Sometimes less is more: educational effectiveness of English as a foreign language instruction in German classrooms

This article challenges one of the central orthodoxies of much school effectiveness and school improvement work – namely that schools should strive to become more consistent environments for pupils and teachers. It reviews the arguments for consistency; the success of centralised systems, and the 'mirroring' of factors of effectiveness at the different levels of organisation but also examines the evidence which seems inconsistent with this thesis. For example, the differential performance of boys and girls in some schools and of certain ethnic groups in some school environments. Whilst not suggesting that 'consistency' theories should be rejected in all circumstances the article argues that the motivation of students is the key factor which needs to link school organisation and school context. Drawing on organisational literature the analysis concludes that effective schools are most likely to be those which are able to differentiate their structures, strategies and policies for different groups of pupils and different learning tasks.     

City of London School and Communities that Care: Researching Pupil Experience to Inform Policy and Practice in the Independent Sector

This article is an account of the decision by an independent school to participate in its local Healthy Schools Scheme. One of the factors that influenced this decision was the value the school gained from a pupil survey. The same survey was used to track the impact of the school's Personal, Social and Health Education curriculum and pastoral work on pupils' experience of the school, and academic achievement. In particular, the authors explore the role of survey analysis and consultancy advice in interpreting survey results and developing school practice. The survey contributed to pupil participation in school development. The use of an external consultant as critical friend was perceived as an aid to school reflection and self-review.     

Teaching Method,Memory and Learning: an enquiry with primary school children

The problem of different teaching methods is briefly discussed in the context of Bennett's work. An experiment involving four different teaching strategies carried out with about 200 senior primary school children is described. Results obtained on two appropriate tests are presented and analysed. The analysis suggests that there is no one uniformly best teaching method, though one appears to be uniformly weak. The other three are effective, or ineffective, insofar as they do, or do not, satisfy the criteria for memory set out by Craik.     

Enhancing learning in the life sciences through spatial perception

Recent educational research finds if students are encouraged to form mental images of events, objects and written or spoken words, learning of the material is enhanced. The inability to image an item may, in fact, hinder one's learning efforts in some disciplines. To find if low spatial apptitude does have a deleterious effect on learning in the life sciences, two hundred and fifty undergraduates taking a nonmajor's biology course were given tests to measure their visual-spatial awareness. Students falling more than one standard deviation from the mean were classified as low in spatial cognition and were randomly sorted into an experimental and a control group. Exercises known to enhance spatial understanding were conducted weekly with the experimental group. When the final grades for the course were examined at the end of the semester, it was found that students in the experimental group scored significantly better than the control group in the biology course. These students, however, did not reach the same level of proficiency as the students who were measuring high in spatial ability initially.He became interested in visual-spatial aptitude and its effect on learning as a doctoral student at Rutgers University and furthered his studies on the topic as a post-doc at Birmingham University in England. While there he worked with Janic Weikowski and I. MacFarlene Smith, two premier British researchers on spatial perception. Dr. Lord has published several articles on spatial learning and given numerous presentations on the topic in recent years.     

EDUCATIONAL TELEVISION: CONTENT AND CONTEXT

The author describes her work as Education Officer for Thames Television. Broadcast ETV has failed to make as much impact as it should because of teachers’ difficulties in finding time to integrate television into their teaching, and producers’ difficulties in discovering programme styles which work for children familiar with adult viewing. There is a real need for greater D.E.S. involvement both in sponsoring research on children's media comprehension and in encouraging teacher training in television use.     

Creating feminised critical spaces and co-caring communities of practice outside patriarchal managerial landscapes

The experiences of five female lecturers working in higher education in the UK are explored as they engage in the search for a feminised critical space as a refuge from the masculinised culture of performativity in which they feel constrained and devalued. Email exchanges were used as a form of narrative enquiry that provided opportunity and space to negotiate identities and make meaning from experiences. The exchanges provided a critical space, characterised by trust, honesty and care for the self and for each other, that enabled a sharing of authentic voices and a reaffirming of identities that were made vulnerable through the exposing of the self as an emotional, politicised subject. Drawing on existing theoretical understandings of critical feminised spaces enabled us to create a pedagogical framework for work with students in further developing caring and co-caring communities of practice that are not alternative to, but are outside the performativity landscape of education.     

The ‘double-edged sword’ of a sessional academic career

ABSTRACT

There have been widespread changes to working arrangements and employment relationships, including significant decreases in continuing/full-time employment contracts. This trend is particularly notable in academia, with more universities relying on the expertise of sessional, teaching-focused academics. This qualitative study extends understanding of this important group of professionals, identifying sessional work as a ‘double-edged sword’ and suggesting a typology of sessional academic careers to be tested in future research. It reports on the diversity among sessional academics, some enjoying the autonomy and flexibility of this working arrangement, others seeking more job security and greater alignment with continuing employment. It also identifies synergies and contradictions between sessional academic careers and key themes in the contemporary careers literature.     

Developmental Differences in Decoding the Meanings of the Appraisal Actions of Teachers

Teachers convey evaluations through such "appraisal actions" as ability versus effort attributions for children's performance, spontaneous displays of warmth versus matter-of-fact acceptance, and attention versus inattention. Some appraisal actions (e.g., ability-effort) require an understanding of multiplicative relations to arrive at an "adult" interpretation. Others (e.g., attention-inattention) do not. First through sixth graders watched videotaped scenes in which teachers attributed one child's performance to ability but chided another for lack of effort even though he had given an equivalent performance, hugged one child but not another for equivalent performance, and paid attention to one child's oral report but not another's. Younger students (ages 5-9 to 7-10) rated the ability-attributed and hugged children as smarter; older students (ages 9-9 to 11-10) rated the effort-attributed and unhugged children as smarter. In contrast, no age differences were found in decoding attention versus inattention. The results suggest that younger children use a different strategy in decoding the meanings of complex appraisal actions.