Personal perspectives on a school-university partnership

The process of collaborative biography was used to examine the effects of a school-university partnership on two elementary teachers. The partnership in question gave the teachers full responsibility for supervising and evaluating their own student teachers, with the support of a school-based team of Clinical Master Teachers. Although the experience gave both teachers opportunities to research their own beliefs and practices, differential effects emerged from apparent interactions with the teachers' personalities and career paths. We discuss these common and differential effects and reflect upon the effects of collaborating on this article. In sum, findings were consistent with the observations of other researchers that teachers' biographies are critical factors in determining how teachers define and experience new or expanded professional roles.     

Some New Convergence Conditions for Jacobi's Method

Let Aχ = b be a linear system or equations in which A is an n × n matrix and both χ and b are n dimensional column vectors. If in addition A is row diagonally predominant (i.e. for any i, ¦:a_ii¦>¦:a_ij¦: for all 1?j?n,i≠j), then criteria are developed to show how to ascertain when such matrix problems may be successfully solved using Jacobi's iterative method.