Shakespeare for All? Some Reflections on the Globe Theatre’s Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank Project

ABSTRACT

Every year since 2007, the Globe Theatre has run the Playing Shakespeare project, largely funded by Deutsche Bank. This has three main components: school-based workshops, CPD sessions for teachers and free performances for school students. From 2014 to 2016, we were commissioned to evaluate this project. In what follows, we reflect on the nature of this project and its relation to the versions of Shakespeare that figure so prominently in the terrain of contemporary schooling in England.     

A comparison of student perceptions of Dutch physics teachers' interpersonal behavior and their educational opinions in 1984 and 1993

According to the literature, in the 1980s the intended science curriculum exhibited a worldwide movement toward a curriculum for all, with a more contextually embedded approach. In writings about science teaching pedagogy, a trend can be observed to consider seriously students' conceptions, based on the premises of constructivism. This article examines consequences of these trends for teacher behavior and concludes that classes should become more student centered. In terms of the model for interpersonal teacher behavior (Wubbels & Levy, 1993), teachers must give their students more responsibility and act in a more understanding way. It is to be expected that teachers' beliefs and opinions have to change before this trend can be implemented in the classroom. We have therefore tested whether teachers' opinions about objectives and content of physics education, on the one hand, and the implemented curriculum, particularly teachers' interpersonal behavior, on the other, display the same trend observed in the intended curriculum. In 1984 and 1993, data on students' perceptions of their teachers' behavior were gathered from ninth-grade students of a random sample of Dutch physics teachers. Data on the teachers' self-perceptions of their behavior and their opinions about physics education also were included. The results show that teachers were more in favor of realistic teaching content in 1993 than in 1984, a shift that is in line with the trend in the intended curriculum. Students' perceptions indicated clearly that Dutch teachers behaved less dominantly and more cooperatively in 1993 than in 1984. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 34: 447–466, 1997.     

Themenheft: Datenintegration

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Graphical Analysis of Test Items

Graphical Item Analysis (GIA) visually displays the relationship between the total score on a test and the response proportions of the correct and false alternatives of a multiple-choice item. The GIA method provides essential and easily interpretable information about item characteristics (difficulty, discrimination and guessing rate). Low quality items are easily detected with the GIA method because they show response proportions on the correct alternative which decrease with an increase of the total score, or display response proportions of one or more false alternatives which do not decrease with an increase of the total score. The GIA method has two main applications. Firstly, it can be used by researchers in the process of identifying items that need to be excluded from further analysis. Secondly, it can be used by test constructors in the process of improving the quality of the item bank. GIA enables a better understanding of test theory and test construction, especially for those without a background in psychometrics. In this sense, the GIA method might contribute to reducing the gap between the world of psychometrists and the practical world of constructors of achievement tests.     

Understanding teacher learning in secondary education: The relations of teacher activities to changed beliefs about teaching and learning

In this study, relations between learning activities of teachers and changes in their beliefs were examined. Thirty-four teachers in Dutch secondary education were asked to complete a questionnaire regarding their beliefs about teaching and learning on two occasions. They were also asked to report on learning activities that they undertook. Teachers who had changed their beliefs in a direction congruent with the aims of recent educational reforms often reported experimentation with colleagues' teaching methods. Teachers who changed their beliefs in a direction that was not congruent with the reform often reported experimentation with alternative methods due to discontent with the effectiveness of current methods.     

Fire play: ICCARUS—Intelligent command and control,acquisition and review using simulation*

Is it possible to educate a fire officer to deal intelligently with the command and control of a major fire event he will never have experienced? The authors of this paper believe there is, and present here just one solution to this training challenge. It involves the development of an intelligent simulation based upon computer managed interactive media. The expertise and content underpinning this educational development was provided by the West Midlands Fire Service. Their brief for this training programme was unambiguous and to the point:

• 1 Do not present the trainee with a model answer, because there are no generic fires. Each incident is novel, complex, and often ‘wicked’ in that it changes obstructively as it progresses. Thus firefighting demands that Commanders impose their individual intelligence on each problem to solve it.
• 2 A suitable Educational Simulator should stand alone; operate in real time; emulate as nearly as possible the ‘feel’ of the fireground; present realistic fire progress; incorporate the vast majority of those resources normally present at a real incident; bombard the trainee with information from those sources; provide as few system‐prompts as possible.
• 3 There should also be an interrogable visual debrief which can be used after the exercise to give the trainees a firm understanding of the effects of their actions. This allows them to draw their own conclusions of their command effectiveness. Additionally, such a record of command and control will be an ideal initiator of tutorial discussion.
• 4 The simulation should be realisable on a hardware/software platform of £10 000.
• 5 The overriding importance is that the simulation should ‘emulate as nearly as possible the feelings and stresses of the command role’.

     

Interpersonal Teacher Behaviour and Student Outcomes

In this study, the effectiveness of secondary education teachers' interpersonal behaviour is investigated by analysing data from 2 samples: a study on 45 Physics teachers and their 3rd-year classes and a study on 32 English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers and their 3rd-year classes. Teacher interpersonal behaviour was studied by means of students' perceptions of this behaviour, collected with the Questionnaire on Teacher Interaction (QTI). These perceptions include 2 important dimensions: Influence and Proximity. Results of multilevel analyses with various covariates indicated that Influence and Proximity were positively related to both cognitive and affective outcomes. Interpersonal behaviour explained up to more than half of the variance in student outcomes at the teacher-class level. The outcomes suggest that interpersonal behaviour as perceived by students may be an important variable for educational effectiveness researchers.     

A model for the supervisor–doctoral student relationship

The supervisor–doctoral student interpersonal relationship is important for the success of a PhD-project. Therefore, information about doctoral students’ perceptions of their relationship with their supervisor can be useful for providing detailed feedback to supervisors aiming at improving the quality of their supervision. This paper describes the development of the questionnaire on supervisor–doctoral student interaction (QSDI). This questionnaire aims at gathering information about doctoral students’ perceptions of the interpersonal style of their supervisor. The QSDI appeared to be a reliable and valid instrument. It can be used in research on the relationship between supervisor and doctoral student and can provide supervisors with feedback on their interpersonal style towards a particular student.     

Successful learning: balancing self-regulation with instructional planning

Many recent studies have stressed the importance of teacher candidates’ (TCs) self-regulated learning (SRL) skills for successful learning. Because of the promising consequences of SRL for academic performance, teacher educators (TEs) are encouraged to increase TCs’ SRL opportunities in educational programs. Because of the difficulty and complexity for TEs to successfully guide TCs towards SRL, the present study contributes to the discussion how to best facilitate TEs in finding a balance between student- and teacher-control. For this purpose, a conceptual model is presented. The model draws upon literature related to the perspective of the learner, the teacher and the learning task. Besides the context of teacher education, the model is beneficial for higher education as well as teaching and teacher professionalization. It will help instructors provide a more balanced approach between teacher- and student-controlled learning, and support students develop essential SRL skills.     

IBM's Chess Players: On AI and Its Supplements

This article investigates the ways in which the reporting of technological developments in artificial intelligence (AI) can serve as occasions in which Occidental modernity's cultural antinomies are played out. It takes as its reference point the two chess tournaments (in 1996 and 1997) between the then world champion Gary Kasparov and the IBM dedicated chess computers Deep Blue and Deeper Blue and shows how these games of chess came to be seen as an arena where fundamental issues pertaining to human identity were contested. The article considers the dominant framing of these encounters in terms of a conflict between two opposed categories—“human” and “machine”—and argues the essential role of human agency, the human supplement, in the performances of machine intelligence.