Application of the Triad Training Model in a Multicultural Counseling Course

The authors investigated the effectiveness of the Triad Training Model (P. Pedersen, 1994a, 1994b, 2000a, 2000b) on influencing counselor empathy, intolerance for ambiguity, and multicultural competency by using a quasi‐experimental treatment group comparison design. No significant differences among the triad training group and two comparison groups were found. However, the changes in multicultural competency scores within the treatment group were found to be significant. Implications of the findings are discussed.     

Normative Considerations in the Aftermath of Gun Violence in Schools

Gun violence in American and Canadian schools is an ongoing tragedy that goes substantially beyond its roots in the interlocking emotional and behavioral issues of mental health and bullying. In light of the need for effective policy development, Dianne T. Gereluk, J. Kent Donlevy, and Merlin B. Thompson examine gun violence in schools from several relevant perspectives in this article. The authors consider the principle of standard of care as it relates to parents, teachers, and community members in a particular school's context. They posit that normative principles may provide a procedural mechanism appropriate for policymakers and practitioners when contemplating and implementing heightened security measures. Finally, they propose Rawlsian reasonableness as an effective and deliberative democratic process that reduces emotional, reactive responses to school shootings. Through these overlapping concepts, the authors advocate for purposeful discussions regarding gun violence in schools based on the unique pragmatic, educational, social, political, and contextual circumstances of individual schools and their surrounding communities.     

Book of the Month

THE ECONOMICS OF CABLE TELEVISION by G. Kent Webb (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books/D.C. Heath, 1983---$23.00)     

Telecommunications in Teacher Education: reflections on the first Virtual Team Case Competition

ABSTRACT

In the spring of 1994, the University of Virginia piloted the first Virtual Team Case Competition. This event combined telecommunications and case‐method teaching to promote the use of technology and problem solving among teams of pre‐service teachers from three countries. Participating teams subscribed to a general mailing list to receive instructions, a schedule of events, and a case based on a real classroom situation. Teams had approximately ten days to email their analyses of the case to judges and to administrators of the competition. Judges scored each team's responses to the teaching case and to follow‐up questions and sent their evaluations by private email to the administrators. Results of the competitition were then posted over the mailing list. This paper describes both how the competition worked and what we learned from our experiment with the first Virtual Team Case Competition.     

EDUCATION AS AN AFFIRMATIVE INVENTION: ALAIN BADIOU AND THE PURPOSE OF TEACHING AND CURRICULUM

Schools can be places where students articulate a preferred social future and exercise informed judgment with others toward that goal. Yet, educators have few examples of what a curriculum explicitly concerned with undertaking such a process might look like. Distinct from questions about how best to receive an Other or social science investigations of what may constitute educational “best practices,” Kent den Heyer explores here the ways in which the work of Alain Badiou provides for a more proactive arrangement of knowledge in schools organized to instigate truth‐processes that might supplement individual and socially inherited commitments. Through this exploration, den Heyer argues for the democratic and life‐affirming benefits of scholars and teachers who take up a “disciplinary ethic of truths.” He provides one of potentially many curricular examples of such an arrangement of knowledge.     

Improving teacher preparation and selection: lessons from the Pennsylvania experience

This paper examines Pennsylvania's teacher preparation and selection processes over the last decade. Teacher test scores are examined across colleges of education, and extreme differences in teacher test scores are found. Also, extreme variations are evident among districts' employed teachers. A unique survey of district employment practices reveals that, on average, 40% of a district's teachers previously attended there as students. An exploratory econometric model indicates that the higher the unemployment rate in a district, the more likely it will hire its former students to teach, and that the greater the fraction of former students now in the district's teacher force, the lower is student achievement. The paper concludes with a discussion of conventional and unconventional strategies to improve the quality of teachers actually hired by school boards.     

Designing Online Workshops: Using an Experiential Learning Model

This article describes 4 online workshops designed to assist college students with improving their time management, textbook reading, memory and concentration, and overall academic performance. These workshops were created to work equally well with imaginative, analytic, common‐sense, and dynamic learners. Positive student feedback indicated that these workshops met students' perceived needs and expectations.