Ensuring the ongoing engagement of second-stage teachers

Research and policy have increasingly focused on the importance of staffing schools with effective teachers. A critical variable affecting teacher effectiveness is the enthusiasm, energy and effort teachers bring to their work, or teachers’ work engagement. Better understanding teachers’ work engagement and how it may change over stages in a teacher’s career is the subject of this exploratory interview study of second-stage teachers—teachers with 4–10 years of experience. Participants in this study described engaging in their work to different degrees and in very different ways. As beginning teachers, their interest in and enthusiasm for teaching was typically high and they focused a great deal of energy on conducting their classes. However, over time they acquired a sense of competence and had been granted considerable professional autonomy. Although competence and autonomy inspired and energized some of these teachers, it also made it unnecessary to be highly engaged. Their administrators reportedly paid little attention to their choices and did not intervene. Ultimately, the decision about whether and how to engage in teaching was theirs to make. Although all participants reported a continued interest in and enthusiasm for teaching, three stage-related patterns emerged in how they engaged in their work. Some teachers chose to modify their engagement, re-directing a portion of their effort to activities other than teaching, including their families or coursework for recertification. Others decided to focus their engagement, by attending to more fine-grained, interesting aspects of their subject or pedagogy, now that they had the basics under control. Still others chose to diversify their engagement—engaging in new and interesting extensions of teaching, such as leadership roles and extracurricular activities. A few, whose efforts to improve their practice or contribute to their school had been ignored or discouraged, either said they would leave teaching or had disengaged as an alternative to leaving. These findings suggest that having a better understanding of teachers’ engagement and the role that the school plays in their decisions about how to engage is important for promoting effectiveness and retention among teachers who have moved beyond their novice years.     

Nagging,noobs and new tricks – students’ perceptions of school as a context for digital technology use

While digital technology is an integral feature of contemporary education, schools are often presumed to constrain and compromise students’ uses of technology. This paper investigates students’ experiences of school as a context for digital technology use. Drawing upon survey data from three Australian secondary schools (n = 1174), this paper considers the various ways in which students use digital devices and applications “in school” and “for school”. After highlighting trends and differences across a range of digital devices and practices, the paper explores the ways in which students perceive school as a limiting and/or enabling setting for technology use. The findings point to a number of ways that schools act to extend as well as curtail student engagement with technology. This paper concludes by considering the possible ways that schools might work to further support and/or enhance students’ technology experiences.     

Personnel Management Strategies for Headteachers

This paper is intended for headteachers, prospective headteachers and others who supervise staff in schools. Drawing upon interviews and observations of executives over a number of years, the paper records a range of personnel management tactics which have proved effective in practice and which educational managers may find useful. Attention is given to the importance of and approaches to induction of new personnel, involvement of staff in managerial tasks, use of goals to focus the school's work, and techniques for communicating productively with staff. The paper also examines the importance and implications of managerial optimism and determination.     

ACHIEVEMENT IN ONLINE AND CAMPUS-BASED CAREER AND TECHNICAL EDUCATION (CTE) COURSES

ABSTRACT

Community colleges are actively involved in distance-learning programs in Career and Technical Education (CTE). Over 76% of community colleges offer some form of distance learning in CTE. Over the years, only a few isolated studies have compared the effectiveness of distance CTE courses to traditional face-to-face courses. Typically, the findings of previous studies indicate no significant differences between the two methods. This study was designed to address the lack of systematic studies of this question. It also examines how student motivation and learning strategies differ for campus-based and online students. Finally, it investigates how online and campus-based courses differ in terms of course interaction, content organization, student support, and transactional distance (i.e., feelings of closeness to the instructor and the program).     

Before Student Teaching: How Undergraduate Students in Early Childhood Teacher Preparation Programs Describe Their Early Classroom-Based Experience

Classroom-based experiences, alternatively known as practica, are an integral component of undergraduate teacher preparation programs, which provide students essential opportunities to apply knowledge in practice. Though much is known about student teaching, much less is known about students’ earlier classroom-based experiences. This qualitative study explores how early childhood care and education students describe their early classroom-based experience. Thirty-four students enrolled in a teacher preparation program participated in interviews, submitted journals, and responded to survey questions about their early classroom-based experience. Results are presented in terms of how students talk about their experiences—belonging or not belonging in the classroom—and what students talk about when discussing their experiences, including communication, support, freedom, new learning, and “the children.” These themes are discussed in terms of students’ experiences in the classroom and implications for undergraduate teacher preparation in early childhood education.     

The Challenges of Defining and Measuring Student Engagement in Science

Engagement is one of the hottest research topics in the field of educational psychology. Research shows that multifarious benefits occur when students are engaged in their own learning, including increased motivation and achievement. However, there is little agreement on a concrete definition and effective measurement of engagement. This special issue serves to discuss and work toward addressing conceptual and instrumentation issues related to engagement, with particular interest in engagement in the domain of science learning. We start by describing the dimensional perspective of engagement (behavioral, cognitive, emotional, agentic) and suggest a complementary approach that places engagement instrumentation on a continuum. Specifically, we recommend that instrumentation be considered on a “grain-size” continuum that ranges from a person-centered to a context-centered orientation to clarify measurement issues. We then provide a synopsis of the articles included in this special issue and conclude with suggestions for future research.     

Multi-facet product information search and retrieval using semantically annotated product family ontology

With the advent of various services and applications of Semantic Web, semantic annotation has emerged as an important research topic. The application of semantically annotated ontology had been evident in numerous information processing and retrieval tasks. One of such tasks is utilizing the semantically annotated ontology in product design which is able to suggest many important applications that are critical to aid various design related tasks. However, ontology development in design engineering remains a time consuming and tedious task that demands considerable human efforts. In the context of product family design, management of different product information that features efficient indexing, update, navigation, search and retrieval across product families is both desirable and challenging. For instance, an efficient way of retrieving timely information on product family can be useful for tasks such as product family redesign and new product variant derivation when requirements change. However, the current research and application of information search and navigation in product family is mostly limited to its structural aspect which is insufficient to handle advanced information search especially when the query targets at multiple aspects of a product. This paper attempts to address this problem by proposing an information search and retrieval framework based on the semantically annotated multi-facet product family ontology. Particularly, we propose a document profile (DP) model to suggest semantic tags for annotation purpose. Using a case study of digital camera families, we illustrate how the faceted search and retrieval of product information can be accomplished. We also exemplify how we can derive new product variants based on the designer’s query of requirements via the faceted search and retrieval of product family information. Lastly, in order to highlight the value of our current work, we briefly discuss some further research and applications in design decision support, e.g. commonality analysis and variety comparison, based on the semantically annotated multi-facet product family ontology.     

Organization and management of an institutional theatre

Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of heteroglossia is central to his concept of dialogism and the way discourse achieves meaning. Bakhtin ‘s catalog of kinds of heteroglossia in the novel offers a method for describing the narrative discourse in Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood, a novel that has evoked disagreement about its quality and its effects. Bakhtin's concept has greater explanatory power than other theories used to explore the rhetorical effects of the novel and the values embodied in its language. In turn, the application of Bakhtin's theory suggests that some kinds of heteroglossia play a larger role in establishing ideology than even Bakhtin claimed.     

Changes in Handedness Associated with Onset or Disappearance of Stuttering

The relationships between scores on the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16 PF), the Brown Personal Beliefs and Teaching Practices Inventories, and the Rokeach Dogmatism Scale for 191 female, beginning teacher education students were investigated using canonical and simple correlation analyses. A significant canonical correlation of .51 was established between these measures, with factors M (Practical vs. Imaginative), and Q1 (Conservative vs. Experimenting) of the 16 PF and total scores on the Brown inventories accounting for the multivariate correlation. Teacher education students who indicate high agreement with Dewey’s philosophy on the Brown instruments appear to also score high on the imagination and experimentation factors of the 16 PF. An additional finding of importance was the absence of significant relationships between the 16 PF and the Rokeach Dogmatism Scale.