The Interaction between Teachers’ Knowledge and Skills when Managing a Troublesome Classroom Behaviour

This paper reports the findings of a study that explored how teachers manage a pervasive and disruptive classroom behaviour known as talking out of turn. The study found that talking out of turn occurred at story time in the 26 primary classrooms investigated. Comparisons between teachers showed that they used different strategies to manage classroom talk and that these strategies correlate with the frequency of talking out of turn in their classrooms. However, this is not a matter merely of some teachers being more skillful than others. Detailed analysis of each teacher's knowledge of teaching and learning showed that the skills that they used are inseparable from the knowledge they hold. It is suggested that teachers may change the frequency of an unwanted classroom behaviour, if they are helped to reflect on their professional knowledge.     

Creating an Institutional Repository: Elements for Success!

ABSTRACT

The institutional repository (IR) can be a dynamic, online collection of research, writing, and projects conducted by a university’s faculty and students. IRs are also important tools that allow a library to create a connection with faculty and students. This report will identify the services and content essential to a successful institutional repository, discuss how to build a team of talented experts to build and market the repository, address the creation of a business plan and strategies for marketing and building social media presence, and conclude with thoughts on how to develop, process, and publish journals locally and sustainably.     

Beginning teachers and inclusive education: frustrations,dilemmas and growth

Scholars report desirable outcomes for all participants in classrooms where diverse learners are welcomed members. Data suggest teachers leave the profession early because of the demands of their work made increasingly difficult by the diverse range of students, lack of assistance to support the diverse range of student needs and the resulting burnout. This paper presents qualitative data from six beginning teachers, juxtaposed with the author's personal narrative, to illustrate the ongoing problems beginning teachers face, contending with political, historical and cultural barriers when teaching students with diverse learning needs. Despite policy advances and mandated courses in inclusive education in initial teacher education, beginning teachers are overwhelmed by the magnitude of teaching diverse learners in contemporary classrooms. Of note in the data are the preservice teachers’ fluid conceptions of inclusive education. The polarity of success and failure of inclusive education is re-envisaged through Deleuze and Guattari's [(1987 Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. [Google Scholar]). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.] rhizome. The data illustrate the challenges and messiness of learning to become an inclusive educator. It is important to listen to the experiences of beginning teachers given the value of supportive classroom environments for students with diverse needs and the impact creating these environments has on beginning teachers’ longevity in the profession.     

What Will I Like Best When I'm All Grown Up? Preschoolers' Understanding of Future Preferences

Three experiments investigated 3‐, 4‐, and 5‐year‐olds' (N = 240) understanding that their future or “grown‐up” preferences may differ from their current ones (self‐future condition). This understanding was compared to children's understanding of the preferences of a grown‐up (adult‐now condition) or the grown‐up preferences of a same‐aged peer (peer‐future condition). Children's performance across all three conditions improved significantly with age. Moreover, children found it significantly more difficult to reason about their own future preferences than they did to reason either about an adult's preferences or the future preferences of a peer. These results have important implications for theories about future thinking and perspective‐taking abilities, more broadly.     

Preschoolers' Saving Behavior: The Role of Planning and Self-Control

Planning and self-control were examined in relation to preschoolers' (41- to 74-months) saving behavior. Employing a marble run paradigm, 54 children participated in two trials in which they could use their marbles immediately on a less desirable run, or save for a more desirable run. Twenty-nine children received the opportunity to create a budget. On Trial 1, children in the budgeting condition saved significantly more than did children in the control condition, and their planning ability related to saving (after controlling for age and language). Those who consistently budgeted at least one marble for the more desirable run were more likely to save. Control children's performance improved across trials, with no between-condition differences on Trial 2. Self-control was not related to saving.     

Talkin’ bout my generation: Boomers, Xers, and educational change

From 1998 to 2003, Andy Hargreaves and Ivor Goodson, along with colleagues Shawn Moore, Sonia James-Wilson, Dean Fink, and Corrie Giles, undertook a large-scale study of eight secondary schools in Ontario, Canada, and New York in the United States to investigate teachers’ perceptions and experiences of educational change over 30 years spanning from the 1970s through the 1990s (Hargreaves and Goodson in Edu Admn Quart 42(1):3–41, 2006). The Change Over Time? study not only provided a unique glimpse into how schools and teachers experience educational change but also demonstrated that most of what educators and scholars previously considered when looking at educational change neglected its political, historical, and longitudinal aspects. Hargreaves and Goodson highlighted five change forces that shape educational change: waves of reform, changing student demographics, teacher generations, leadership succession, and school interrelations. This article, based on work conducted in Massachusetts from 2007 to 2009 (Stone-Johnson in Enduring reform: The impact of mandated change on middle career teachers. Boston College, Chestnut Hill, 2009; Teachers’ career trajectories and work lives. Springer, Dordrecht, 2009), elaborates upon two of these aspects, waves of reform and teacher generations, highlighting the response of the current generation of teachers in mid-career to the most recent wave of reform.     

What do Pre-Service Teachers See as Their Roles in Promoting Positive Social Environments? “I see Myself as a Facilitator of Acceptance”

Teacher educators describe a developmental process they use for preparing pre-service teachers to support preschool-age children with and without disabilities in becoming socially competent. Social competence is crucial in developing the “whole” child and may actually foster other areas of development. Using qualitative data gathered from multiple classes over several years, the authors explain ways they guide future teachers in learning how to provide positive social environments. They describe their observations of changes in students’ beliefs about their roles and responsibilities, which appear to be influenced by the guided experiences they have provided. Activities implemented in early childhood and early childhood special education courses are shared, as well as student work samples that illustrate developing awareness and understanding.     

School Development Planning in England and Wales (1988–1992): An Insight into the Impact of Policy Recontextualization on the Initiation and Early Implementation of Decentralized Reform

The predictable failure of reform has been a characteristic of education systems for some years. However, the tendency of policy makers to attribute blame for any implementation deficit solely to schools and school systems is somewhat at odds with the historical evidence presented in this article. Through the lens of school development planning, the data analysed in this British example support the view that, rather than an unequivocal government position on decentralized governance, the rational approach of policy formulation, initiation and implementation tended to mask considerable ambiguity within the policy cycle.

Although the inherent ambiguity of the ‘tight–loose’ design of such early models of decentralization has previously been criticized, ambiguity was also exacerbated by fragmentation. Information concerned with the roles, responsibilities and duties of those responsible for implementing change was late arriving from multiple official sources, and at times inconsistent or contradictory. The resulting uncertain role of planning, a key component of decentralized governance models, left policy open to recontextualization by those most likely to be involved at both the initiation and implementation stages of the reform process. This finding reinforces the work of Ball and Bowe, and Deem and others, who have previously criticized change theorists for over‐simplifying the conditions leading to implementation failure.     

Parallel professionalism in an era of standardisation

Today’s American educational context is characterised by increasing standardisation coupled with heightened accountability. While some view standardisation as a lever for equity, many view it as problematic for the work of teachers. Efforts to improve student achievement by focusing on the activities of teachers have resulted in an over-riding sense that teachers have lost control over their work and that teachers’ professional identities are being worn away by the changes asked of them. Research has demonstrated the ways in which understandings of teachers’ professionalism have changed over time. Here, I argue that not only have views of professionalism changed over time, but that different teachers or here different groups of teachers, experience and understand professionalism differently. In this article, I first look at teachers’ professionalism across two decades using data from a large national database and then focus on how different generations of teachers experience professionalism in a context of standardisation in multiple ways based on qualitative interviews. The findings show that unlike veteran teachers from the Boomer generation (born 1943–1960) who started their careers as idealists but have become increasingly bitter about changes being asked of them, many Generation X (born 1961–1981) teachers are able to accommodate the changes asked of them in a more neutral fashion. While these teachers do not particularly like all aspects of standardisation, they feel that it is just part of the work they do, not who they are. This flexibility is not a function of diminished professionalism but rather a generational difference, as teachers from Generation X tend to be more flexible, less rule-bound than those from the Boomer generation whose mission is who they are. The data presented demonstrate the need to understand professionalism in a new light. Some teachers feel more control in this era of standardisation, and some feel less. Rather than viewing professionalism as a singular phenomenon that everyone experiences in the same way, it is increasingly important to view it as a complex phenomenon that can be experienced in unique ways at the same time by disparate groups of teachers. In this sense, professionalism can morph from more than ‘old’ or ‘new’ to complex, or what I term in this article parallel professionalism.