A comparative study of peer and teacher feedback and of various peer feedback forms in a secondary school writing curriculum

This study examines whether peer feedback can be a substitute for teacher feedback and which measures can be taken to improve its effectiveness. A pre‐test post‐test control group design examined the long‐term learning effects of individual peer feedback and of collective teacher feedback on writing assignments in secondary education. Moreover, it examined the added value of a priori question forms and a posteriori reply forms aimed at supporting the assessee's response to peer feedback. The study supports the ‘non‐inferiority’ hypothesis of there being no significant difference in students’ progress after plain substitutional peer feedback or teacher feedback. Both groups (plain peer feedback and teacher feedback), however, improved significantly less than the groups that worked with question or reply forms, confirming the added‐value of these forms. Almost half of the students found the received peer feedback helpful, but less than a quarter considered giving feedback an aid in their own learning process.     

Possibility thinking: culminative studies of an evidence-based concept driving creativity?

The authors have, for some years, studied the concept of ‘possibility thinking’ (PT), or ‘what if’ and ‘as if’ thinking in children aged 3–11, which generates novelty – and the pedagogical strategies which foster it. They have argued, on the basis of previous qualitative studies, that ‘PT’ is at the core of creativity in education. Having begun as a conceptual study for 7 years, this team has undertaken empirical studies of PT in classrooms. This paper discusses findings from the third phase of empirical work focusing on 9- to 11-year olds. The particular research question addressed here is ‘What characterises possibility thinking as manifest in the learning engagement of children aged 9–11?’. In a small-scale qualitative study, involving co-participation with teachers, the paper features episode analysis of naturalistic video data featuring children aged 9–11 in two schools. It focuses on PT evidenced by children engaged in a range of classroom activities, some established as individual activities and others as group work. The study reveals some features of PT in both sites (question-posing [Q-P], question-responding [Q-R], self-determination, intentional action, development, being imaginative, play/playfulness, immersion and innovation) to differing degrees of strength. Risk-taking was absent in both and a new feature, collaboration, evident in both. Differences were documented in how Q-P and Q-R manifest, compared with earlier studies with younger children. This study seeks to make an evidence-based contribution to the characterisation of PT as driving creativity in the classroom, with implications for research and practice.     

Exploring ‘learning lives’: community,identity, literacy and meaning

This article explores the term ‘learning lives’ by reporting on three research projects conducted by members of the Oslo‐based research group TransActions. By stressing the term ‘learning lives’ within a range of social ‘educational’ contexts, the article aims to look at learning within and across different learning sites exploring the positioning and repositioning of learner identity across these different ‘locations’. We emphasise how the individual learner relates to other people and objects, drawing on deeper trajectories or narratives of the self as it exists within and outside the immediate learning contexts. We pay attention to processes occurring between people which we find significant for the individual's identity, literacy and learning. By doing so we hope to make explicit the mobilisation of resources within and across specific contexts, in the ‘learning lives’ of Norwegian youngsters.     

The Creation of the ‘Hong Kong Visual Arts Education Web’ and the Use of the Inquiry‐Based Teaching Approach

This article describes a collaborative action research conducted by a lecturer and several primary school art teachers, who between 2001 and 2006 created the Visual Arts Education Web (‘iii web’) in Hong Kong. The creation of the ‘iii web’ was accomplished through research that employed questionnaires, focus group discussions and individual interviews. Teachers' perceptions of using websites in teaching were examined, art education websites from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Mainland China and the USA were compared, in order to create a website that could meet the needs of Hong Kong primary school art teachers. Inquiry‐based learning is one of the important teaching approaches that were introduced during the Hong Kong Education Reform in 2003. An example of using the ‘iii web’ to teach public art is described to illustrate how the teacher and students used inquiry‐based learning in art education.     

Shifting the reflective focus: encouraging student teacher learning in video-framed and peer-sharing contexts

Since many studies that use video to support teacher learning are situated in strongly guided contexts and encourage particular kinds of thinking, we still know very little about how more loosely guided contexts can support teachers to think about the dilemmas of practice associated with their own goals by reflecting about video. This study explores how video-based and peer-based reflections about one’s own and others’ practices both indicate and guide the development of teachers’ change-directed thinking when they are sequenced before supervisor feedback. Six secondary preservice teachers reflected about peer-evaluated mini-teaching and videotaped field-based teaching in the prestudent teaching term and then about videotaped teaching alone, with peers, and alone again with supervisor feedback in the student teaching term. These reflections were coded by their subject, degree of reform-mindedness, and tendency toward three foci (player, stance, and source). Patterns in their ‘higher focus’ codes across the three reflective resources during student teaching showed how teachers were developing the goals they espoused in the fall term. Teachers situated their learning in contexts where the degree of scaffolding matched their degree of readiness for change, which was better characterized by their tendency toward subjects and foci that were less ‘one-sided’ than by their tendency toward only reform-minded (standards-based) thinking. While teachers whose reflections were intermediately different from the peer group were better supported by it, most teachers found direct support from the self-video and/or peer-video contexts to advance change-directed thinking associated with their own goals for teaching. The findings reveal not only how goal-related teacher learning can be powerfully supported with loosely guided video-framed contexts, but also how the diversification and/or expansion of teachers’ reflections across the categories used in this study provide robust indicators of both the content and efficacy of their change-directed thinking.     

What is more important for fourth-grade primary school students for transforming their potential into achievement: the individual or the environmental box in multidimensional conceptions of giftedness?

Multidimensional models of giftedness specify individual and environmental moderators or catalysts that help transform potential into achievement. However, these models do not state whether the importance of the ‘individual boxes’ and the ‘environmental boxes’ changes during this process. The present study examines whether, during the early stages of talent development, the ‘environmental boxes’ play a more important role than the ‘individual boxes.’ To answer this question, we analyzed individual moderators and environmental moderators of achievement for fourth-grade primary-school students (N?=?976). A cluster analysis that included intelligence, achievement, and two individual moderators (motivation and learning behavior) revealed three groups of students, two of which are of particular interest, as they both displayed high intelligence and achievement but differed in their motivation and learning behavior. Questionnaire data on family environment (filled out by parents, N?=?682) and school environment (filled out by teachers, N?=?47) supported the assumption that among young students an inauspicious set of individual moderators, in this case maladaptive motivation and learning behavior, can be compensated by a sufficiently propitious set of environmental moderators, in this case parents’ and teachers’ learning support, cultural capital within the family, and teachers’ commitment to support their students’ learning.     

Impacts of flipped classrooms with peer assessment on students’ effectiveness of playing musical instruments – taking amateur erhu learners as an example

ABSTRACT

Amateur musical instrument learners are usually taught in a one-to-many learning mode owing to the cost consideration; therefore, it is difficult for the teacher to address individual students’ problems. This results in a lack of knowledge internalization. The flipped classroom enables the teacher to have more in-class time to interact with individual students. However, when the teacher guides a learner in the flipped class, the other learners usually practice on their own rather than engaging in critical thinking or reflective thinking activities. Therefore, this study uses the peer assessment strategy to increase the effectiveness of musical instrument flipped teaching. However, conventional peer assessment flipped teaching (CPA) has some disadvantages. So, we present another method in which the peer assessment is performed by online video sharing (VSPA). The VSPA method can further extend the learning time until after class. It lets teachers have more time to solve the problems of individual students. Besides, it can reduce the students’ nervousness. The experimental results showed that both of the two teaching modes can help progression, but there is no significant difference in the learning effectiveness. As for learning preference, we found that the learners preferred CPA to VSPA.     

Action research on a collegial model of peer observations

Observing peers for professional development is a familiar and valuable practice but not always favoured in many educational institutions. This small-scale action research (AR) was conducted in an institution where teachers are accustomed to regular peer observation, requiring each teacher to conduct peer observation and to reflect in their teachers’ portfolios. Conventionally, to fulfil the requirement each teacher finds a colleague to observe them either with or mostly without a certain focus. This study, however, employed action research methodology to inquire into a collegial peer observation model to improve this organisational practice. It aimed to promote mutual growth of the participating faculty members in an agreed area. Including the author, five faculty members, who are midcareer and experienced English language teachers, acted as members of the consultation group. In the AR project, appreciative inquiry was used when reflecting on the observed classes and during focus group interviews. As a result of this AR, at least two levels of knowledge were generated: first-person (author) and second-person (the team). The knowledge claim that this practitioner research constructed is ‘When small groups of teachers conduct peer observations focusing on a common concern, learning and collegial growth may increase.’ It is expected to lead to a third-person stage in the department and the academic community in general.     

Moving from best practice to next practice: some deliberations on educational leadership

This paper begins from the premise that the challenges characterising the contemporary education environment call for more flexible approaches to leadership than the traditional reliance on codified knowledge. These more flexible approaches are likely to involve new ways of learning, dispositions and behaviours, which enable educational leadership to progress from ‘best practice’ to ‘next practice’. The paper, therefore, has two main aims. First, it seeks to illuminate a potential modus operandi for contending with the complex challenges that have become integral to the landscape of educational leadership. Second, it seeks to encourage consideration of the implications of this modus operandi for processes of leadership thinking, learning and development. For this purpose, the nature of the challenges purported to define the landscape of educational leadership now and into the future is first discussed. This is followed by an examination of three interrelated leadership concepts in enabling appropriate judgements to be made in dealing effectively with highly complex circumstances, namely, ‘phronesis’, ‘contextual intelligence’ and ‘negative capability’. The paper concludes by discussing the circumstances within the professional milieu that either constrain or promote the kind of educational leadership that is deemed to be required for embracing the three concepts in question.     

Exploring problems of self‐directed learning within practice and discourse

Self‐directed learning is an important feature in using experiential approaches with adult students. It is both part of a theorisation and the basis of certain kinds of practices which together form a ‘discourse’ of self‐directed learning. The paper critically examines the general characteristics of this discourse and considers the consequences of the assumptions made about adult learning and teaching.

Case studies of practice involving experiential teaching approaches with two different groups of adult students are then presented and analysed. The idea is to show how the discourse of self‐directed learning relates to these actual situations of practice, it is clear that the discourse since it cannot take account of context misleadingly assumes adult learners to be naturally self‐directing. Practitioners, therefore, need to have a critical awareness of the frameworks of thinking and action which can be imposed by any discourse even if it purports to be ‘student‐centred’.     

What’s the body got to do with it? Exploring embodied,political readings in the classroom through poetry

ABSTRACT

This essay attempts to explore the links between politics, poetry, and collective, embodied readings and discussion in the classroom. When my Year 12 class were asked ‘What is Poetry?’, their answers suggested something in the Romantic tradition – of poetry as expressive, individual and emotional. My experience studying poetry with my Year 9 class suggests something altogether different – that studying poetry allows students to have an embodied and collective reading. In the sense that politics concerns the control of bodies, poetry allows the class to read in an embodied sense, thus politically, in a way that assessment criteria and the demands of high-stakes testing, with their focus on individual understanding, do not. Thus, I argue for the study of poetry as essential in terms of recognising students’ political agency – not primarily as exam-takers but as citizens of a country and an Earth they will, to put it grandly, inherit.     

Insights into teacher learning about pedagogy from an international group of teachers of students with severe intellectual disabilities

This article examines teacher professional learning about pedagogy for teachers of students with severe intellectual disabilities within broader teacher education and pedagogical frameworks for this group of learners. The article presents and discusses findings from a USA–England research project, involving classroom observations and interviews with nine teachers of students with severe intellectual disabilities from four specialist public school settings, intended to explore teachers’ pedagogical decision-making and learning. The theoretical lens of situated learning and the conceptual lens of evidence-based practice are used to contextualise and examine the teachers’ views about the what, how and when they learn about pedagogical approaches and strategies. Teachers emphasised the situated and interactional nature of their learning, particularly highlighting the personal responses of students and their relationship with these students. They use this knowledge and understanding to adapt evidence-based strategies and programmes and inform their pedagogical decisions. This affords the concepts of ‘situated generalization’ and ‘practice based evidence’ an influential role in how teachers engage in the process of pedagogical decision-making. An implication for teacher educators is the need to support teachers in making connections of new pedagogical understandings and skills with the individual learning profiles and responses of their students with severe intellectual disabilities.     

Teacher professional development as an effect of policy and practice: a Bourdieuian analysis

This article draws on Bourdieu’s field theory and related concepts of habitus and capitals, to explore policy implementation in relation to a particular case of teacher professional development in Queensland, Australia. This implementation process is described as an effect of the interplay between what is called the policy field and the field of teachers’ work. The policy field demonstrates intra‐field tensions between the federal Quality Teacher Programme (QTP) and a raft of state policies, particularly those associated with the Queensland meta‐policy, Queensland State Education 2010 (QSE2010). To investigate the effects of this complex policy ensemble, the article draws upon the experiences of principals and a group of teachers engaged in professional development across a cluster of six schools in south‐east Queensland, Australia. The specific focus is on the ‘Curriculum Board’, a cross‐school body created by the principals in the participating schools, and its mediated work in policy implementation and teacher learning. The article analyses the effects of the involvement of the principals in the creation of the board, the limiting impact of QTP requirements to involve consultants rather than support for teacher release, and the limited influence of the board on teacher learning and policy implementation in the individual schools. By doing so, the analysis shows the disjunctions between the logics of practice of the policy field and that of teachers’ work, and the ways in which the differing habitus of principals and teachers and teacher members of the board affected teacher learning and policy implementation. It is argued that effective implementation requires learning within and across fields, and more reflexive habitus of policy makers, principals and teachers.     

Existential being as transformative learning

In some ways, ‘a culture of the modern consulting room’ may be seen as having been initiated by Freud and followers. Here, social hierarchy, unconscious motivation and the authority of analyst may all be seen as manifestations of professional practice. With the contributions of Heidegger, Kierkegaard, May, Adler, Rogers and others of the existential and humanistic schools, it is argued that ‘transformative learning’ serves as a vehicle to ‘being’. It is not that the classroom becomes a consulting room. Rather, it is suggested that the change and transformation of ‘self’ and ‘being’ (‘Dasein’) are accompaniments of deep, relational learning. As such, they rightly occupy the activities of both classroom and consulting room. Far from being an abstract or irrelevant notion, the ‘existential classroom’ diverges radically from any lack of focus or neglect of ‘subjectivity’. Neither is it a ‘place apart’, as Freud would have it. The learning relationship itself furnishes a model of conviction for all who see; an expression of trust, symbol for community, and the way to Kierkegaard’s notion of self‐defining freedom.     

Practice Theory: Viewing leadership as leading

Abstract

Inspired by Theodore Schatzki’s ‘societist’ approach—in which he advocates a notion of ‘site ontologies’—in this article, we outline our theory of practice architectures (a theory about what practices are composed of) and ecologies of practices (how practices relate to one another). Drawing on case studies of four Australian primary schools, we examine how practices of leading relate to other educational practices: professional learning, teaching, student learning, and researching and reflecting. We find ‘leading’ not only in the work of principals and other formal leadership positions, but also in the activities of teachers and students. We show that changing leading practices requires changing more than the professional practice knowledge of individuals; it also requires changing the practice architectures (cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political arrangements) in sites where leading and its interconnected practices are conducted. In order to study practices of leading, we adopt a philosophical-empirical enquiry approach, i.e. we conduct our research as a conversation between practice philosophy and theory and the empirical cases of leading we study. We study practices in the mode of research within practice traditions, sometimes described as ‘practical philosophy’, as a contribution to the self-reflective transformation of the practices we are studying.     

Teachers’ professional development: a theoretical review

Background and purpose:?The article reviews studies that focus on the professional development of teachers after they have completed their basic teacher training. Teacher professional development is defined as teachers’ learning: how they learn to learn and how they apply their knowledge in practice to support pupils’ learning. The research question addressed in the article is: How do experienced teachers learn?

Main argument:?The review is framed by theories within the constructivist paradigm. From this perspective, knowledge is perceived as the construction of meaning and understanding within social interaction. The social surroundings are seen as decisive for how the individual learns and develops. It is argued that courses and lectures, or ‘times for telling’, and teachers’ development of a metacognitive attitude are decisive factors for teachers’ learning within a constructivist frame of reference.

Sources of evidence and method:?To attempt to answer the research question, a search was conducted of the subject of pedagogy in the ISI WEB of Science (search undertaken 9 August 2011) using the search strings ‘teacher learning’, ‘teacher development’ and ‘teacher professional development’, and covering the period from 2009 to 2011 to probe the most recent decade of research. Articles that dealt with basic education, primary and secondary school, were selected, and articles that dealt with learning using digital tools and the internet and newly trained teachers were rejected. A set of 31 articles was selected from this search. To ensure width and depth of coverage, this was supplemented by a selection of review studies and research on further education in respect of teachers’ learning. The texts were analysed by means of open and axial coding, developing main and sub-categories.

Conclusions:?The review of articles shows that both individual and organisational factors impact teachers’ learning. Teacher co-operation has importance for how they develop, and some of the teachers can lead such learning activities themselves. Moreover, a positive school culture with a good atmosphere and understanding of teachers’ learning, in addition to co-operation with external resource persons, may impact the professional development of teachers. The article concludes with the reflection that learning in school is the best arena for further development of teachers.     

Book Reviews

We present here a reflexive and critical commentary and exemplification of the teaching and learning of research methodology. The paper focuses on the teaching/learning of qualitative data analysis. It is our belief that it is essential to do data analysis when learning about the process and that there are serious limitations to methodological ‘manuals’ which set out to model the process. In doctoral workshops, Frankham and Stronach have used a passage by Jules Henry to provoke students into generating data which is then analysed as a group. This paper, written with a group of doctoral students, describes the reflexive and iterative processes of data analysis which took place in one such group. We hope that describing our discussions will be of practical use to others in our attempt to iterate a process. Our other purposes include a desire to underline the inappropriacy of the notion of ‘skills’ in the context of research ‘training’ or of following formulaic procedures in interpretive inquiry. Instead the process we set out to illustrate here is embodied and serendipitous and centres on individuals' capacity to think.     

Zafar,so good: middle‐class students,school habitus and secondary schooling in the city of Buenos Aires (Argentina)

This article examines how students from the ‘loser’ sections of the middle class dealt with the game of secondary schooling in a ‘good’ state school in the city of Buenos Aires (Argentina). It engages with Bourdieu’s theory of social practice and, in particular, with its concepts of game, habitus and cultural capital. It argues that middle‐class students embody a school habitus, which I call zafar. Zafar (a Spanish slang word) refers to students’ dispositions, practices and strategies towards social and educational demands of teachers and their school. Zafar propels middle‐class students to be just ‘good enough’ students, and promote an instrumental approach to schooling and learning. Although this paper offers an account within which the reproduction of relative educational advantage of a group of middle‐class students takes place, it also poses questions about their future educational and occupational opportunities.     

Combining the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of teaching sustainability: the case of the business school academics

Abstract

Faculty are key to bringing about ‘bottom-up’ change for sustainability education. Yet, research is still needed on the backgrounds and experiences of change agents in universities and the challenges they face. This study focuses on the marketing discipline, a field fraught with epistemological tensions in seeking to integrate sustainability, mainly revolving around profit maximisation and continuous consumption while living on a planet with finite resources. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with sustainability marketing academics in Australasia, Europe and North America. The contribution of this paper lies in the development of a sustainability educator typology linking why and how integration occurs. The sustainability ‘transformer’ wishes to engage in transformational learning, changing student mindsets, the ‘thinker’ wants to encourage critical thinking to bring about the discussion of worldviews, while the ‘actioner’ hopes ‘learning by doing’ (community projects) will provide an appreciation for sustainability. We discuss implications for those disciplines which struggle with philosophical tensions and colleague resistance to the integration of sustainability in the form of suggestions for professional development (i.e. creation of positive nature experiences) and pedagogical approaches (critical, transformative and community-service learning).