Book review

Summary Teaching is a highly intellectual process that involves numerous decisions before, during, and after classroom instruction. These decisions are made as the teacher thinks about and engages in the entire process of teaching. The more clearly and deeply teachers think about instruction, the greater the possibility that student learning will be enhanced. Cognitive coaching offers a practical approach to achieving that end.As a partitioner in public elementary and secondary education, I found Drs. Costa and Garmston's book very interesting and helpful. The book was interesting because it stimulated my thinking about the need to redesign productive systems for teachers' growth. The book was helpful in that it gave me tangible/practical material for starting the process of redesign.     

Teaching children while they play: Cultivating emergent writing and reading

Effective teachers of young children include symbolic play in their early education curricula. They design and prepare play environments, knowing that children learn through play. Piaget's (1962) research contributed greatly to teachers' understanding of how such play functions as a medium for learning, as a vehicle for understanding and constructing knowledge. For example, the child who has experienced meal preparation and child care at home will use those experiences in the housekeeping center with available props and adultlike behavior and language. According to Piaget (1962), this symbolic representation is a way of abstracting elements from life experiences and manipulating them so the learner can facilitate his or her construction of knowledge.Carol Taylor Schrader is an assistant professor at The University of Maryland at College Park.     

Learning environment associated with use of mixed mode delivery model among secondary business studies students in Singapore

At many teacher education institutes around the world, preservice teachers are empowered to use pedagogical tools and strategies that engage their students. We used a modified version of the Constructivist Learning Environment Survey (CLES) to evaluate the effectiveness of a pedagogical model known as the Mixed Mode Delivery (MMD) model in terms of the CLES’s five scales of personal relevance, uncertainty, critical voice, shared control and negotiation. Comparisons were made between 2,216 secondary school students taught by the preservice teachers in an MMD group and 991 students in a control group in terms of the relative magnitudes of the gap between the actual and preferred learning environment in students’ school classrooms. The findings supported the positive impact of using MMD in terms of students’ perceptions of their classroom environments for all CLES scales.     

Operating at the margins while seeking a space in the heart: the daily teaching reality of Japanese high school teachers experiencing workplace stress/anxiety

The esteem historically attributed to the teaching profession in Japan is eroding, and some Japanese teachers who identify with the ideal of being a ‘life educator’ are becoming disillusioned with teaching. While the stress and anxiety associated with teacher disillusionment have been researched from a Western perspective, little is known about the work-related stress and anxiety experiences of Japanese teachers. Thus, this grounded theory qualitatively details the teaching experiences of 14 Japanese high school teachers. The findings reveal that whereas only two teachers within the present study had actually achieved a ‘space in their heart’ where they were able to create a balance between the negative and positive forces operating within their teaching careers and home lives, this was a position that many other teachers strove toward.     

Ethnic and Racial Identity in Adolescence: Implications for Psychosocial,Academic, and Health Outcomes

The construction of an ethnic or racial identity is considered an important developmental milestone for youth of color. This review summarizes research on links between ethnic and racial identity (ERI) with psychosocial, academic, and health risk outcomes among ethnic minority adolescents. With notable exceptions, aspects of ERI are generally associated with adaptive outcomes. ERI are generally beneficial for African American adolescents' adjustment across all three domains, whereas the evidence is somewhat mixed for Latino and American Indian youth. There is a dearth of research for academic and health risk outcomes among Asian American and Pacific Islander adolescents. The review concludes with suggestions for future research on ERI among minority youth.     

Feeling Good,Happy, and Proud: A Meta‐Analysis of Positive Ethnic–Racial Affect and Adjustment

One point of intersection in ethnic and racial identity research is the conceptual attention paid to how positively youth feel about their ethnicity or race, or positive ethnic–racial affect. This article reports results of a series of meta‐analyses based on 46 studies of this dimension and psychosocial, academic, and health risk outcomes among ethnic and racial minority youth. The overall pattern of results suggests that positive ethnic–racial affect exhibited small to medium associations (r range = |.11| to |.37|) with depressive symptoms, positive social functioning, self‐esteem, well‐being, internalizing, externalizing, academic achievement, academic attitudes, and health risk outcomes. Implications for theory and research about the role of positive ethnic–racial affect among youth growing up in an increasingly diverse society are discussed.