Presence in context: Teachers’ negotiations with the relational environment of school

This inquiry research builds on the theory of presence in teaching (Rodgers and Raider-Roth 2006) adding nuanced understandings of how school contexts play into teachers’ abilities to support students’ learning. Findings are drawn from multiple interviews with five veteran middle school teachers, teachers’ written work, and field observations. Illustrating these findings is the compelling story of an exemplary teacher’s negotiations of her practice in response to the school’s relational environment. Our findings point to the teacher’s sense of isolation and vulnerability–indicators of the relational context in the school as a threat to undermining her presence. They also create a compelling argument for the importance of a healthy relational context to support teachers’ most powerful teaching, hence students’ learning.     

Administrative Effectiveness in Higher Education: Improving Assessment Procedures

Holding higher education personnel accountable for measurable outcomes is a relatively new phenomenon. Assessing the performance of administrators may well provide needed and appropriate information about the functioning of the university, but it may represent high stakes assessment for individuals; that is, measures of administrative effectiveness may be tied to promotion, salary augmentation, contract renewal, or dismissal. Little previous research exists, however, on the assessment of administrators' performance in higher education (Gmelch et al., in press; Seldin, 1988). We develop an evaluation model for assessing and monitoring the effectiveness of academic deans and directors, using generalizability theory (i.e., an approach that focuses on identifying multiple sources of error in performance assessment) as a basis for developing more accurate assessment procedures. We illustrate this approach using faculty and staff assessments of their deans' leadership effectiveness. We also provide guidelines for improving the quality of assessments by adjusting various aspects of the evaluation model.