Planning a comprehensive staff development program

Directing an early childhood education program is a backbreaking, stressful endeavor. The successful administrator learns to manage time so as to squeeze the completion of infinite tasks into a finite daily time frame. Budgeting, paper work or unexpected conflict resolution often take priority over work with the staff or the curriculum. Staff development efforts are often limited.Jeffrey Trawick-Smith is an Assistant Professor at Eastern Connecticut State University in Willmantic     

An Ethical Exercise for the Social Studies Classroom: The Trolley Dilemma

The Trolley Problem as defined in this paper is a series, or continuation, of increasingly difficult ethical riddles successfully implemented in a classroom environment to spur complex, critical thinking and dialogue. The activity is designed upon the scenario of a runaway train with different and challenging choices, segueing neatly into group discussions of ethics while limiting potential disruptions or controversies. It fits nicely with multiple standards, goals and/or outcomes and can be accommodated to multiple grade levels and courses. It is a powerful, yet easily implemented classroom exercise for educators to develop higher order thinking and dialogue for their students.     

Comparing cognition by integrating concept learning,proactive interference,and list memory

This article describes an approach for training a variety of species to learn the abstract concept of same/different, which in turn forms the basis for testing proactive interference and list memory. The stimulus set for concept-learning training was progressively doubled from 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 . . . to 1,024 different pictures with novel-stimulus transfer following learning. All species fully learned the same/different abstract concept: capuchin and rhesus monkeys learned more readily than pigeons; nutcrackers and magpies were at least equivalent to monkeys and transferred somewhat better following initial training sets. A similar task using the 1,024-picture set plus delays was used to test proactive interference on occasional trials. Pigeons revealed greater interference with 10-s than with 1-s delays, whereas delay time had no effect on rhesus monkeys, suggesting that the monkeys’ interference was event based. This same single-item same/different task was expanded to a 4-item list memory task to test animal list memory. Humans were tested similarly with lists of kaleidoscope pictures. Delays between the list and test were manipulated, resulting in strong initial recency effects (i.e., strong 4th-item memory) at short delays and changing to a strong primacy effect (i.e., strong 1st-item memory) at long delays (pigeons 0-s to 10-s delays; monkeys 0-s to 30-s delays; humans 0-s to 100-s delays). Results and findings are discussed in terms of these species’ cognition and memory comparisons, evolutionary implications, and future directions for testing other species in these synergistically related tasks.