A new approach to training teachers to meet the diverse learning needs of deaf and hard‐of‐hearing children within inclusive Australian schools

A restructured postgraduate teacher education programme is described specifically with regard to its commitment to prepare educators to work effectively with deaf and hard‐of‐hearing children in inclusive settings. The focus of the paper is on the design and development process rather than on the evaluation of the outcomes. Background information is provided about the design and development of the programme, including the components that support a strong relationship between special and general educators. The paper details the philosophical and pedagogical underpinnings of the programme, planned outcome measures for the graduate teachers, and highlights the challenges in programme design and development.     

Re-engaged students’ perceptions of mainstream and flexible learning environments – a ‘semi-quantitative’ approach

ABSTRACT

Flexible Learning Options (FLOs) attempt to enable secondary school completion by young people for whom ‘mainstream’ schooling has not worked well. Despite their proliferation and the increased research attention to understanding the mechanisms at work within such programmes, quantitative methods have not been utilised to compare participants’ perceptions of the learning environments of FLOs and mainstream schools. This study describes the development and application of a quantitative instrument to assess re-engaged Australian students’ perceptions of an FLO relative to their previous (mainstream) schools. Findings indicate that, on average, young people rate the learning environment more highly at the FLO than at the mainstream school from which they disengaged, indicating that the learning environment of the FLO aligns more closely with the needs of its student cohort. However, bimodal results for some instrument items highlight that the learning environment is influential, but not necessarily a precondition of school disengagement or re-engagement. Implications of this study are considered, with attention to the complexities that mainstream schools and FLOs negotiate in creating effective learning environments for diverse young people.     

Curriculum Continuity on Transfer from Middle to Secondary School

Centralised educational restructuring initiatives result in a wide variation of responses in schools, some are quite productive, others are much less so. Interview data were collected from seventy‐two teachers and principals in six schools as a response to government restructuring policies in British Columbia, Canada, in order to better understand the reasons for such variation. An organisational‐learning perspective was used to guide the study. The results describe the processes used by teachers in pursuit of their own individual and collective learning. Also identified are school conditions which foster and inhibit these processes, conditions related to school vision, culture, structure, strategies and resources.     

What Do Schools Do after OFSTED School Inspections-or before?

ABSTRACT

The results of research on the effects of OFSTED secondary school inspections in England since 1994 are presented. The reactions of headteachers to the inspections and their progress on the resulting school action plan are given. The results indicate considerable potential for school inspections to contribute to the process of school improvement.     

The National Professional Qualification for Headship: Perceptions of the providers of taught higher degrees in educational management in England and Wales

This paper argues that evidence from the commercial sector suggests that successful organisations, even when subjected to competitive pressures from other organisations in a market environment, soon become complacent and thereafter begin to fail. It contends that the effects which lead to such complacency could also apply to successful schools. Based upon an analysis of these effects the paper argues that a strategic planning process which takes account of the dangers of a strong shared culture in a school could avert the dangers of complacency. Further, it suggests that schools should take a wider view of their development than the current English Government's preoccupation with examination and test results if they are to keep abreast of changing client expectations and avoid a stultifying quest for marginal improvements in exam scores.     

Are all teenagers emotionally illiterate? Charting a neuroscientific storying of normative deficit

Defining ‘emotional illiteracy’ is a task located within the broader context of expert (and subsequently public) assumptions regarding the normally expectable competencies of the age group concerned. In the late 1990s a series of neuroscientific studies reporting adolescents' limited ability to recognize emotional states from facial expressions seemed to present radically new developmental benchmarks. Although these studies were subsequently subjected to considerable methodological and interpretive criticism, some incautious assertions regarding teenagers' general inability to respond appropriately, especially in emotionally charged situations, continued to flourish. This paper charts the creation and maintenance of these ideas over the past decade to illustrate how, when primary sources are not carefully checked, powerful messages for which there is dubious empirical evidence can become incorporated into expert advice. It also suggests the importance of linking neuroscientific claims to other strands of contemporary Western efforts to define and contrast normative and disordered emotional behaviour in adolescence.     

Prospective teacher learning: recognizing evidence of conceptual understanding

This study examined prospective teachers’ (PSTs) ability to recognize evidence of children’s conceptual understanding of mathematics in three content areas before and after an instructional intervention designed to support this ability. It also investigates the role PSTs’ content knowledge plays in their ability to recognize children’s mathematical understanding. Results of content knowledge assessments administered at the beginning of the study revealed that content knowledge did seem to support PSTs’ analyses of children’s understanding when the child’s response demonstrated understanding or demonstrated a misconception. Content knowledge did not seem to support PSTs’ analyses of children’s procedural responses, as many PSTs with good content knowledge initially characterized procedural solutions as evidence of conceptual understanding. Similarly, content knowledge did not seem to support PSTs’ analyses of children’s responses with features commonly associated with understanding but not evidence of understanding. After the instructional intervention consisting of three multifaceted lessons in which PSTs examined many examples of student thinking, they showed improved ability to analyze responses with conceptual features and no evidence of conceptual understanding and responses demonstrating procedural knowledge. Results suggest that content knowledge is not sufficient for supporting PSTs’ analysis of children’s thinking, and that building activities such as the intervention into content courses may help develop this ability. Implications for teacher education programs and future research are considered.     

Inversion in mathematical thinking and learning

Inversion is a fundamental relational building block both within mathematics as the study of structures and within people’s physical and social experience, linked to many other key elements such as equilibrium, invariance, reversal, compensation, symmetry, and balance. Within purely formal arithmetic, the inverse relationships between addition and subtraction, and multiplication and division, have important implications in relation to flexible and efficient computation, and for the assessment of students’ conceptual understanding. It is suggested that the extensive research on arithmetic should be extended to take account of numerical domains beyond the natural numbers and of the difficulties students have in extending the meanings of operations to those of more general domains. When the range of situations modelled by the arithmetical operations is considered, the complexity of inverse relationships between operations, and the variability in the forms that these relationships take, become much greater. Finally, some comments are offered on the divergent goals and preoccupations of cognitive psychologists and mathematics educators as illuminated by research in this area.     

Examining charter student achievement effects across seven states

Since their inception, charter schools have been a lighting rod for controversy, with much of the debate revolving around their effectiveness in improving student achievement. Previous research has shown mixed results for student achievement; this could be the consequence of different policy environments or varying methodological approaches with differing assumptions across studies. In our analysis, we discuss these approaches and their assumptions and estimate charter school achievement effects using a consistent methodology across seven locations.