Leading through partnership: enhancing the Teach First Leadership Programme

Teach First works in partnership with government, business organisations, higher education institutions (providers of Initial Teacher Training, ITT) and schools to offer a two-year integrated Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) Leadership Development Programme; the first cohort of students were accepted in 2003. Its delivery of an integrated QTS/leadership programme, recruitment of top graduates who would not otherwise consider teaching, focus on teaching in challenging schools and joint business–Higher Education Institution delivery, set Teach First within a unique position amongst ITT partnerships in England. In 2008, building on its success, Teach First sought to enhance its Leadership Development Programme, relevant to teachers and leaders in all fields, including the development of an optional Masters route. This paper considers the development of the enhanced programme within the Teach First partnership model and explores the merits of the programme in developing teachers. Evidence suggests that the core values, focus on mission and strong ethos have been major contributory factors to its success.     

Building services cabinets as teaching material in a degree in architecture

The aim of this innovative educational project is to encourage students’ interest in one of the most underrated fields of architecture: building services. With this material students interact with real elements and thereby understand the relationship between facilities and the building. A set of three small technical cabinets is planned. They allow for comfortable use and movement inside the building, need minimum maintenance and are easily stored. The result is an alternative concept of a mobile laboratory called a ‘technical cabinet’, made up of three mobile units for fire safety, electricity and the heating/cooling system. The design, content and learning systems of the cabinets confirmed the validity of the initial concept during the first year of use. A protocol has also been developed for each of the technical cabinets so that the teaching experience may be of use in other Schools of Architecture.     

Instructional technologies in developing countries: A contextual analysis approach

Conclusion This paper proposes an expanded context-based analysis approach for implementing instructional technology in developing countries by calling for the front-end analysis phase of the design process to include an analysis of the socio-cultural, environmental and institutional factors surrounding the instructional problem. Given that there is an increased application of instructional technology in developing countries and limited human capacity to appropriately design instructional technology interventions, it is imperative that instructional designers working in developing countries take into account the contextual factors outlined in the adapted Tessmer and Richey (1997) model. This adapted context-based analysis model for instructional design, if appropriately applied, may increase the probability of successful instructional technology initiatives in developing countries. Although this context-based model was expanded to include factors related to developing countries, the factors described in this paper exist in developed country settings as well. The authors would, therefore, encourage the use of this expanded model in settings that can include, but are not limited to, certain rural and urban areas in industrialized countries as well.     

Bi-directional dynamics underlie the complexity of talk in teacher–child play-based conversations in classrooms serving at-risk pupils

This study examined the transactional, utterance-by-utterance dependencies in the syntactic complexity of teachers’ and children's talk during small-group conversations in preschool classrooms. The sample included 39 teachers and select children in their classroom, which targeted enrollment to children experiencing documentable risk factors. Patterns of sequential dependencies demonstrated a bi-directional interdependence in teachers’ and children's complex syntactic use, whereby both teachers and children appeared sensitive to each other's use of complex syntactic forms. Teachers’ use of complex syntax increased the likelihood that children's adjacent utterance would contain complex syntax; similarly, children's use of complex or simple syntax increased the likelihood that teachers’ adjacent utterance would mirror their syntactic level. Associations were small to moderately large in strength, but varied across individual classrooms. The findings point to complex, bi-directional relationships underlying the complexity of talk within the classroom language environment.     

CLASS–Infant: An Observational Measure for Assessing Teacher–Infant Interactions in Center-Based Child Care

Research Findings: The growing body of literature demonstrating the importance of quality interactions with caregivers to infant development coupled with the increasing number of infants spending time in classroom settings highlights the need for a measure of interpersonal relationships between infants and caregivers. This article introduces a new measure of quality in infant classrooms based on the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) framework. This measure focuses on teacher–infant interactions with the goal of understanding how these proximal process features can be assessed in this environment. Results from a small pilot study of 30 infant classrooms indicated that the CLASS–Infant demonstrated adequate variability as well as expected convergent and divergent validity with the most commonly used infant child care quality measure. The dimensions of the measure composed a single construct of classroom quality based on teacher–infant interactions. Practice or Policy: Implications of using this measure as an assessment of center-based infant classroom quality and improving professional development are discussed.     

Professional development for design-based learning in engineering education: a case study

Design-based learning (DBL) is an educational approach in which students gather and apply theoretical knowledge to solve design problems. In this study, we examined how critical DBL dimensions (project characteristics, design elements, the teacher's role, assessment, and social context) are applied by teachers in the redesign of DBL projects. We conducted an intervention for the professional development of the DBL teachers in the Mechanical Engineering and the Electrical Engineering departments. We used the Experiential Learning Cycle as an educational model for the professionalisation programme. The findings show that the programme encouraged teachers to apply the DBL theoretical framework. However, there are some limitations with regard to specific project characteristics. Further research into supporting teachers to develop open-ended and multidisciplinary activities in the projects that support learning is recommended.     

Atypical predictive processing during visual statistical learning in children with developmental dyslexia: an event-related potential study

Previous research suggests that individuals with developmental dyslexia perform below typical readers on non-linguistic cognitive tasks involving the learning and encoding of statistical-sequential patterns. However, the neural mechanisms underlying such a deficit have not been well examined. The aim of the present study was to investigate the event-related potential (ERP) correlates of sequence processing in a sample of children diagnosed with dyslexia using a non-linguistic visual statistical learning paradigm. Whereas the response time data suggested that both typical and atypical readers learned the statistical patterns embedded in the task, the ERP data suggested otherwise. Specifically, ERPs of the typically developing children (n?=?12) showed a P300-like response indicative of learning, whereas the children diagnosed with a reading disorder (n?=?8) showed no such ERP effects. These results may be due to intact implicit motor learning in the children with dyslexia but delayed attention-dependent predictive processing. These findings are consistent with other evidence suggesting that differences in statistical learning ability might underlie some of the reading deficits observed in developmental dyslexia.