Teacher as Researcher,Teacher as Scholar,and Teacher as Leader

ABSTRACT

Too often, because of the static nature of schools and the dominant existence of high-stakes testing, professional learning for teachers is determined by administrators or policy and is facilitated by those who are not part of the school community using prepackaged programs. These initiatives run counter to authentic teacher inquiry where teachers enhance their understanding of students and learning and, ideally, develop new teaching practices (Borko, 2004; Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999, 2009; Darling-Hammond, 1997). In this article, we focus on how teachers participating in action research begin to position themselves as teacher leaders.     

Planning programs for distant learners

Summary The 1990s promise to be exciting years for educators due to the opportunities made possible by advances in information technologies. However exciting the possibilities are, it is imperative that the quality of delivered instruction not suffer. Program planners need to adapt instruction to technologies using a systematic process to ensure that programs effectively and efficiently educate learners. The program planner who intends to use distance education technologies must actively consider and plan for the factors that result from being geographically separated from their learners.     

Teaching the biological consequences of alcohol abuse through an online game: impacts among secondary students

A multimedia game was designed to serve as a dual-purpose intervention that aligned with National Science Content Standards, while also conveying knowledge about the consequences of alcohol consumption for a secondary school audience. A tertiary goal was to positively impact adolescents' attitudes toward science through career role-play experiences within the game. In a pretest/delayed posttest design, middle and high school students, both male and female, demonstrated significant gains on measures of content knowledge and attitudes toward science. The best predictors of these outcomes were the players' ratings of the game's usability and satisfaction with the game. The outcomes suggest that game interventions can successfully teach standards-based science content, target age-appropriate health messages, and impact students' attitudes toward science.     

Rethinking the reference collection: exploring benchmarks and e-book availability

Librarians in the Health Sciences Library System at the University of Pittsburgh explored the possibility of developing an electronic reference collection that would replace the print reference collection, thus providing access to these valuable materials to a widely dispersed user population. The librarians evaluated the print reference collection and standard collection development lists as potential benchmarks for the electronic collection, and they determined which books were available in electronic format. They decided that the low availability of electronic versions of titles in each benchmark group rendered the creation of an electronic reference collection using either benchmark impractical.     

Teacher professionalism under the recent reform of performance pay in Mainland China

In 2009, a reform in teachers’ pay, linking remuneration to performance, was implemented in China. The intention was to improve the quality of education by making teachers more diligent and creative and removing the inequality in pay between teachers in different schools. A review of this reform reveals that it has resolved the problem of inequality between teachers working in different schools but has created a new inequality: between teachers within the same schools. Also, the performance evaluation, based mostly on quantitative data such as student test scores, has led to teachers formalising their work and adopting an approach of “compliant professionalism”. Teachers’ workloads have increased, and only teachers who perform well on empirical performance indicators are given opportunities for professional development and remuneration. The findings suggest that a focus on teaching and on teachers’ autonomy is needed to achieve the goal of improving the quality of education.     

Enhancing preschool children's vocabulary: Effects of teacher talk before,during and after shared reading

This observational study analyzed patterns of teacher extratextual talk as it occurs before, during, and after reading books to children, and the frequency and duration of teacher questioning by type (label, define, associate) on preschoolers’ receptive and expressive vocabulary knowledge. Over the course of 18 weeks, 13 teachers and 100 children participated in ninety 20-min small-group sessions of teacher-guided shared reading instruction. Teachers’ reading instruction was examined through videotaped observations using the Multi-Option Observation System for Experimental Studies (MOOSES™; Tapp, Wehby, & Ellis, 1995). Two findings, in particular, yielded relevant educational and theoretical implications. First, time spent after reading was significantly related to expressive vocabulary. However, question timing did not seem to matter in terms of receptive vocabulary outcomes. Second, duration of teacher association questioning was significantly related to receptive vocabulary outcomes while both frequency and duration of teacher vocabulary-related association-level questioning were related to expressive vocabulary. For receptive vocabulary, both vocabulary- and comprehension-related association-level questioning mattered. These findings complement the body of work demonstrating that engaging children in interactive shared reading that elicits their active participation is related to meaningful gains in children's language and literacy growth. Limitations of the study and directions for future research are discussed.     

2. CBQ REVIEW ESSAY: Reporting Wars and the Military (Part 1)

Leslie Halliwell's The Filmgoer's Companion (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974—$25.00)

Ray Armes' Film and Reality: An Historical Survey (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1974—$1.95, paper)

Peter Harcourt 's Six European Directors: Essays on the Meaning of Film Style (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1974—$2.50, paper)

James Robert Parish' The RKO Gals (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1974—$14.95)

Lee R. Bowker's Elements of Film (New York: Harcourt Brace Javanovich, 1974—$5.95, paper)

Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Cinema (3138 West Schubert, Chicago, Ill. 60647—$3.00 for 6 issues a year, or 50c each)

William Kuhns' Themes Two (Dayton, Ohio: Pflaum/Standard, 1974—$4.95, paper)

Raoul Walsh's Each Man in His Time: The Life Story of a Director (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974– $10.00)     

Library Outreach Positions: From Planning to Practice

East Tennessee State University has a diverse student population of approximately 12,500 students. Recent statistics have indicated that the student body is bypassing the physical library building, including reference services, and connecting to online sources from off campus. With only six public service librarians whose duties include interlibrary loan, instruction, and other key library functions, librarians are limited in their ability to provide outreach to those students who might never enter the library. In this article, the authors describe the decision process in developing outreach librarian positions for the graduate programs librarian and the undergraduate student services librarian and discuss the specific services that these librarians provide to students.     

Dialogic voices in talk about drinking and pregnancy

Alcohol use during pregnancy poses a significant risk of fetal alcohol syndrome. This study presents the interpretive findings of the formative research phase of a funded grant to develop a community‐based public health media campaign on the topic of drinking during pregnancy. In the initial wave of data collection, 50 rural women were recruited from four Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) clinics in southeastern Iowa to participate in semi‐structured interviews. In the second wave, 10 additional WIC clients were interviewed for member‐checking purposes. Findings revealed two competing discourses that organized these women's attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors surrounding drinking and pregnancy: the discourse of individualism and the discourse of responsible motherhood. These two discourses offer opposing normative guidelines for talk among their close female relatives and friends. The implications of these findings for designing a community‐based media campaign are discussed.