Triadic Supervision and its Impact on the Role of the Supervisor: A Qualitative Examination of Supervisors' Perspectives

Although triadic supervision has been the subject of little empirical research, perspectives of supervisors in this form of supervision have received even less attention. This qualitative study examined 6 doctoral student supervisors' experiences of triadic supervision and the demands it placed on them in their role as supervisors. Data collection involved use of in‐depth, open‐ended interviews, and a whole‐text analysis resulted in 2 major categories. These categories address various ways in which triadic supervision increases or decreases the demands placed on the supervisor. Implications of the findings for supervisory practices and future research are also addressed.     

The acquisition of biological knowledge during childhood: Cognitive conflict or tabula rasa?

Clinical interviews were conducted with three elementary school children, who varied in age but not in family or school environment, to determine the extent to which they held naive misconceptions about important biological topics and to determine agewise trends in the development of biological knowledge. Does early biological knowledge acquisition follow a pattern of spontaneous naive theory construction and cognitive conflict or does it follow a pattern of gradual accretion to an initially blank slate? Contrary to findings in the physical sciences, little evidence was found for biological “misconceptions” as knowledge acquisition appeared to more directly follow the gradual accretion hypothesis with the primary source of that knowledge adult authority rather than personal experience. However, “conceptual change teaching” is still advocated due to its ability to provoke students to consider and test alternative conceptions (even if they are not their own) as a means of encouraging the development of important general reasoning patterns utilized in the testing of causal hypotheses.     

Building teacher capacity for implementing curricular coherence: mathematics teacher professional development tasks

Improving mathematics education in the United States has taken many forms. Our work has focused on two aspects: the content knowledge of teachers and a well-articulated coherent curriculum. Our aim was teacher “capacity building” that is enabling teachers to teach to coherent and significant mathematical curricular goals and describe the implementation in a large-scale project based at Michigan State University. We highlight the design, structure and use of mathematics teacher learning tasks that were intended to improve teachers’ capacity to teach to these goals and note how the teachers’ perceptions of the structure and sequencing of mathematics itself affect the ways they organize mathematics in their teaching and the ways they teach.