Brief Therapy at a University Counseling Center: Working Alliance,Readiness to Change,and Symptom Severity

The authors investigated whether students receiving short–term individual counseling at a university counseling center showed progress as evidenced by perceived client and counselor outcomes and the roles that client readiness to change and working alliance played in this setting. The results indicated that the counselor reports, not the client reports, reflected statistically significant change in client symptoms. Changes in symptom severity were not associated with working alliance and readiness to change.     

New practices in doing academic development: Twitter as an informal learning space

Using social media platforms to build informal learning processes and social networks is significant in academic development practices within higher education. We present three vignettes illustrating academic practices occurring on Twitter to show that using social media is beneficial for building networks of academics, locally and globally, enhancing information flows, inspiring thinking, and motivating academic practice. Using a reflective and diffractive methodology, we illuminate how different flows of forces and relations are enacted. We argue it is in this fluidity of informal learning that perspectives are contested and shaped, and that academic developers can benefit by encompassing such practices.     

Negotiating the challenge of collaborative writing: learning from one writing group's mutiny

With continuing pressure to publish or perish, interventions such as writing groups are increasingly part of the academic landscape. In this paper, we discuss our writing group's experiment with collaborative writing, which came unstuck as simmering concerns led to a mutiny within the group. The mutiny provided insights into tensions that are inevitably present in writing groups and collaborative writing exercises but are seldom written about. We explore these tensions via a collaborative autoethnography, drawing on published literature on writing groups and collaborative writing. The mutiny revealed three key dynamics. Experienced voices can have an important role to play but these voices need to be moderated so that other voices might be recognised and valued. Pleasure and productivity are two necessary components for sustaining writing groups and writing collaborations. Finally, hierarchies in the academic context are inescapable but they can be renegotiated so that more enabling power relations can be generated.     

Challenges in Enacting Core Practices in Language Teacher Education: A Self-Study

In this study, I explore my practices as a teacher educator in one course both before and after returning to the K–12 classroom to teach secondary language learners for one academic year. By examining the intersection of self-study and practice-based teacher education, I illustrate how I used self-study as a mechanism for innovation and change and focus on the challenges I encountered in implementing the use of practice-based education in my work as a teacher educator. Qualitative data analysis revealed that in redesigning my approach to my course, I stopped short of my goals to make the course more practice-centered. Although I provided students with many opportunities to practice planning, I did not provide enough focused opportunities to practice implementation and to participate in giving and receiving feedback. I learned that engaging teachers in practice-based teaching requires teacher educators to be both specific and deliberate in setting their own purposes for establishing the centrality of practice in their courses and to explain these clearly to teacher candidates. Further work in which teacher educators study their use of practice-based pedagogy would benefit from using a self-study lens. Other researchers are urged to add to the limited body of research about the use of practice-based pedagogy with teachers of language learners, particularly English language learners.     

Personal and Professional Growth Realized: A Self-Study of Curriculum Design and Implementation in a Secondary Science Classroom

This study focuses on the experience of designing and implementing an action research-based curriculum in a secondary science classroom. By systematically examining ourselves and our practices, we brought to light beliefs and values that were realized through this process, came to a deeper understanding of our own learning, and developed new awareness as teachers and researchers. Here, we provide our perspective on how the process of curriculum design and implementation facilitated our personal and professional growth, and we share this as an example of how teacher educators and kindergarten through grade 12 teachers can position one another as generators and disseminators of knowledge through collaborative self-study to inform their own and others' teaching practices.     

Physical Activity,Self-Regulation,and Early Academic Achievement in Preschool Children

Research Findings: The present study investigated whether active play during recess was associated with self-regulation and academic achievement in a prekindergarten sample. A total of 51 children in classes containing approximately half Head Start children were assessed on self-regulation, active play, and early academic achievement. Path analyses indicated that higher active play was associated with better self-regulation, which in turn was associated with higher scores on early reading and math assessments. Practice or Policy: Results point to the benefits of active play for promoting self-regulation and offer insight into possible interventions designed to promote self-regulation and academic achievement.     

The state of evidence for social and emotional learning: A contemporary meta-analysis of universal school-based SEL interventions

This article provides a systematic review and meta-analysis of the current evidence for universal school-based (USB) social and emotional learning (SEL) interventions for students in kindergarten through 12th grade available from 2008 through 2020. The sample includes 424 studies from 53 countries, reflecting 252 discrete USB SEL interventions, involving 575,361 students. Results endorsed that, compared to control conditions, students who participate in USB SEL interventions experienced significantly improved skills, attitudes, behaviors, school climate and safety, peer relationships, school functioning, and academic achievement. Significant heterogeneity in USB SEL content, intervention features, context, and implementation quality moderated student experiences and outcomes. Strengths and limitations of this evidence and implications for future USB SEL research, policy, and practice are discussed.     

Visually focusing on the far versus the near target during the putting stroke

The purpose was to evaluate the traditional method, of visually focusing on the ball, in comparison to focusing on the hole, during the putting stroke. The study design consisted of a pretest, a 4-week practice period, and a posttest. Participants (n = 31, handicap: 18.7 ± 10.4) practised using only one of the two gaze techniques. Testing consisted of having all participants putt using both gaze techniques from both a 1.22 m and a 4 m distance. Five putts were executed for each gaze technique/putt length combination for a total of 20 putts in each testing session per participant. The kinematics of every putting stroke executed during testing (1240 strokes) were captured using a TOMI? system. There was a significant improvement in putting success for both groups following practice (P = 0.001). Practising while visually focusing on the hole, resulted in a statistically significant reduction in putter speed variability in comparison to practising while visually focusing on the ball (P = 0.017). Visually focusing on the hole did not meaningfully (nor statistically) affect the quality of impact as assessed by the variability in face angle, stroke path, and impact spot at the precise moment the putter head contacted the ball.     

Measured markets: Limited edition publishing and the Grabhorn Press, 1920–1930

In the postwar prosperity of the 1920s there burgeoned a new interest in fine book-making, which typically featured handcraft production, luxurious materials, “worthy” texts, and—virtually by definition—limited editions. A small but socially prominent community of bibliophiles and wealthy collectors consituted an eager market for these elite books, distinguished by their visible repudiation of mass culture and “commercialism.” This article examines the publishing enterprise of the Grabhorn Press, one of the foremost producers of finely printed books in twentieth-century America. It analyzes the press's editiorial and design strategies, pricing and marketing policies, and general business practices in order to better understand the cultural paradoxes of producing such books both “for love” and for profit.