Uncovering a hidden professional agenda for teacher educators: A mixed method study on Flemish teacher educators and their professional development

Taking into account the pressing need to understand more about what teacher educators’ professional development characterises, this article adopts a mixed method approach to explore Flemish (Dutch-speaking part of Belgium) teacher educators’ professional development needs and opportunities. Analysis results of a large-scale survey study with 611 teacher educators and analysis of five qualitative focus groups (with 24 teacher educators) are presented. The results confirm the lack of attention for teacher educators’ professional development in the Flemish teacher education system. Moreover, the findings indicate a structural need for participation in professional development activities that are linked to teacher educators’ own practices, organised as long-term sustainable professional development trajectories, and formally recognised. To conclude, a professional development agenda for research, policy and practices related to teacher educators’ professional development is discussed.     

‘You should collaborate,children’: a study of teachers’ design and facilitation of children’s collaboration around touchscreens

Touchscreens are being integrated into classrooms to support collaborative learning, yet little empirical evidence has been presented regarding how children collaborate using touchscreens in classrooms. In particular, minimal research has been directed towards how teachers can design for and guide children’s touchscreen-based collaboration. Concurrently, the Programme for International Student Assessment and other international organisations have highlighted collaboration and ICT skills as crucial competencies for mastery in the twenty-first century. Accordingly, this article presents three narrative cases from a touchscreen project in Denmark, where 41 second-grade children and three teachers from two classrooms participated. The cases are based on ethnographic field data and 150 hours of video footage of natural occurring interaction in classroom settings. The ethnographic field data and video footage are examined using a collaboration model and embodied interaction analysis. Each case presents features of the subtle processes of children’s collaboration around touchscreens and teachers’ role in designing and guiding such collaboration. Thus, this article illustrates teachers’ and children’s situated processes of integrating touchscreens for collaborative activities in their classrooms.     

ICT research and school performance feedback: a perfect marriage?

An important step towards the successful integration of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in schools is to facilitate their capacity to develop a school based ICT policy. However, one of the biggest challenges for schools is to gather data that could help shape such policy development. In this context, ICT researchers can be very useful as they can use the data gathered from their research projects to give feedback to schools. In this article, we present an electronic school performance feedback system (e‐SPFS) we developed for schools that participated in our survey research. This e‐SPFS illustrates how researchers can collaborate with practitioners; and how schools use data to examine their performance, their strengths and their weaknesses in shaping ICT policy decisions and practice. We appeal the ICT research community to carry out more research that is grounded in a school performance feedback cycle.     

Reprints from the Research Quarterly

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of intensified physical education sessions on adolescents ages 11–16 years. They were divided into two experimental groups—high-intensity running group (HIRG) and high-intensity jumping group (HIJG)—and a control group (C). During the sessions, heart rate (HR) was monitored. There was no significant difference between mean HR for HIRG and HIJG, while the mean HR was significantly lower for C (p < .001). For both HIRG and HIJG, the mean HR was significantly higher for girls than for boys (p < .001). Our results suggested that these intensified physical education lessons require a high percentage of maximal HR in adolescents and can be used to improve aerobic fitness.     

The effect of co-designing on educational transfer between cultures

This paper describes the process of co-designing used in a project undertaken by the Instituto Tecnologico de Monterrey (ITESM), the agency for development of Mexico (NAFIN), and the consulting authors to jointly produce a business development program for medium and small companies in Mexico. The first element of the program was a total quality training program, and the second was the design and development of facilitators/consultants' training for the instruction and dissemination of the quality program. This paper examines the project from the perspective of the role that values, and more specifically value conflicts, play in transfer effectiveness between nations. It proposes that transfer without significant modification and interpretation to fit local world views and practices is generally dysfunctional, and offers co-designing as a viable strategy to obviate traditional conflicts. The authors gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments made by Robert Baker, University of Southern California, on an earlier draft of this article.     

Les caractéristiques du dispositif français d'insertion sociale et professionnelle des jeunes de 16 à 18 ans

Sans résumé     

The Impact of Institutional Context,Education and Labour Market Policies on Early School Leaving: a comparative analysis of EU countries

This article presents a comparative analysis of the determinants of early school leaving (ESL) at the country level. We decompose ESL rates into two components: a ‘primary’ rate reflecting unqualified school leaving from initial education, and a second component accounting for early school leavers who participate in training programmes. Both may be influenced by structural and policy determinants. We examine how the ESL rate is affected by macro-economic and social context variables such as GDP/capita, growth, poverty, and youth unemployment, as well as system characteristics of the education system (such as legal school leaving age, grade retention, early tracking, and size of vocational education) and the labour market and social protection systems (minimum wages, unemployment insurance).     

Towards a humanism of knowledge, action and cooperation

This article begins by looking at two reports, commissioned in the second half of the 20th century to investigate the impact of social change on education and to propose strategies for tackling new challenges arising from this. The first report, published in 1972, was the so-called Faure report (named after French lawyer and politician Edgar Faure), and the second one, published in 1996, was the so-called Delors report (named after French economist and politician Jacques Delors). Using these two reports as their starting point, the authors of this paper consider the effects of modern information technology on our cultural environment. Today we are experiencing an increasingly virtual world with very real effects. This paper argues that Edgar Faure already foresaw the emergence of a new cultural world in which virtuality would both add to and compete with reality. The authors stress that now, more than ever, access to lifelong education needs to be ensured for everyone, permanently enriched by research and innovation, addressing creativity and entrepreneurship, in addition to continuously evolving skills and competences.     

School tracking and educational inequality: a comparison of 12 education systems in Switzerland

Using data from the super-sample of the ‘PISA Suisse’ 2003 assessment, this article examines the relationship between the characteristics of education systems (made up of homogeneous or heterogeneous tracks) and their consequences in terms of effectiveness and equity. Our results indicate that it is not so much the official structure of tracks as the ways in which tracking is really organised – and, in particular, the degree of segregation that tracking methods involve – which make it possible to explain inequalities among students. They also show that some education systems are more inegalitarian than others and that the factors leading to inequalities can vary significantly from one Swiss canton to another. Finally, through multilevel analyses, we demonstrate that when the individual and aggregate characteristics of students are taken into account, the type of track a student attends is of only limited significance for explaining inequalities, which suggests that the effects of tracking are in fact linked to the nature of the population educated in the tracks.