School district triggers for reconstructing professional knowledge

In a recent publication, Senge (All systems go: the change imperative for whole system reform. Corwin Press, Thousand Oaks, 2010, x) stated ??at no time in history has there been a more powerful need for a new vision of the purpose of education.?? Increasingly citizens, academics and practitioners are calling for radical changes to educational practices to meet the needs of a knowledge-based society in the twenty-first century (Dede in 21st Century skills: rethinking how students learn. Solution Tree Press, Bloomington, 2010; Hargreaves and Shirley in The fourth way: the inspiring future for educational change. Corwin Press, Thousand Oaks, 2009). Accomplishing such substantive educational change requires that individual educators collectively reshape their personal professional knowledge (Connelly and Clandinin in Teachers as curriculum planners: narratives of experiences. OISE Press, Toronto, 1988; Elbaz in Curriculum Inq 11(1):43?C71, 1981) and adapt their personal mental models (Duffy in J Staff Dev 24(1):30?C36, 2003). In 2000, we began a longitudinal study on the role of a school district in facilitating significant educational reform which required adaptations to individual and collective mental models of professional practice. Annually we conducted intensive interviews with a large sample of teachers, school and system administrators in this large Ontario, Canada school district. Recently, we conducted a retrospective analysis of these data collected in order to identify the conditions necessary for a large organization to support knowledge-creation and dissemination. In this paper, we identify three school district actions that triggered individual educators to challenge and reconstruct their professional personal practical mental models of the teaching and learning. First, improved student learning became the central focus of the school district. Second, the school district stressed and created opportunities for educators to collectively engage in professional dialogue about their practice. Third, the school district emphasized the importance of educators individually and collectively using evidence to assess whether their actions improved student learning.     

Video Presentations that have to Teach

To be successful, an instructional video presentation needs to be effective, valued, liked and efficient, and educationalists and designers should strive (explicitly and implicitly) to satisfy these criteria. In the interests of optimum teaching effect, a didactical distinction is recommended between video presentations that have to ‘instruct’, ‘explain’, ‘tell’ and ‘let encounter’. A schema or frame of reference is proposed, the use of which (it is claimed) can help to optimise communication between video producer, teacher and instructional designer     

On Going (Way) Beyond One’s Data: A Proposal to Restrict Recommendations for Practice in Primary Educational Research Journals

To counteract what we see as a growing research-reporting concern, we propose the following editorial-policy change regarding the content of primary research articles in educational research journals: Contributors should restrict their discussion and conclusions to their data and not offer recommendations for educational practice nor speculate about the educational policy implications of their research. We believe that this change will be beneficial for maintaining a separation between evidence and opinion concerning the legitimate warrants of empirical research. We suggest viable accompaniments and alternatives to authors offering practical recommendations and policy speculations in primary-research journal articles. Among these is to rely on all sources of evidence, including systematic research syntheses based on the aggregated contribution of multiple research studies from different sources, with recommendations for practice tailored to specific situations so that both their validity and utility will be increased. It is hoped that our proposed policy change will initiate a conversation among researchers, editors, reviewers, and educational-policy experts with respect to the scope and purpose of primary research journal articles.     

Community participation in bureaucratic organizations: Principles and strategies

The present paper points out that there are tasks that primary groups perform better than bureaucracies and those that bureaucracies perform better than primary groups. Both types of tasks are very interdependent so that sometimes primary group tasks must be performed within the boundaries of the bureaucratic organization. The argument is made that when primary groups intervene in bureaucracies, they can do so directly in non-expert tasks without lowering the effectiveness of the bureaucratic organization. When they intervene in expert aspects, they should do so indirectly through an expert advocate. However, in all intervention the primary group must take into account that its structure is contradictory to that of the bureaucracy and, therefore, it must keep as much distance as possible—consistent with its ability to intervene. From this analysis we derive a series of hypotheses suggesting when the community might ideally use the bureaucracy's own experts, when the community must hire its own experts, when the community should use mass media, strikes, indigenous workers, etc. It is suggested that the multitudinous possibilities for linkages can all be derived from a few basic underlying dimensions of the situation.

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Résumé Cet article montre qu'il existe certaines tâches que les groupes primaires accomplissent mieux que les bureaucraties, et certaines autres qu'accomplissent mieux les bureaucraties. Les deux sortes de tâches sont interdépendentes; donc parfois les tâches des groupes primaires doivent s'accomplir parmi les organisations bureaucratiques. Les auteurs soutiennent que les groupes primaires peuvent intervenir dans les bureaucraties en complétant les tâches non-expertes sans réduire l'efficacité de l'organisation bureaucratique. Quands ils participent à certains sujets experts, ils devraient se munir d'un agent expert. Mais dans toute intervention le groupe primaire doit se rendre compte que sa structure contredit celle de la bureaucratie et que, par conséquent, il doit se tenir autant à distance que possible par rapport à sa compétence d'intervention. De cette analyse proviennent des hypothèses qui indiquent quand une communauté peut se servir le mieux du personnel expert d'une bureaucratie, quand la communauté doit engager des experts, quand la communauté doit se servir des mass média, des grèves, des ouvriers indigènes, etc. Les nombreuses possibilités de liaisons proviennent toutes de quelques dimensions fondamentales de la situation.