A Behavior Observation System for Group Supervision

A behavior observation system was developed for group supervision. The observation system was designed to measure the occurrence of verbal problem-solving behavior during group supervision meetings. Reliability data were obtained from four counseling teams' group supervision meetings at a residential facility for youngsters with social and emotional problems. Interrater agreement based on occurrences of verbal behavior indicated that the observation system has adequate reliability for preliminary research. Possible directions for research with the observation system are delineated.     

Self-Portraiture: The Uses of Academic Autobiography

This review article examines Leonard Waks's innovative collection of essays entitled Self-Portraiture: The Uses of Academic Autobiography: Review of Leaders in Philosophy of Education: Intellectual Self-Portraits. The book is based on invitations to leading philosophers of education to write about their own careers in the field and to offer an intellectual autobiography. The purpose of the book is not primarily to provide a history of particular arguments and their rebuttal, and in this sense it is not directly philosophical, but the chapters do chronicle broader intellectual shifts, and this is invaluable. The article examines the essays in terms of the relation between the professional and the personal, and between political and social contexts. Academic virtues and vices are found to be on display in several of the accounts. Together the essays constitute, albeit to an incomplete degree, the history of a movement, with philosophy of education framed mainly as an Anglo-American pursuit. Finally, in the light of this series of reflections, the article ponders the future of the subject both in relation to the changing context of educational policy and practice, and in terms of its positioning with regard to mainstream philosophy.     

Books for Younger Secondary School Children in a Multi-racial Classroom

In this article I want to discuss some conclusions I have reached about using books with younger pupils in a multi-racial classroom. I shall have to make some general points about underlying approaches. Since I work in a general studies programme with first year pupils, I also want to comment in passing on some implications for teaching in history and geography.     

Hypothetical Insurance and Higher Education

What level of government subsidy of higher education is justified, in what form, and for what reasons? We answer these questions by applying the hypothetical insurance approach, originally developed by Ronald Dworkin in his work on distributive justice. On this approach, when asking how to fund and deliver public services in a particular domain, we should seek to model what would be the outcome of a hypothetical insurance market: we stipulate that participants lack knowledge about their specific resources and risks, and ask what insurance contracts they would take out to secure different types of benefit and protection in the domain in question. The great benefit of the hypothetical insurance approach is that it allows us to take apparently intractable questions about interpersonal distribution and transform them into questions about intrapersonal distributions: that is, questions about how an individual would choose to distribute risks and resources across the various lives that they might end up living, in light of their individual ambitions and preferences. Applying this approach to higher education, we argue that the UK model of higher education funding in which the costs of an individual's higher education are shared between general taxation and the individual herself, with the latter element to be paid retrospectively through an income‐contingent state‐backed loan, is vindicated as just. In particular, we argue that it is more just than alternatives such as a graduate tax, full funding through general taxation, and full privatisation.