Life inside a professional development school: What experienced teachers learn

Abstract

Most professional development schools emphasize the benefits to preservice teacher preparation but rarely focus on the professional development opportunities for the practicing, experienced teachers at the site (Clark, 1999). Professional development schools are not only changing the way preservice teachers are prepared, but are drastically changing the roles of the experienced teachers who participate in the process. By telling their stories of involvement in a growing and changing professional development school, experienced teachers can reflect on their experiences and learn new and different lessons from them each time.

Recorded stories of participants in professional development schools can be used to help teachers gain renewed insights into their potential as leaders in school reform. Storytelling, as a strategy for connecting theory to practice in real school settings, allows and encourages teachers to be active participants in creating progress. It acts as a catalyst for generating and clarifying personal and common visions.     

A Study of Cluster Grouping

The increasing size of most universities in the United States at times has led to efforts to counteract largeness by creating many small units within the larger one. The following study reports on a pilot study to evaluate the effectiveness of a grouping pattern in which freshman students had their class schedules arranged in such a way as to have at least three sections (courses) in common with others in their respective group.     

The Mathematically Able as a Marked Category

Most literature on gender and mathematics is based on assumptions that the value of mathematical accomplishment is unquestionable and wholly good, and that any failures of women to achieve in mathematics are due to problems within her or the larger society, problems which should and can be resolved. This article argues that the situation is not so simple. Drawing on literatures of sociology, cultural studies, and education (among others), the article sets forth characteristics shared by 'marked categories' of persons as deviant. Drawing evidence from a wide range of sources, it is then argued that 'the mathematically able' share these characteristics and can therefore be considered as a marked category. Moreover, women in mathematics are doubly marked (as women and as mathematical), making their position doubly difficult socially. There are thus two discourses of mathematics in Western society, a discourse of power and a discourse of deviance. Drawing on the practices of other marked categories, I make a few recommendations for educators based on the analysis.     

What's Meat Got to Do with It? Some Considerations for Ecologizing Education with Respect to Diet

Even in a society of meat‐eaters such as the United States, when diet is addressed in school at all, it is widely treated as matter of personal choice, the consequences of which are borne by individual consumers. Overlooked are myriad connections involved in human diet and the implications of consumption for other entities. In the first part of this essay, Suzanne Rice discusses ways in which diet, particularly meat‐eating, is connected to animal suffering, environmental harms including climate change and pollution, and risks to the health of agricultural workers and consumers. In the second part, she discusses ways in which education might be “ecologized” in efforts to help students gain insight into such connections. There are many ways to ecologize education, but regardless of how teachers proceed, they are likely to encounter not only simple ignorance, relatively unproblematic gaps in students' knowledge linked to youth and inexperience, but also willful ignorance, more problematic gaps linked to avoidance, manipulation, or rejection of evidence perceived as threatening.