Measuring challenge,fun and sterility on a ‘phunometre’ scale: evaluating creative teaching and learning with children and their student teachers in the primary school

‘It was the funnest week in the whole history of funnest weeks’: our case study, the second phase in a three-phase research project, evaluates the successes and limitations of creative teaching and learning during the ‘The Creative and Effective Curriculum’ module for PGCE primary student teachers which includes a one-week placement in school. Student teachers', children's and teachers' perspectives pointed to a range of factors necessary for effective and creative teaching and learning. These included learning which is ‘fun’, achievement through intrinsic motivation, willingness to take risks and learn from mistakes, children's ownership of learning and the teacher's role as facilitator. Our findings enabled us to formulate ‘phunometre scales’ which we suggest can be used to assess both the organisation of learning areas and also planned activities in terms of their capacity for learning which is both challenging and fun.     

The War: The Story of One Rural College's Battle for Survival

This paper intends to describe the recent experience of a small, rural, two-year technical college. After four decades of success, the college had found itself in a difficult situation with a substantial loss in enrollment and diminished state and local support, coupled with low campus employee morale. In response, the college team closed ranks and rallied in what has become quite a proactive and successful effort to reinvent itself. After nearly six years of working to correct a number of issues that had led to decline, the college gained a general sense of stabilization, made advances in existing and new academic programs and technical innovation, dramatically increased diversity, and enhanced student life opportunities with the addition of an array of successful athletic programs. The college has seen significant increases in enrollment, state and national recognition for technical initiatives, and a collectively positive sense of the future.     

Assessing Musical Performance Musically

The last decade has seen changes in the systems used in the summative assessment of musical performance at the end of compulsory schooling. One trend has been the replacement of holistic assessment by segmented assessment. The author discusses the subjectivity, reliability and musical validity of the two systems, and summarises an experiment which investigates the extent to which holistic assessment can be accounted for by means of a segmented marking system. Multiple regression analysis produces a regression equation which accounts for 71% of the variance in holistic marks produced by 29 assessors marking 10 performances. The paper concludes with a consideration of the implications of this study for assessment in musical performance and other fields.     

Distributive Justice in Education and Conflicting Interests: Not (Remotely) as Bad as you Think

The importance of education and its profound effect on people's life make it a central issue in discussions of distributive justice. However, promoting distributive justice in education comes at a price: prioritising the education of some, as is often entailed by the principles of justice, inevitably has negative effects on the education of others. As a result, all theories of distributive justice in education face the challenge of balancing their requirements with conflicting interests. This article aims to contribute to developing an account of conflicting interests by identifying a category of conflicting interests—non‐positional conflicting interests—the realisation of which does not necessarily disrupt distributive justice. Non‐positional conflicting interests include, for example, the interest in realising one's full potential and parents’ interest in familial relations. The article argues that the core dimensions of non‐positional conflicting interests can usually be realised without upsetting distributive justice, and that actions that do upset distributive justice tend to be peripheral to these interests. Either way, there is no severe friction between distributive justice and non‐positional conflicting interests: in the former cases, both are realised simultaneously. In the latter, tension exists; however, because the infringement on the conflicting interest is of relatively little weight, it is often justified, all things considered, in order to promote distributive justice. The conclusion is that while there are indeed cases in which distributive justice must retreat in the face of other interests, the friction between distributive justice and other interests is actually weaker than meets the eye.     

Educational needs of the talented

Children with specific talents have particular needs that must be recognized if that talent is to be nurtured.