of how young people experience the Social,Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties (SEBD) label within the confines of the UK education system

Young people whose behaviour does not conform to our expectations of how pupils should behave within an educational context have had a variety of labels attached to them including: Social, Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties (SEBD), and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). The employment of such labels will shape how the young person is perceived by the adults surrounding them. This will not only have an impact on the relationships that are developed between the pupil and the educator but also how the young people see themselves in terms of their own identity. This paper seeks to give voice and explore the position of young people within the confines of their educational experiences. The paper draws on 13 in-depth case studies to reflect on how young people experience the SEBD labels attached to them by others and what pupils consider to be the main antecedents leading them to display behaviour which is deemed unacceptable in the classroom. The paper highlights the importance of providing opportunities for young people to have their voice heard to fill the gap between professional perceptions and those of the pupil. In order to truly understand why young people display behaviour that is considered difficult and how they experience the labels we attach to them we have to speak to young people themselves.     

Creating optimal work environments: exploring teacher flow experiences

The purpose of this article is to provide a new perspective on the intricacies of the work life in schools that motivate and satisfy teachers. The authors review the literature related to the improvement of school environments and the concept of ‘flow’ as defined by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi (1990 Csikszentmihalyi M 1990 Flow: the psychology of optimal experience (New York, Harper and Row)  [Google Scholar]). He describes flow as a ‘state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at a great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it’ (p. 4). These experiences when applied to classrooms have the potential of enhancing teachers' work environments and increasing their effectiveness, thereby increasing student achievement. A review of research over several years indicates that the frequency of principals' classroom visits predicts teacher flow experiences in the following areas: (a) teacher self‐efficacy, (b) teacher‐perceived school efficacy, (c) teacher‐perceived efficacy of other teachers, (d) teacher‐perceived organizational effectiveness, and (e) teacher‐perceived efficacy of evaluations and professional development programs. Each of these those variables is discussed and suggestions incorporated so administrators can build work environments where teachers have greater opportunities to experience flow.     

Shifting Identities: An investigation into student and novice teachers' evolving professional identity

This paper focuses on recent and innovative moves towards flexible learning in initial teacher education programmes in England and Wales, as part of the ‘widening participation’ agenda in higher education and in response to changes in teacher recruitment patterns. We take as our perspective our own experience as two course tutors in a higher education institution that introduced flexible routes into its secondary teacher education programme at the beginning of the academic year 2002/2003. Using the university's model for our case study, we have undertaken a small‐scale research project and reviewed the literature describing flexible learning discourses in higher education, to consider the extent to which concepts of flexibility are being translated into practice. In particular we highlight some implications for pedagogy and practice that have become apparent at this early stage in the development of flexible courses and which will have an impact upon their progress in the future.     

The Teacher-Student Relationship in Secondary School: Insights from excluded students

This paper is derived from a study of excluded students' perceptions of their educational experience. It is based on the accounts of 33 young people, all permanently excluded from school. Through in-depth, semi-structured interviews a number of salient features of the school experience were raised. One of these features is the students' relationships with teachers. This paper considers excluded students' perceptions of teacher qualities that either foster or hinder the development of positive relations, disciplinary practice as a particularly significant set of interactions that affect relationships, and the hierarchical social structure in which these relationships are formed and operate. The result is an ideal model of the teacher-student relationship based on the excluded students' accounts. This model reconsiders power relations in order to create a set of interactions that recognises the students' non-child status while, at the same time, highlighting teacher-specific responsibilities such as duty of care.     

Us and them: Finding irony in our teaching methods

This paper reports a collaborative project to explore our work as teacher educators, an effort to reconstruct a stance for ourselves in relation to our students. Our analysis is aligned with feminist post-modern perspectives, involving a reflexive representation of our teaching identities. To collect these expressions, we kept a real-time dialogue journal, sitting together weekly over the course of a semester, writing to each other in conversation about our ongoing interactions with students. We reviewed these written records looking for contradictions in our talk about our students and our methods of instruction. This paper shares our discovery of the ironic in our desires for authoritative knowledge, effective methods, coherent organization, and harmonic relationships that mirrored our students' requests of us. We suggest the importance of planting seeds of irony alongside our teaching recommendations, so that our students might recognize and embrace the limitations of our authority. I wonder about the value in talking about what concerns us in our teaching. The labels we dredge up get us to the same old places where we win, students struggle, and colleagues don't get it. Well, I don't usually get it either. I mean, I think you can get used to an audience and figure out how to address it, and that might get you good course evaluations. But to what end? (Hinchman, 9 September 1995).     

Teacher‐pupil dialogue in the guided reading session

Drawing on the findings of an ESRC‐funded project, this article concerns the quality of teacher‐pupil dialogue in the guided reading session of the Literacy Hour and its relationship to pupils' powers of comprehension. We recorded and analysed examples of discussions during the guided reading session in four primary schools, visiting each of them three times. On each school visit, we recorded the same group of six Year 6 children (10–11‐year‐olds) working with their class teacher. The results of the study suggest that talk in this context is teacher‐dominated. The teacher: usually asks questions to which s/he already knows the answer; normally selects which pupil is going to speak next; keeps a tight grip on the topic of conversation; and does most of the talking. We argue that there is a case for making time available during the guided reading session for a period of discussion in which pupils are invited to play a more leading role in shaping the topic of conversation.     

Reality Check: A teacher educator returns home

This collaborative self-study, told through email excerpts and reflections, explores a teacher educator's return to high school teaching. In this study, we juxtapose our voices and alternate between past and present to develop insights that reveal how going back can lead to moving forward with respect to educating prospective teachers. While the story is Lisa's, we work together to use self-study as a research approach methodologically aimed at improving practice. As a teacher educator, Lisa's experience of being a first-year teacher with her former students was one of the most powerful experiences of her professional life. Being a new teacher for a second time forced her to face novice-teacher issues as a participant rather than as an observer or researcher. At times Lisa had no choice but to put aside her doctoral training. When she subsequently returned to teacher education, she did so with renewed passion and enriched understanding of the challenges facing new teachers.     

Aesthetic experience in a dynamic cycle: Implications for early childhood teachers and teacher educators

Abstract

This study describes early childhood teachers’ own beliefs and concepts of aesthetic experience in young children. The teachers involved in this study were directly engaged in preschools for 4 and 5 year‐olds where arts and aesthetic education are a primary consideration of their integrated curriculum. These teachers identified a variety of features of aesthetic experience in three dimensions, which develop in a dynamic, non‐linear cycle. This study suggests that early childhood teacher's awareness and knowledge of aesthetic experience is critical to support the high quality of young children's learning through the arts. It concludes with implications for both teacher education programs and early childhood teacher educators. © 2005 Published by Elsevier Inc.