Enhancing Teacher Performance: The Role of Professional Autonomy

Current teacher accountability initiatives such as those included in the “No Child Left Behind” legislation in the United States create particular difficulties that impact deleteriously on the performance of professional educators. The quality of public education is undermined when teachers are held accountable to an external authority rather than to themselves, their colleagues, and their professional associations. In this article, and in response to this concern, we argue that for teachers to strengthen their classroom performance, policy renewal is required on two separate fronts: first, we must restructure teachers’ working conditions to support autonomous professional activity related to education; and second, teachers, both individually and collectively, must accept the concomitant responsibility to pursue personal professional development to improve their pedagogical work.     

Administrating transnational education: a cross‐cultural application of Hodgkinson’s values paradigm

This article reports on an exploratory study which employed Hodgkinson’s values paradigm as an analytical tool for explaining how administrators of transnational education programmes understand national cultural values to affect their work and working environment. In particular, interviews with managers responsible for Australia’s provision of transnational higher education in Thailand were examined against Hodgkinson’s values paradigm in an attempt to identify whether any of his particular value types might appear more prominently in decision‐making undertaken in either the Australian or the Thai educational administrative setting. The findings suggest that rational consequential decision‐making might be more significant in Australia, while decision‐making using rational consensual, transrational and subrational values might be more prominent in Thailand.     

Critical Thinking Ability and Teacher Effectiveness

Research on teacher thinking in the last fifteen years supports the hypothesis that being an effective critical thinker (as defined by Ennis) would make a major contribution to being an effective teacher. Ennis’ conception of critical thinking incorporates various dispositions and abilities, while his Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level X provides a measure of four crucial abilites. The teacher thinking research suggests that each of these four abilities is central to effective teaching. The four abilities are: (1) inductive thinking; (2) judging credibility of observation reports; (3) deductive thinking; and (4) assumption identification. Research findings about teacher thinking fall into three main categories: (a) implicit theories; (b) planning and reflection; and (c) dilemmas and uncertainty.

The first half of the paper shows how a teacher's performance and capacity to deal effectively with (a)‐(c) depend significantly on using the abilities (1)‐(4). If this is so then highly effective teachers should score significantly better on Ennis’ Cornell Critical Thinking Test (Level X) than do teachers as a whole. Hence scores on this test for a large sample of vocational teachers were compared with the scores of vocational teachers whose teaching performance has been judged as excellent by their teacher educators. The second half of the paper reports and discusses the results of testing the hypothesis and the implications for teacher education.