Research and teacher education in the UK: Building capacity

The need for capacity-building in teacher education in the UK has been raised as a serious issue by a number of commentators. Tensions about the place of research in teacher education have persisted for many decades, but following changes to the core funding mechanisms in the UK, the maintenance of education research bases within many universities has become increasingly tenuous. This paper provides an analytical account of an initiative conducted by the Teacher Education Group (TEG) to build research capacity in teacher education. With reference to a review of the national contexts for research in the UK and research on teacher educators, the article argues that, in order to build research capacity initiatives we need to provide motivation and new types of networking opportunities for researchers, as well as developing their expertise. In developing this argument, the article also explore the relationships between national policy changes, institutional research cultures and individual habitus and agency in research capacity-building. The paper also describes a new initiative in England, the Teacher Education Research Network (TERN).     

Career education and the professional association

Conclusion Certain premises are used in this article: 1)that the voluntary professional association is a viable instrument for maintenance, change, and progress; 2)that the components of an association can be identified and described, and, further, utilized in creating more meaning, effectiveness, and efficiency; and 3)that some of the broad components of an association are roles, outcomes, substance, structure, and process.Certain information is presented about 1)broad components and working relationships within an association; and 2)the preliminary results of a survey of CEAs and CERAs and their substance, structure, and process.Finally, a certain challenge is issued for CEAs and CERAs to be vehicles and promoters of progress.The next move is ours.Pat Nellor Wickwire is a consultant and counselor in private practice, Hermosa Beach, Los Angeles County, California. She currently serves as Chair, National Network of State and Local Career Education Associations.     

Prescribed active learning increases performance in introductory biology

We tested five course designs that varied in the structure of daily and weekly active-learning exercises in an attempt to lower the traditionally high failure rate in a gateway course for biology majors. Students were given daily multiple-choice questions and answered with electronic response devices (clickers) or cards. Card responses were ungraded; clicker responses were graded for right/wrong answers or participation. Weekly practice exams were done as an individual or as part of a study group. Compared with previous versions of the same course taught by the same instructor, students in the new course designs performed better: There were significantly lower failure rates, higher total exam points, and higher scores on an identical midterm. Attendance was higher in the clicker versus cards section; attendance and course grade were positively correlated. Students did better on clicker questions if they were graded for right/wrong answers versus participation, although this improvement did not translate into increased scores on exams. In this course, achievement increases when students get regular practice via prescribed (graded) active-learning exercises.     

Differences between good and poor child writers on fMRI contrasts for writing newly taught and highly practiced letter forms

During fMRI imaging, 12 good and 8 poor writers aged 11 wrote a newly taught pseudoletter and a highly practiced letter. Both letters were formed from the same components, but the pseudoletter had a novel configuration not corresponding to a written English letter form. On the first fMRI contrast between the newly taught pseudoletter and highly practiced letter, based on a group map, good and poor writers significantly activated many common regions; but the poor writers showed spatially more extensive brain activation than did the good writers. The additional regions of significant activation may reflect inefficiency in learning a new letter form. For the second contrast between the highly practiced and newly taught letters, individual brain activation analyses, based on exact clusters, showed that good and poor writers differed significantly in activation only in left fusiform. This individual fusiform activation correlated significantly with behavioral measures of automatic letter writing and expressive orthographic coding. Multiple regression in which both individual fusiform activation and individual orthographic coding were entered explained significant variance in written composition. Results are discussed in reference to the role of the orthographic loop, from internal letter form to external letter writing by hand, in writing letters and composing. The overall results are consistent with prior brain and behavioral studies of writing.     

Caught between two stools? Academic writing in ‘new’ vocational disciplines in higher education

‘New’ vocational disciplines often struggle for acceptance in the academy. The marginalising of these disciplines impacts on their teaching and learning environment often to the detriment of staff and students. This study focuses both on the role academic writing plays in this marginalisation and how the teaching of such writing is affected by the positioning of these disciplines. Using semi-structured interviews the perceptions of 27 lecturers teaching postgraduate hospitality programmes in the UK were explored. While lecturers expressed concern that traditional academic writing requirements do not serve the best interests of the discipline or the students, they feel they are powerless to make changes to improve the situation. The academic enculturation process appears to be a one-sided affair, where the discipline adopts practices simply because they are part of long-standing academic traditions and not because they serve the needs of the discipline.     

Beyond the power of one: redesigning the work of school principals

There is mounting international research evidence that the work of school principals is increasingly difficult, time consuming and more unattractive to prospective applicants. We suggest that the solution to this situation lies in redesigning the work that principals do. Using the New London Group’s (1996) definition of design as both process and product and as a hybrid of existing resources, we offer five cases of redesign: distributed pedagogical leadership, co-principalship, shared principalship, multi-campus principalship, and community-based principalship. We argue that these examples show that redesigns that focus on the school, rather than on the work of the principal, have more far-reaching effects, but are also much more vulnerable to context. We propose three emerging principles for redesign viz. developing a strong warrant for redesign, attending to infrastructure and building organic relations between school and community.