Teachers’ professional growth through engagement with lesson study

Lesson study is highly regarded as a model for professional learning, yet remains under-theorised. This article examines the professional learning experiences of teachers and numeracy coaches from three schools in a local network of schools, participating in a lesson study project over two research cycles in 2012. It maps the interconnections between their experiences and their beliefs and practices, using Clarke and Hollingsworth’s (Teach Educ 18(8):947–967, 2002) Interconnected Model of Professional Growth. Analysis of interview data and video-recordings of planning meetings, research lessons, and post-lesson discussions reveals the development of teachers’ collaborative planning skills, increased attention to students’ mathematical thinking, use of orchestrated whole-class discussion based on anticipated student solutions and focused questioning, and the enhancement of collaborative practices for teacher inquiry. Our findings illuminate the interplay between the External Domain, the Personal Domain, the Domain of Practice, and the Domain of Consequence, in the teaching and learning change environment, and the mediating processes of enactment and reflection. Changes in the domains across the period of the lesson study provide evidence of teachers’ professional growth, with the iterative processes of enactment and reflection being critical in mediating this professional growth.     

An analysis of the integration of instructional technology in pre-service teacher education in Zimbabwe

In the context of continuous innovations in information and communication technology (ICT) and its impact on higher education, this study explored the integration of instructional technology (IT) by university lecturers in pre-service secondary school teacher education programs in Zimbabwe. Specifically, the study examined how lecturers integrate IT into their instruction, and the constraints they face. Twenty-one lecturers in the colleges of education at three universities participated. The data collection methods used are questionnaires, interviews and analysis of documents. Analysis of data was inductive, employing Miles and Huberman’s interactive data analysis model. Findings show that lecturers’ computer proficiency and competencies were at the basic level in Internet usage, with little confidence shown in basic productivity software skills and in IT integration tasks and processes. The lecturers’ integration of IT was at the Entry and Adoption stages. Institutional support was characterized by poor availability and access to appropriate technological tools by both lecturers and students, and in the context of a hyper-inflationary operating environment, constraints ranged from lack of institutional funding, to the absence of an IT integration policy framework, and the lack of appropriate initial and continuous staff development. This study is part of the nucleus of instructional technology research in the Zimbabwean context. It is hoped that insights gleaned will influence policy, practice and future research. From a global perspective, this study will add to the limited knowledge and literature on instructional technology integration in “developing” and/or low-income countries like Zimbabwe.     

English as a foreign language spelling: comparisons between good and poor spellers

This study examined English as a foreign language (EFL) spelling development amongst 233 fifth‐grade, eighth‐grade and 10th‐grade Hebrew first‐language speakers to examine effects of English orthographic exposure on spelling. Good and poor speller differences were examined regarding the acquisition of novel phonemes (/æ/, /Λ/ and //) and orthographic conventions (/ð/, /θ/, // and silent ‘e’). Hebrew measures included standardised spelling and orthographic and phonological tasks. Experimental English measures included real‐word and pseudoword spellings, orthographic tasks and standardised spellings. Results showed significant differences in spelling accuracy between good and poor spellers at all grades. Spelling accuracy for most conventions did not improve after the eighth grade. Spellings of consonantal clusters, initial h and /ð/ differed between good and poor spellers in the fifth grade only. Hebrew spelling was one of the strongest predictors of EFL real‐word and pseudoword spellings in both fifth and eighth grades. Implications for teaching practice are discussed.     

Climate Change: Implications for Parents and Parenting

This tutorial draws together research on the impacts of climate change on children and youth, and suggests how parents, and parenting researchers, educators, and professionals, can engage with climate change. We start with an overview of the science of climate change and highlight the urgency of action to restore a safe climate for future generations. Then we discuss three major types of impact of climate change on children and youth: first, their greater vulnerability to its impacts on health and well-being due to physiological immaturity and dependency, a vulnerability that is greatly exacerbated for children in disadvantaged circumstances; second, evidence of widespread worry about climate change among children and youth, and their need for support and empowerment to respond adaptively to these anxieties; and third, the need to prepare the next generation for demands for massive changes in lifestyles as the world transitions to a low-carbon economy. We follow with a review of evidence about how parents can support their children through actively engaging with the issue themselves and through communication and other strategies that help build children’s hope, efficacy, resilience, and engagement. We then discuss the multiple important roles that parenting researchers and professionals can play in addressing climate change, concluding that those of us with responsibility for future generations need to recognize climate change as an urgent challenge.     

Emotional Autonomy Redux: Revisiting Ryan and Lynch

Ryan and Lynch have suggested that emotional autonomy in adolescence, at least as indexed by Steinberg and Silverberg's Emotional Autonomy Scale, is associated with poor family functioning and might therefore be better conceptualized as detachment. In the present study, we contrast adjustment scores among adolescents who differ in both emotional autonomy and perceptions of support in their relationship with their parents. Several thousand adolescents aged 14 through 18 completed Steinberg and Silverberg's emotional autonomy measure, a measure designed to assess the provision of support in the parent-adolescent relationship, and a number of standardized measures of adjustment. Adolescents high in emotional autonomy but low in relationship support show problematic adjustment profiles, consistent with Ryan and Lynch's interpretation of the measure as an index of detachment. Although adolescents high in both emotional autonomy and relationship support report more internal distress and behavior problems than some adolescents, they score higher on measures of psychosocial development and academic competence than their peers. Emotional autonomy in the context of a supportive adolescent-parent relationship may carry some developmental advantages as well as some deleterious consequences suggested by Ryan and Lynch.     

Impact of Parenting Practices on Adolescent Achievement: Authoritative Parenting, School Involvement, and Encouragement to Succeed

This article examines the impact of authoritative parenting, parental involvement in schooling, and parental encouragement to succeed on adolescent school achievement in an ethnically and socio-economically heterogeneous sample of approximately 6,400 American 14-18-year-olds. Adolescents reported in 1987 on their parents' general child-rearing practices and on their parents' achievement-specific socialization behaviors. In 1987, and again in 1988, data were collected on several aspects of the adolescents' school performance and school engagement. Authoritative parenting (high acceptance, supervision, and psychological autonomy granting) leads to better adolescent school performance and stronger school engagement. The positive impact of authoritative parenting on adolescent achievement, however, is mediated by the positive effect of authoritativeness on parental involvement in schooling. In addition, nonauthoritativeness attenuates the beneficial impact of parental involvement in schooling on adolescents achievement. Parental involvement is much more likely to promote adolescent school success when it occurs in the context of an authoritative home environment.