Navigating Mandates and Working toward Coherence: Our Journey with a High-Stakes Teacher Performance Assessment

Abstract

This article details the experiences of four teacher education faculty members as we navigated the consequential implementation of a state-mandated high stakes teacher performance assessment in our educator preparation program. By shifting our perspective from simply complying with an assessment mandate to considering how we can leverage implementation of high stakes performance assessment as a vehicle for program inquiry, we were able to gain significant insight into our practice.     

Retaining faculty: A tale of two campuses

The results of a study examining factors influencing the decisions of faculty with firm offers to leave two universities are discussed. Particular attention is paid to the relative weight and importance faculty placed on the tangible, intangible, and nonwork-related benefits of the incumbent and offering employment situations. Comparisons are drawn to previous studies of this genre, as well as between the urban and rural universities represented in the study. The methods and findings of this research should be of special interest to those from institutions concerned both with attracting and retaining a quality faculty.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 29th Annual Forum of the Association for Institutional Research, Baltimore, April 30–May 3, 1989.     

THE AFFECTIVE ESTABLISHMENT AND MAINTENANCE OF VYGOTSKY'S ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT

A bstract .  Many recent articles, research papers, and conference presentations about Lev Vygotsky's zone of proximal development (ZPD) emphasize the "extended" version of the ZPD that reflects human emotions and desires. In this essay, Michael G. Levykh expands on the extant literature on the ZPD through developing several new ideas. First, he maintains that there is no need to expand ZPD to include emotions, as its more "conservative" dimensions (cognitive, social, cultural, and historical) already encompass affective features. Second, Levykh emphasizes that an emotionally positive collaboration between teachers and students in a caring and nurturing environment must be created from the outset. Finally, he asserts that culturally developed emotions must mediate successful establishment and maintenance of the ZPD in order to be effective. According to Levykh, Vygotsky's notion that learning can lead development represents a crucial contribution to our understanding of teaching and learning by clearly showing that emotions are vital to human learning and development.     

WHAT SHOULD WE TEACH AS CONTROVERSIAL? A DEFENSE OF THE EPISTEMIC CRITERION

Abstract There is an emerging consensus that to teach something as controversial is to present it as a matter on which different views are or could be held and to expound those different views as impartially as possible. This raises an important normative question that has yet to receive the attention it deserves from educational theorists: how are we to decide which topics to teach in this way? The answer suggested by Robert Dearden is that we should apply the epistemic criterion: a matter should be taught as controversial when contrary views can be held on it without those views being contrary to reason. In this essay, Michael Hand aims to defend that answer. In the first part of the article he revisits Dearden’s rather thin and unsatisfactory justification for the epistemic criterion and attempts to mend its deficiencies. In the second part, Hand examines an alternative to the epistemic criterion in the area of moral education, an alternative he labels the political criterion, and explains why he thinks we should reject it.     

Training and Learning

Some philosophers of education think that there is a pedagogically informative concept of training that can be gleaned from Wittgenstein's later writings: training as initiation into a form of life. Stickney, in ' Training and Mastery of Techniques in Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy: A response to Michael Luntley' takes me to task for ignoring this concept. In this essay I argue that there is no such concept to be ignored. I start by noting recent developments in Wittgenstein scholarship that raise serious issues about how we should handle the translation of Arbrichtung and arbrichten. I then concentrate on the substantive philosophical issues about the very idea that training can have a pedagogically productive role in education. I show that what work training does is a function of the prior skill set of the trainee. This means that we have to endorse some form of rationalism and acknowledge that the learner can only respond to training if they already possess sufficient mental equipment to generate the appropriate responses.