Positive Performance Management: Bold Experiments,Provocative Possibilities

In the face of accelerating technological, demographic, socioeconomic, and political changes, successful organizations are flattening hierarchies, forging active communication networks, promoting cross‐functional and cross‐level collaboration, and actively supporting grassroots innovation. Traditional performance management practices lack the capacity, scalability, and speed to support these cultural strategies. This article describes a new breed of performance management: an appreciative inquiry‐inspired process that focuses on strengths and puts employees in the driver's seat. It increases commitment and forges trusting relationships between employees and their leaders and paves the way for the next generation of performance management systems.     

Peer coach during field experiences: cultivating teacher candidates’ peer feedback and reflective practices

ABSTRACT

Designing field embedded experiences for teacher candidates poses a unique challenge for large teacher education programs. Field experiences must include working with students, enhanced pedagogical coaching, and interaction within a professional community. Coursework coupled with field work should engage teacher candidates in a process of planning, implementing, analyzing and reflecting, and then modifying future teaching as evidence of reflective practice. Skilled coaching by the university based teacher educator or classroom mentor is one avenue for teaching novice educators how to analyze their classroom experiences. However, in large teacher education programs the ratio of candidates to UBTEs can make adequate coaching impossible. Thus, peer coaching can provide a feasible option for UBTE coaching. The purpose of this article is to describe the peer coaching experiences of teacher candidates and their university based teacher educators during junior level clinical block courses focused on developmentally appropriate practices for students in grades 1-3. Presented are a discussion of reflective practice, a rationale for peer coaching, and the application of peer coaching within three early childhood and elementary courses. Recommendations and challenges of peer coaching in a clinical pre-service teacher education program and implications for further studies are explored in the closing.     

The Winnipeg Center Project: Teacher education for inner-city people

Education in the inner city is complicated by a series of unique problems. These problems have been recognized but little has been done by teacher educators to prepare teachers to cope with them. The Winnipeg Center Project represents an attempt to prepare individuals, drawn from the inner city, to become teachers who are specially prepared to cope with these problems.

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Résumé Une suite de problèmes particuliers complique l'enseignement dans les centre-villes. Ces problèmes ont été reconnus mais les responsables de la formation des maîtres ont peu fait pour préparer les professeurs à y faire face. Le Winnipeg Center Project est une expérience destinée à préparer des individus provenant des centre-villes à devenir des professeurs formés spécialement en vue de faire face à ces problèmes.

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For further information, the author can be contacted c/o Aberdeen School, 450 Flora Avenue, Winnipeg, Manitoba R2W 2R7.     

THE POLITICS OF DECLINE‐CATASTROPHE OR OPPORTUNITY

My challenge to those that use Derrida or Bey or Adorno or Bourdieu within their disciplinary frameworks to advance our understanding of new media, is can you enact the ideas of these thinkers in a sophisticated way through new media, or can it only be done through writing books about books? I challenge cultural studies and new media theorists to produce a Derrida engine or a Bourdieu database or a Bey GIS map. I am not aware of any major contribution that cultural studies has made within this medium beyond using it as a publishing and networking mechanism, and beyond writing innumerable valuable books to critique it from a distance. We need more people engaged in building academic resources on-line that help us to look at things in new ways.

Craig Bellamy, “The Milk Bar Challenge,” posted on the fibreculture mailing list on 22 July, 2002