Assessing teacher practice and development: the case of comprehensive literacy instruction

In this paper, we report on 2 studies developing, testing, and using an observation tool for measuring primary literacy instruction, the Developing Language and Literacy Teaching (DLLT) rubrics. In Study 1 (an instrumentation study), we show that the DLLT has a high level of internal consistency, that there are high levels of inter-rater reliability when the tool is used by in-school coaches, that the items order consistent with a hypothesized developmental trajectory, and that the DLLT can distinguish between novice and more experienced teachers at one time point. In Study 2 (a 3‐year longitudinal study), we show that the DLLT is sensitive to growth in teaching practice, that this growth is related to exposure to one-on-one coaching, and that teacher practice as measured by the DLLT is related to teachers' value added to student achievement year by year.     

Teachers’ Understanding and Operationalisation of ‘Science Capital’

Across the globe, governments, industry and educationalists are in agreement that more needs to be done to increase and broaden participation in post-16 science. Schools, as well as teachers, are seen as key in this effort. Previous research has found that engagement with science, inclination to study science and understanding of the value of science strongly relates to a student's science capital. This paper reports on findings from the pilot year of a one-year professional development (PD) programme designed to work with secondary-school teachers to build students’ science capital. The PD programme introduced teachers to the nature and importance of science capital and thereafter supported them to develop ways of implementing science capital-building pedagogy in their practice. The data comprise interviews with the participating teachers (n?=?10), observations of classroom practices and analyses of the teachers’ accounts of their practice. Our findings suggest that teachers found the concept of science capital to be compelling and to resonate with their own intuitive understandings and experiences. However, the ways in which the concept was operationalised in terms of the implementation of pedagogical practices varied. The difficulties inherent in the operationalisation are examined and recommendations for future work with teachers around the concept of science capital are developed.     

Two negatives don't always make a positive: Exploring how limitations in teacher knowledge and the curriculum contribute to instructional quality

This paper examines the contribution of mathematical knowledge for teaching (MKT) and curriculum materials to the implementation of lessons on integer subtraction. In particular, it investigates the instruction of three teachers with differing MKT levels using two editions of the same set of curriculum materials that provided different levels of support. This variation in MKT level and curriculum support facilitated exploring the distinct and joint contribution of MKT and the curriculum materials to instructional quality. The analyses suggest that MKT relates positively to teachers' use of representations, provision of explanations, precision in language and notation, and ability to capitalize on student contributions and move the mathematics along in a goal-directed manner. Curriculum materials set the stage for attending to the meaning of integer subtraction and appeared to support teachers' use of representations, provision of explanations, and precision in language and notation. More critically, the findings suggest that less educative curriculum materials, coupled with low levels of MKT, can lead to problematic instruction. In contrast, educative materials can help low-MKT teachers provide adequate instruction, while higher MKT levels seem to enable teachers to compensate for curriculum limitations.     

The Training of Adequate Leadership for Week‐Day Religious Education

The 51 abstracts of doctoral theses printed below were sent to the Bureau of Research of the National Council of Churches for abstracting in Religious Education since the last series of such doctoral abstracts was printed in this journal (see Religious Education, Vol. 56, pages 359–382, 1961). The abstracts here printed have been substantially limited to studies containing explicit reference to current educational processes, procedures, and personnel in religious institutions. Persons interested in reviewing complete dissertations usually may obtain these in one of two ways. The school granting the degree will either loan complete dissertations to local libraries on interlibrary loan, or it will direct interested persons to ordering that dissertation on microfilm. Readers are reminded that an indispensable library resource for obtaining information on available doctoral theses from many of the major academic institutions is Dissertation Abstracts. Please do not address requests for dissertations to this magazine or to the National Council of Churches     

Troubling “understanding mathematics in-depth”: Its role in the identity work of student-teachers in England

In this paper, we focus on an initiative in England devised to prepare non-mathematics graduates to train as secondary mathematics teachers through a 6-month Mathematics Enhancement Course (MEC) to boost their subject knowledge. The course documentation focuses on the need to develop “understanding mathematics in-depth” in students in order for them to become successful mathematics teachers. We take a poststructural approach, so we are not interested in asking what such an understanding is, about the value of this approach or about the effectiveness of the MECs in developing this understanding in their participants. Instead we explore what positions this discourse of “understanding mathematics in-depth” makes available to MEC students. We do this by looking in detail at the “identity work” of two students, analysing how they use and are used by this discourse to position themselves as future mathematics teachers. In doing so, we show how even benign-looking social practices such as “understanding mathematics in-depth” are implicated in practices of inclusion and exclusion. We show this through detailed readings of interviews with two participants, one of whom fits with the dominant discourses in the MEC and the other who, despite passing the MEC, experiences tensions between her national identity work and MEC discourses. We argue that it is vital to explore “identity work” within teacher education contexts to ensure that becoming a successful mathematics teacher is equally available to all.     

Australia’s 1988 Bicentennial: national history and multiculturalism in the primary school curriculum

As in many countries, such as Germany, Turkey, the United States and Japan the history/culture wars of the past two decades have increased public interest in what is taught in schools. This has resulted in rigorous debates in the general community, encouraged and sustained through regular media coverage. Partly as a response to this, History has been designated as a separate subject in the first wave of planning and implementation of the Australian National Curriculum. Two of the reasons for this include first, to recognise the importance of teaching historical skills as a distinct subject; and second there is an ongoing bipartisan political interest in privileging history disciplinary knowledge and content to ensure that national history narratives are taught to students. To contribute meaningfully towards the development and implementation of a National Curriculum, it is important to understand past curriculum constructions, so that the disciplinary knowledge and content of history remains independent, and not subsumed within current (or future) political trends. Based on examples of national history from the Queensland Social Studies syllabus and government endorsed sourcebooks in the lead-up to the 1988 Bicentennial of British colonisation of the Australian continent, this article examines the influence and role of multiculturalism in History teaching in primary schools. Particular attention is paid to Indigenous representations and British heritages, as an example of two groups that have often been represented as binaries to each other throughout Australian history. An analysis of the curriculum materials illuminates the differences between multiculturalism and history—highlighting how the two are merged at the expense of accurate historical knowledge and concepts, particularly in the area of national history. This study will demonstrate that as a result of the infiltration of multiculturalism into history content within the Social Studies curriculum, historical knowledge becomes silenced in the school curriculum – resulting in vague and sometimes historically inaccurate information being presented to students; and the privileging of certain types of multiculturalism.     

Olympic Sport and Its Lessons for Peace

The purpose of this paper is to study the expressive part of game performance in soccer by introducing the concept of theatricality to describe a special form of expression. The aim is to contribute to the understanding of game performance by looking into the appearance, role and value of theatricality. The main argument of the paper is that theatricality can describe an important, but rarely noticed performance aspect, as it provides a unifying concept for expressive distancing in four dimensions of the players’ life-worlds: the subjective, intersubjective, collective and institutional. By explicating the value of this kind of expression in soccer the paper can provide a philosophical basis for including theatricality in performance and development strategies.