Early Educators’ Collective Workplace Stress as a Predictor of Professional Development’s Impacts on Children’s Development

Although professional development is widely used to improve the impacts of early childhood education, little is known about the conditions under which such interventions promote child outcomes. This study applies newly developed methods for quantifying intervention impact heterogeneity to understand whether educators’ collective workplace stress moderates professional development’s impacts on children’s language and literacy skills, executive functioning, and learning behaviors. Within a sample of 406 children from the National Center for Research on Early Childhood Education Professional Development Study (M_age = 4.17; 50% female; 50% Black, 32% Latinx, 11% White), professional development positively impacted child outcomes in centers where educators collectively reported high workplace stress but negatively impacted child outcomes in centers where educators collectively reported low workplace stress.     

Teaching Specialized Legal Research: Business Associations

Business associations are a complex substantive topic that can be included in an advanced legal research course that teaches students sophisticated research, writing, and citation skills. This article presents the basic substantive law regarding business associations necessary to deliver instruction about advanced legal research, writing, and citation. This article also offers a model syllabus with suggested sources and assignments for students. These research assignments require students to perform tasks such as citing primary and secondary sources, learning advanced research skills using loose-leaf materials, assimilating information from multiple sources into cogent narratives, locating information using various electronic resources, digests, and other secondary sources, and locating and using forms pertinent to business association agreements. This article also provides an instructor with twenty-five suggested sources to use in assigning materials to students. These sources consist of both print and electronic versions. They additionally consist of treatises, monographs, guides, model statutory materials, electronic databases, Web sites, form guides, casebooks, a digest, and a citation manual.     

Phonological processing and early literacy

Phonological awareness and phonological memory have been cited separately as two cognitive skills thought to underpin literacy. Few studies, however, have investigated the relationship between these two skills and their relative contribution to early reading and spelling. The aims of this longitudinal study were to evaluate the developmental relationship between these two phonological processing skills and to consider their relative contributions to early literacy. This paper reports results from the first 12 months of the study, which monitored 80 preliterate children during their first year of formal schooling. The findings discussed here suggest that phonological awareness and phonological memory both make significant yet distinctive contributions to early literacy: while early phonological awareness may predict subsequent single‐word reading, early phonological memory appears to play an important part in the development of the decoding strategies needed for later reading. Evidence that a qualitative change in phonological memory takes place during the first year of formal schooling confirms earlier claims that a phonological strategy for spelling may develop before a similar strategy for reading (Frith, 1985; Huxford, 1993).     

E-government implementation strategies in developed and transition economies: A comparative study

In the last decade, electronic government in Europe has emerged and established itself as a viable alternative channel for public service delivery. While e-government has now matured in most developed European countries, transition economies in Europe, have only recently begun to recognise its potential benefits and incorporated e-government as part of their national strategy. Although time may result in the amplification of e-government experience for transition economy countries, lessons drawn from developed countries indicate that political, fiscal, social, strategic and organisational issues need to be addressed when formulating plans for deploying e-government. Using case study research, this paper examines strategies adopted by the UK and Slovakia in the context of e-government implementation. Particularly, the paper examines how the perspectives on e-government vision, strategy, focus and related organisational change influence the implementation and diffusion of e-government in developed and transition economies in Europe.     

A Two-Generation Education Intervention and Children’s Attendance in Head Start

Two-generation human capital programs seek to promote the education of parents and children simultaneously. This study examines relations between family participation in CareerAdvance, which recruits parents of Head Start children into a workforce training program, and children’s Head Start attendance. The sample included 293 children (on average 4 years old) and their parents. After one semester, CareerAdvance children demonstrated higher rates of attendance and lower rates of absence and chronic absence (missing 10% or more of school days) than matched comparison children. These associations were similar across a range of high- and low-risk subgroups at baseline. These findings are discussed in terms of the implications of a family systems approach for improving children’s Head Start attendance.     

Transnational academic mobility,knowledge, and identity capital

This article begins with the contemporary context of transnational academic mobility, and sketches a typology of mobile academics according to their self-identification. UK examples are offered as the main case study here. The article will then explore the relations of mobile academics and their embodied and encultured knowledge. It employs a concept of ‘transnational identity capital’ to discuss the position of transnational mobile academic intellectuals as a ‘stranger’ as inspired by Simmel's sociology of space.     

Creating urban classroom communities worthy of trust

Developing trusting relationships between teachers and students in urban secondary schools everywhere is a challenging task that is essential to maintaining an effective learning environment. Trust involves a fragile web of relationships nurtured through positive daily interactions. We examined strategies that US urban high school teachers used to encourage hard-to-teach students to comply with school and class rules and engage in learning. Based on recommendations of these alienated students, we interviewed 18 teachers and observed four of their classes regularly for 4 months. We examine themes supporting an emerging theoretical framework of educational trust. Teachers encouraged their marginalized students to participate in learning by creating a curriculum and class environment that permitted many opportunities for engagement, provided positive interactions, encouraged the development of shared curriculum, and fostered student ownership. These features provided the foundation for educational trust based on themes of shared expectations, persistence, commitment, and voice.     

Reviews

This paper reports findings from an enthographic study of educational restructuring in an Institute of Technical and Further Education (TAFE) in Victoria Australia. Educational restructuring is analysed as a process of institutional redesign and theorized in relation to recent debates in institutional theory concerning the nature of institutional change. The review distinguishes between hyperrational approaches to institutional redesign based upon assumptions about rational actors and their motivations and behaviours, and social and cultural perspectives on institutional redesign that sees purposeful institutional change achieved through processes of ‘institutional gardening’. The paper documents the way Australian governments have adopted hyperrational strategies aimed at changing education and training by reworking institutional rules that frame the day-to-day practices within particular organizations. Reworking these practices of organizing serves to steer change by restructuring and rearticulating relationships, practices and centres of power within organizations. Data drawn from interviews with the TAFE Institute Director, and various managers and teachers are used to track the effects of government steering in the TAFE Institute. This analysis shows that government steering drives management steering in the TAFE Institute, creating new imperatives and work organization. These organizational changes are influenced by local conditions and management priorities. They also call forth counter-steering by teachers and managers as they attempt to deal with change. The paper suggests that hyperrational government steering drives towards probable educational futures but is also interrupted by counter-steering oriented to other values and priorities. While there are probable futures, there are also preferred futures to be willed for and worked for.