‘Teamwork’ or ‘Working as a Team’? The Theory and Practice of Top Team Working in UK Higher Education

This article focuses on the theory and practice of teamwork in ‘top management teams’ in UK higher education institutions. It is informed by some of the key findings from a recent two‐year research project sponsored by the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education that investigated the different ways in which UK higher education institutions organise their ‘top management’ and ‘senior management’ structures ( Kennie and Woodfield, 2008 ). The authors discuss literature from the corporate and higher education sectors on the meaning of ‘teamwork’ in top teams (e.g. Bensimon and Neumann, 1993 ; Katzenbach, 1998 ; Wageman et al., 2008 ) and relate the findings to the challenges of top level team working in higher education settings. Particular issues discussed include: the terminology related to higher education top teams, areas of decision‐making and time‐management, team orientation and agenda setting, team behaviours and team roles, team performance and evaluation, location, logistical support and resources, and team development. The authors conclude that the challenges of top team working in higher education settings are similar to those found in the corporate sector, albeit nuanced by different organisational cultures, and suggest some key principles to help top teams in higher education institutions improve their ability to work effectively together.     

Discourses of the good parent in attributing school success

Recent education policy places a heavy emphasis on parents in relation to students' success at school. This paper explores how parents and teachers account for school success. Using membership categorisation analysis, it interrogates data collected in different interview situations across sites over a period of 20 years. The analysis shows how parents and teachers use talk as moral work to conversationally constitute particular agreed versions of the category ‘parent’. This category is interactively assembled through the use of category-bound attributes that construct deficit discourses of parents that explain student achievement. The analysis demonstrates that parents are complicit with teachers in producing versions of being a good parent wherein they are held responsible for their children's school success and that minimises the responsibility of the school. These findings raise questions both about who is responsible for schooling and about current contradictory policy emphases on parent and teacher responsibility for school success.     

Responding to racism at school: Ethnic-racial socialization and the academic engagement of Black and Latinx youth

Guided by the Theory of Racial Socialization in Action (TRSA; Smith-Bynum in press), this study examined observed caregiver-provided ethnic-racial socialization in response to a school-based discriminatory dilemma. Forty-five Black and 36 Latinx caregivers (88% mothers) with low-income and their children (M_age = 11.09, SD = 0.29; 46.3% female) participated in Dallas, Texas from 2018 to 2019. Dyads responded to a hypothetical scenario in which a school counselor makes a discriminatory comment to the child. Results of a factor mixture analysis suggested that caregivers engaged in the dialogue using one of four approaches: Low-engaged, Legacy, Racial Literacy, or High-engaged. Profiles were found to differ significantly by the race/ethnicity and language of caregivers and were associated with youth’s concurrent behavioral engagement (R² = .04).     

Skills, Socrates and the Sophists: Learning from History

The Sophists, and the Socratic response they provoked, are considered in order to elucidate issues raised by present-day skill-talk. These issues include: whether skills avoid questions of ends and truth; the existence of general skills, such as critical thinking; the importance of knowledge; skills and the personality; and some implications for teaching and philosophy.