The teacher-innovator: Models of teaching as the core of teacher education

A design for teacher education has been made around the concept of providing teacher trainees with the theoretical understanding of the major models of teaching and the clinical competence to employ them in the classroom. Research indicates that this design enables teachers to acquire the ability to radiate several models in the classroom regardless of their natural styles. While personal values do not appear to affect acquisition of the repertoire of models, conceptual level is related to repertory acquisition. The teaching behavior of cooperating (supervising) teachers is not related to the behavior of teacher trainees when practicing the models of teaching but is related to their more general teaching styles.

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Résumé Doter les futurs professeurs de la connaissance théorique des principaux modèles d'enseignement ainsi que de la compétence pour les utiliser en classe constitute le point central d'un programme de formation des maîtres. La recherche indique que ce programme permet aux professeurs d'acquérir la capacité d'utiliser en classe plusieurs modèles malgré leur style naturel. Même si les valuers personnelles ne semblent pas influer sur l'acquisition de la gamme de modèles, le niveau conceptuel est relié à l'acquisition de cette gamme. Le comportement en classe des professeurs (surveillants), lequel n'est pas relié à l'attitude des futurs professeurs lorsqu'ils pratiquent ces modèles d'enseignement, est plutôt fonction de leur style plus général d'enseignement.

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With Mike McKibbin, Michael Feller, Christina Gullion, Joe Kelly, and Gene Rude, all of whom contributed to the data collection and analysis and debate over substance. All are instructors at Teachers College.     

Enhancing Father Involvement in Low‐Income Families: A Couples Group Approach to Preventive Intervention

To address the problem of fathers’ absence from children's lives and the difficulty of paternal engagement, especially among lower income families, government agencies have given increasing attention to funding father involvement interventions. Few of these interventions have yielded promising results. Father involvement research that focuses on the couple/coparenting relationship offers a pathway to support fathers’ involvement while strengthening family relationships. Relevant research is reviewed and an exemplar is provided in the Supporting Father Involvement intervention and its positive effects on parental and parent–child relationships and children's outcomes. The article concludes with policy implications of this choice of target populations and the need to develop new strategies to involve fathers in the lives of their children.     

Internationalism: A Need in American Education

The author's middle school has created a mediated set of electronic learning resources designed to more effectively meet students' research needs. These research strategies help students with a variety of reading skills and allow students, and their teachers, to focus on higher-level thinking activities because the resource collections provide time-saving shortcuts through open-ended Google searches.     

Hard bodies: exploring historical and cultural factors in disabled people’s participation in exercise; applying critical disability theory

Abstract

The popularity of the Paralympics co-exists with persistent exclusion of disabled youth and adults in community sport and recreation programmes around the world. This study explored the experiences of disabled people in sport, fitness and dance, drawing upon a range of participants’ perspectives from Paralympic athletes and professional dancers, to those who’d never engaged in physical activities. We asked participants about the range of psycho-social factors that intervene between a disabled person and a workable, enjoyable fitness regimen. Insights emerged into factors that encourage enjoyable physical movement for some, and factors that discourage or prohibit this for others. Analytic tools of Critical Disability Theory were applied to penetrate stereotyped conceptualizations of disabled people, taking a long view into the history of disability discrimination and exclusion. An example is the concept and (English) word, ‘fitness’ used during the Eugenics Movement to dismiss the worth of disabled people. Along with other marginalized populations, the ‘unfit’ were systematically targeted with elimination. We addressed these archaic attitudes, in concert with the present era’s intrusions of architectural, programmatic and attitudinal barriers, which may become internalized as resistance to physical activities. Participants offered strategies to support others in the world of movement, along with encouragement to Disability Studies scholars to expand research in this arena.     

Is Visually Guided Reaching in Early Infancy a Myth?

The issue examined was whether infants require sight of their hand when first beginning to reach for, contact, and grasp objects. 7 infants were repeatedly tested between 6 and 25 weeks of age. Each session consisted of 8 trials of objects presented in the light and 8 trials of glowing or sounding objects in complete darkness. Infants first contacted the object in both conditions at comparable ages (mean age for light, 12.3 weeks, and for dark, 11.9 weeks). Infants first grasped the object in the light at 16.0 weeks and in the dark at 14.7 weeks, a nonsignificant difference. Once contact was observed, infants continued to touch and grasp the objects in both light and dark throughout all sessions. Because infants could not see their hand or arm in the dark, their early success in contacting the glowing and sounding objects indicates that proprioceptive cues, not sight of the limb, guided their early reaching. Reaching in the light developed in parallel with reaching in the dark, suggesting that visual guidance of the hand is not necessary to achieve object contact either at the onset of successful reaching or in the succeeding weeks.     

Teasing apart the child care conundrum: A factorial survey analysis of perceptions of child care quality, fair market price and willingness to pay by low-income, African American parents

Child care quality plays a crucial role in children's social and cognitive development. While child care quality is a critical issue for all children, it matters more for low-income children. Policy makers have increased the emphasis on allowing parents, not government, to make decisions about the type of care they want for their children. Yet most research on child care quality has focused on how child care professionals, not parents define high quality care. This study investigates how low-income families evaluate child care quality by examining the child care preferences of a sample of low-income African American parents. We employ the factorial survey method, a method used in sociological research to assess people's perceptions and rankings of individual attributes associated with complex multidimensional phenomena. The factorial survey method permits a simultaneous assessment of how respondents evaluate and make tradeoffs among multiple child care characteristics. We assess the impact of child care characteristics on respondents’ perceptions of child care desirability, fair market value, and willingness to pay. Findings indicate that parents’ definition of quality focused squarely on the care giving environment, specifically the qualifications, experience, training and behavior associated with the child care provider. The type of care facility—family, center, relative or neighbor care was largely irrelevant to this sample of parents. Parents believed that the characteristics they defined as desirable child care situations were worth more, and parents were willing to pay more for these characteristics. These parents also defined quality in terms of race and class, and they wanted racial and economic diversity. This research suggests parents may choose lower quality care, not because they do not know what quality is or because they define quality care differently, but because such care may be neither available nor affordable in their communities.     

Overcoming institutional barriers to broad-based curricular change

Most large organizations, including universities, are fraught with institutional barriers to change. Their very structures can be impediments to the horizontal communication and cooperation necessary to effect broad-based innovation. U.S. automobile makers, however, are learning to overcome such structural obstacles to facilitate innovation. Can universities employ similar techniques? The recent experience of one regional university suggests important attributes of a successful model to facilitate curricular change.     

The Origins of Parenting Stress During the Transition to Parenthood: A New Family Model

This paper describes the origins of parenting stress, defined both as tensions in the parent-child relationship and as broader changes in five family domains as men and women make the transition from couple to family life. Despite significant change in their average level of functioning, parents show continuity in their level of adaptation from pregnancy through the first five years of parenthood. Parenting stress emerges from the context of parents' individual and marital adaptation before the child is born. It is possible to identify expectant parents who are at risk for later parenting stress and lower well-being across employment and family domains. Path analyses show that men's and women's prior well-being and their involvement in paid work during pregnancy are associated with higher parenting stress—and lower self-esteem, marital satisfaction, family work satisfaction, and job satisfaction—two years later when their babies are 18months old. Stress in the parent-child relationship at 18 months postpartum compounds preexisting stress in other family domains to reduce well-being in other aspects of family life. Links among parenting stress, parenting quality, and children's adaptation to school lead to suggestions for preventive interventions early in the family life cycle.