Contemporary challenges and changes: principals' leadership practices in Malaysia

This article outlines the findings from a contemporary study of principals' leadership practices in Malaysia as part of the 7 System Leadership Study. Recent policy developments within Malaysia have increased principals' accountability and have underlined the importance of the role of the principals in transforming school performance and student learning outcomes. This article draws upon emerging empirical evidence about principals' leadership practices and highlights some of the challenges associated with the new accountability expectations and demands placed upon principals in Malaysia. It provides a contemporary insight into the way in which principals in Malaysia view their leadership practice. The article proposes that despite the pressure on them to secure better school and student outcomes, principals in Malaysia increasingly view their leadership practices as transformational and distributed.     

School curriculum in South Africa in the Covid-19 context: An opportunity for education for relevance

The pandemic nature of the Covid-19 virus and the infectious potential that this virus has for the global population demands a radical response. This article focuses on school education within the context of Covid-19 and asks a fundamental curriculum question around what knowledge is most worthwhile for school education in response to this disease. Schools within South Africa have been closed for an extended period and, within the guidelines for dealing with this infectious disease, social distancing has become a key component in determining how and when schools should reopen. This uncertainty has led to speculations, suggestions, proposals and tentative plans for a school recovery plan to save the integrity of the academic year. The article reviews some of the suggestions, proposals, and plans, which illuminate a technical concern of curriculum coverage rather than a curriculum concern of what learning should be pursued post the lockdown period. It also argues that, going forward, a review of the purpose of school is needed. If learning is the bedrock for determining a school curriculum, it should of necessity be relevant and responsive to the issues and challenges of the country within a global world.

     

Time,space and the scholarly habitus: Thinking through the phenomenological dimensions of field

This article engages critically with Bourdieu’s notion of field. It questions the emphasis that Bourdieu places on what he terms ‘objective relations’ at the expense of the actual relations of those within a field. This not only involves relations between human actors but the interactions of humans with the non-human such as inanimate objects that over time, and in particular spaces, engender certain forms of embodiment. The intention of the article is to think through these phenomenological dimensions of field. It does this by firstly examining these issues as theoretical questions before siting them within an empirical context, revisiting data from an earlier study into the differential achievement of students of Chinese-, Pacific Islander- and Anglo-Australian backgrounds to ascertain the ways in which various micropractices performed within the home promote different dispositions to learning, some more and some less of value at school.     

A missing link? Contemporary insights into principal preparation and training in Russia

Over the last decade, the Russian education system has undergone significant transformation that has radically changed the expectations placed upon the school principals. This current reform process has placed far greater responsibilities and accountabilities upon principals to secure school effectiveness and improved student learning outcomes. This article offers some insights into the way in which principals in Russia are currently prepared and trained. It outlines initial quantitative findings from Russian principals, as part of a contemporary, large-scale empirical study of principal leadership preparation and training. The emerging empirical evidence highlights that the new principal standards and training requirements in Russia reinforce “managerial approaches” that are not necessarily meeting the needs of principals.     

The girl with the garden gloves: researching the affordances of sensual materialities in the school garden

ABSTRACT

This article uses vignettes and photographs taken from ethnographic research to reframe the methodological assumptions within school garden research. New theoretical perspectives are applied to previous empirical school garden research that provides deeper understandings of both the teaching and the learning of ecoliteracy in such material contexts. Actor Network Theory and Social Semiotics further highlight the affordance of school garden spaces. We make public the conversations of a small research group about a perceived ethnographic turn towards materiality, aesthetics and agency.     

新形势下学讲方式应用于高中化学教学的对策思考

当前在我国高考科目中,化学始终是重点科目之一,化学也在高中阶段受到很大的重视。因此,在新形势下,高考的全新指引对高中化学学科教学提出了新的要求。为了最大限度地提升学生的化学学习效果,就要选择最佳的化学教学方式。本文针对高中化学的学讲方式应用展开探讨,希望对高中化学教学起到一定的促进作用。     

Conceptualising Curriculum Knowledge Within and Beyond the National Context

The core theme of this article is the implications of a global language for the curriculum and how it can be dealt with in terms of content knowledge and reform. First, the article conceptualises curriculum from the perspective of schooling within a geographical territory, symbolising its own cultural history and the nation as a key agent in reform. Second, it takes a closer look at current reform designs and asks how they represent equivalent but also contrasting arguments and rationales about curriculum beyond the national. Third, the article discusses implications of globalisation for curriculum pertaining to both cultivation and qualification as indispensable parts of education and schooling. The main empirical point of departure is the formal curriculum guidelines in Norway, written policy documents, expert reports and evaluation frameworks, written within the last two decades. Through the application of a new language for change, these documents advocate world-wide expectations which could harmonise curriculum across national boarders. However, the design of the reform is of core significance in standardisation processes, and highly dependent on the way matters and meanings are conceptualised in the professional semantics which accompany reform efforts within and beyond the national context.     

Vocational Education and Training: Researching the Relationship between School and Work

Researchers and policy makers agree that the relation between school and work is an important characteristic of vocational education and training (VET) and needs attention. The relation itself poses several challenges for research to be successful and useful for policy makers. In this article, we outline these challenges and answer the following question: What needs to be considered when researching the relation between school and work? Our central claim is that research on the relation between school and work needs to (1) take into account contextual conditions of the VET system, including identifying the central actors and their responsibilities within a VET system, (2) take into account the characteristics of VET itself, (3) define the quality of the relation between school and work (depending on the context, characteristics of the VET system and VET itself), and (4) be consistent with respect to chosen research aims and paradigms. To illustrate how these aspects can be taken into account an example of empirical research conducted in the German dual apprenticeship system is described. The readers are provided with guidelines for researchers and policy makers to carry out high quality research on the relation between school and work in VET systems that enables policy makers to make use of the results to improve the relation between school and work in VET systems.     

The Rise of the New Professionals? The restructuring of primary teachers’ work and professionalism

This article explores teachers’ reactions to changing management cultures and argues for a complex reading of their responses. Data from an ethnographic study of a primary school are used to illustrate the restructuring of the teachers’ work since the mid‐1980s. Different teacher strategies were developed in response to changes in the managerial control of their work and dominant management constructions of professionalism. Whereas teachers in an occupational culture, the ‘old professionals’, largely resisted the changes but subsequently left the school or left teaching, the ‘new professionals’ complied with some of management's changed expectations of them, but resisted others. In the new managerialist culture the teachers experienced new forms of control and their roles increasingly included managerial tasks. The article concludes by suggesting that measures for policing teachers’ work, such as inspection and school self‐management may limit the spaces in which teachers can use strategies of resistance within accommodation.     

Facilitating Grade Acceleration: Revisiting the Wisdom of John Feldhusen

This article revisits the 1986 Feldhusen, Proctor, and Black recommendations on grade skipping. These recommendations originally appeared as 12 guidelines. In this article, the guidelines are grouped into three general categories: how to screen accelerant candidates, how to engage with the adults in the acceleration process (e.g., teachers, parents), and how to support the accelerated students. The authors then reviews the literature since the publication of Feldhusen et al.'s original article. This body of research includes grade skipping, early entrance to college, and early entrance to school and supports the three general categories. However, some findings provide nuanced changes to the guidelines. The past 25 years of research also presents some additional considerations about acceleration not considered by Feldhusen et al. These topics include gender issues, resistance to acceleration, and methodological concerns.     

Weaving the threads of meaning: a characteristic of children's spirituality and its implications for religious education

Although well documented from a British perspective, empirical research exploring the spiritual lives of primary school children in the Australian context is a field in which scholarship is beginning to emerge. This article reports on one particular finding which emerged from an Australian study seeking to identify some characteristics of children's spirituality in Catholic primary schools. The characteristic has been termed weaving the threads of meaning. It describes the way in which the children who participated in this study appeared to use their sense of wonder as a means of expressing their spirituality by piecing together a worldview based around their attempts at meaning making. This article argues that the existence of this characteristic presents a challenge for religious education, in particular for those programmes which operate within faith schools where the Christian narrative forms a source of the authoritative wisdom to be handed on to its students.     

Conceptualizing Teaching to the Test Under Standards-Based Reform

Teacher and school accountability systems based on high-stakes tests are ubiquitous throughout the United States and appear to be growing as a catalyst for reform. As a result, educators have increased the proportion of instructional time devoted to test preparation. Although guidelines for what constitutes appropriate and inappropriate test preparation exist, they are outdated and need revision. The current article proposes new guidelines within the framework of standards-based assessment. It also examines the test preparation practices in 32 third- and fifth-grade classrooms and examines the relationship between student test performance and test preparation activities using a two-level Hierarchical Linear Model. Instruction on tested objectives using items like those presented on the state test, decontextualized practice, and teaching test taking skills offered no student achievement benefit relative to general instruction on the state standards leading us to conclude that test preparation was not beneficial.     

A Review of Scholarly and Research Work in Physical Education in China During the First Decade of the 21st Century

The purpose of this article is to describe published scholarly and research work to determine the extent to which they contributed to the physical education reform during 2000–2010 in China. Using an analytical reasoning approach, we analyzed 730 scholarly articles on K–12 physical education published in the 6 top kinesiology scholarly journals. Both conceptual synthesis and statistical reasoning approaches were used in the analysis. It is clear that variation in the number of empirical research fluctuated corresponding in time to important decisions made by the central government. The number of empirical research declined sharply after the central government published its initial guidelines for K–12 physical education. Statistical evidence suggests that empirical research should have made more contribution to formulating the new 2012 guidelines.     

How can we Teach History through Television?

This article contrasts the often ambivalent attitudes of teachers towards television and generalised research on teachers’ uses of television, with detailed empirical evidence from primary school history co‐ordinators describing their reactions to and expectations of the medium. The data describes a wide variety of reasons why television is educationally useful in the teaching and learning of history. The argument is articulated that teachers and children can be sophisticated viewers of televisual schools history, offering useful guidelines for programme makers; but that teacher conservatism and lack of advisory support for teachers’ deployment of the medium may be hindering its educational effectiveness.     

Learning the (hidden) silence policy within the police

Many organisations declare that the ability for employees to speak out about organisational matters is important for organisational development. However, recent literature reports a widespread fear of retaliation among employees if they express themselves – especially within the police. The point of departure of the present article is the tension and discrepancy between official policy and officers’ accounts of the conversational climate within the police. Through empirical examples from data consisting of field studies and 33 interviews with police officers in subordinate ranks, this article describes how employees learn and reproduce informal norms that condition the conversational and working climate within the organisation. In contrast to official guidelines within the police, employees learn the informal cultural norms of keeping a low profile and remaining silent through everyday talk. Theories that stress how discourses, storytelling, and noisy silences accomplish social action are used to explain why these informal norms are given such power within an institutional setting.     

Assessing the severity of behavior disorders: Rankings based on clinical and empirical criteria

School psychologists need to assess the severity of behavior disorders accurately to facilitate comprehensive diagnosis, to provide appropriate intervention, to enlighten research efforts, and to be in compliance with state and federal guidelines. Although clinicians in fields such as mental retardation categorize severity of behavior to make diagnostic and general treatment decisions, school psychologists rarely attempt to assess severity in any systematic or comprehensive way. The primary purpose of this study is to see how 92 practicing school psychologists rank 11 variables in their assessments of SED in school-age children. A secondary purpose is to examine the extent of school psychologists' reliance upon clinical and empirical criteria in assessing the severity of SED. It is concluded that school psychologists agree in their rankings of variables from most to least important and that they do not consider empirical criteria more important than clinically based criteria when assessing SED. Implications for practice are presented.     

Redefining leadership in schools: the Cheshire Cat as unconventional metaphor

ABSTRACT

Moving away from the study of the principal as the central leader figure in schools, this article argues for an alternative narrative for school leadership. It draws on empirical data from a doctoral study to propose a new way of thinking about the school leader through the unusual metaphor of the Cheshire Cat.

Examining the stories of 11 school leaders from one independent PK-12 Western Australian school, including middle leaders who are often absent in school leadership literature, this article provides insights into school leaders’ perceptions of themselves as leaders, and their private processes of decision making. These leader stories challenge the notion of school leadership as an archetypal story of a central figure, showing that it can instead be quiet, subtle, fluid, and even deliberately invisible.

The visible-invisible Cheshire Cat school leader enacts collective vision, action, and transformation by acting as a deliberate and skilled collaborator in a complex, networked web. This reimagined school leader is one who makes careful decisions about how to best serve their communities, how to foster trust, and how to distribute power and agency, including when to appear and disappear, when to step forward and step back, when to direct and when to empower.     

关于新课程改革背景下中小学教师职业枯竭的思考

在回顾中小学教师职业枯竭的概念及其特征的基础上,从社会、组织、个人因素三个方面分析中小学新课程改革背景下教师职业枯竭现象的成因,提出了职业枯竭的对策。