Content and Context of the Administrative Internship: How Mentoring and Sustained Activities Impact Preparation

As universities prepare educational leaders for twenty-first century schools, the quality and authenticity of the internship experience require both the strengths of university faculty and the expertise of practitioners to create authentic experiences that seek to bridge the theory-to-practice divide. One mechanism to achieve this is through quality mentorship by school- and central-office-based personnel during the internship experience. A central aspect of this professional relationship is the ability for the mentor to provide access to quality activities that will prepare the aspiring leader for his/her first administrative position. This exploratory study examined language utilized by interns in their time logs as well as information gleaned from preliminary surveys of both interns and mentors upon completion of their experience. Findings revealed the complexity of language analysis and revealed a need for understanding activities of interns and interactions with mentors in a contextual fashion.     

Contraction: implications for school leaders

Ackoff's circular structure has been successfully utilised to combine hierarchy and democracy in various industries. This paper argues that this structure is the most appropriate democratic structure for the internal governance of public schools. It concludes that a circularity of power relations between administrators and teachers would create genuinely empowering teacher participation, improve co‐ordination, foster teacher self‐actualisation and expressiveness, alleviate teacher shortages, help attract high quality persons to teaching careers, ensure appropriate (service oriented) teacher supervision, and increase the number of successful school improvement projects.     

Community‐based early intervention for children with behavioural,emotional and social problems: evaluation of the Scallywags Scheme

Scallywags is a community‐based, early intervention programme for young children (aged 3–7) with behavioural, emotional and social problems, which integrates work in the home and school with a parenting curriculum and direct work with children. A pre‐post intervention study across multi‐sites of 340 participants is reported. Using standardised measures, the study found statistically significant reductions in problems at home and school experienced by children who completed the programme, and in parental stress levels. Participation was found to be high and the project acceptable to parents, many of whom would be described as hard to reach. The rigorous evaluation of this real‐life service and its positive outcomes highlight the potential of such programmes to tackle the needs of these children and families, and help prevent longer‐term problems associated with early onset behavioural problems, including social exclusion, antisocial behaviour and educational failure.     

SURVEY OF JEWISH EDUCATION IN NEW YORK CITY

This case study examines the contours of culturally relevant pedagogy in an undergraduate preservice teacher education program for Jewish women. The case describes how the assigned reading of Albarelli’s (2000) narrative of teaching in a Hasidic Jewish school, Teacha! Stories from a Yeshiva, disrupts the classroom community, diminishes student engagement with the course, and undermines student confidence in the instructor. This research explores what happens when “respect for” challenges “reflection about.” The study finds that differential cultural understandings surrounding the concept of “respect” mediate the discourse. The author raises questions about the ethics of social justice in religious teacher education, probes the poverty of educational reform in a landscape of nondiscussables, and offers strategies for navigating this tender terrain.     

Transfer Student Success: Exploring Community College,University, and Individual Predictors

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates community college transfer success by exploring the relationship between individual and institutional-level characteristics at students’ two- and four-year institutions. Using statewide administrative data from North Carolina, this study employs a cross-classified multilevel model to investigate the impact that a student’s community college and four-year transfer institution have on post-transfer success. Our findings offer important and compelling insights into the relationship between transfer students, the community college they attended, the four-year transfer institution, and educational outcomes. While individual effects were small, we find several institutional factors associated with student success. Attendance at a large community college or having a public university in the same county as their community college is positively associated with student success, whereas size of the university is negatively related to grades during the first year and persistence to the second year. While the four-year institution’s selectivity is negatively related to many of our outcomes, transferring to a Historically Black College or University is positively associated with GPA, college persistence, and degree completion.     

忍者“神偷”

回想起来,"忍者追捕"涉及的是一个席卷斯塔顿岛的连环"忍者盗贼"。"武当乐队"正是发祥此地且名声在外,出于对功夫电影的敬意,在很久以前他们把这个地方戏称为"少林"。这个特别的盗贼,如今已被认定在过去的七个月里洗劫了十八户人家。九月,他在东安山的基奥洛家作案时,遇到了当地居民菲儿·基奥洛,"忍者盗贼"之恶名便是源自此案。他一身黑衣,戴着黑色面具,基奥洛说道,那盗贼还拿着双节棍。他用那副双节棍击打基奥洛的     

Adaptive neural design frame for uncertain stochastic nonlinear non-lower triangular pure-feedback systems with input constraint

This paper dedicates to dealing with the adaptive neural design problem for uncertain stochastic nonlinear systems with non-lower triangular pure-feedback form and input constraint. On the basis of the mean-value theorem, the pure-feedback structure is first transformed into the desired affine structure, and then the well-known backstepping technology is applied to construct the actual input signal of the controller. Although the considered system has a fairly complex structure, a new adaptive neural tracking controller design frame is established via the flexible application of radial basis function (RBF) neural networks’ (NNs’) structural characteristics. The proposed design frame guarantees the control objective of this paper can be achieved. Finally, a simulation example is given to further illustrate the availability of the proposed control scheme.