Team Experiences for Science and Social Studies Preservice Teachers

Becoming an effective literacy learner requires a bit of slowing down and appreciating the reflective nature of reading and writing. Literature circles support this instructional direction because they provide opportunities for immersing students in discussions that encourage their personal responses. When students feel their personal responses are nurtured and respected, they develop confidence to grow beyond status-quo thinking and to engage in critical perspectives on meaning making. These reflective practices from personal to critical are important ingredients for effective literacy learning.     

The Color of Leadership

On July 1, 2000, I became the first black dean of Education in the almost 100-year existence of the formidable University of Pretoria, South Africa. This essay offers a set of meditations on being a black dean in a white university at the birth of a post-apartheid democracy. There are many sides to this narrative. It is a story of leading in a young democracy and about black leadership in a conservative white environment. It is about the emotions and politics of change. It is about engaging established patterns of certainty and control, and managing the inevitability of loss and change. It is about race, reconciliation, and restitution—all at the same time.     

A cross-cultural comparison of numeracy skills using a written and an interactive arithmetic test

This study applied two arithmetic tests, one written and one one computer-based interactive, to samples of primary school children from two populations, one suburban non-Aboriginal and one rural Aboriginal. The results from the written test were significantly (p?&;lt;?0.001) better for the non-Aboriginal children than for the Aboriginal children. This was not the case with the results from the computer-based interactive test. The study used Rasch-based methodology to reduce the results from the two tests to a common scale, to ascertain whether the Aboriginal children performed better (in relation to the non-Aboriginal children) in the computer-based than in the written test. The study found that this was the case, and concluded that the results from the computer-based test exhibited less cultural bias against the Aboriginal children than the written test.     

Cameos,supporting roles and stars: citation and reflection in the context of initial teacher education

Background: Reflection is well established as an important part of teacher education, but it is also the focus of critical enquiry. This means that reflection is of interest to those who wish to explore its use to produce ‘better’ teachers. It is also of interest to scholars who are interested in the wider implications of reflection, for example, in relation to power and social control. Academic articles are the primary medium through which ideas and practices are communicated. However, they can only contribute if they are accepted for publication on the basis of making a contribution to knowledge. To be seen in this way, a journal paper needs to cite earlier work to show understanding of this work and how this is being augmented.

Purpose: This paper aims to initiate an academic debate of citation practices which, it argues, should be based on an awareness of current practices and a willingness to share, and even change, them. To facilitate the debate and the development of a better understanding of citing and its implications, the paper offers a tripartite citation framework.

Sources of evidence: The extensive citation analysis literature is reviewed to provide a context for an examination of the variety of citation practices found in 24 papers, which all focus on initial teacher education and which cite the same critical paper (Fendler, L., Teacher reflection in a hall of mirrors: Historical influences and political reverberations. Educational Researcher, 32, no. 3: 16–25, 2003; doi: 10.3102/0013189X032003016).

Main argument: This paper argues that there is value in differentiating three categories of citation, labelled ‘cameo’, ‘supporting role’ and ‘star’. These categories do not make judgements about what counts as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ referencing. Rather, they provide a way for authors to assess how they are citing and what the possible consequences may be. These can include an apparent lack of understanding not just of a cited paper but also of the wider literature. This means that citation that is not being carefully managed can undermine an argument.

Conclusions: This paper concludes that there is there is a need to initiate an academic debate about citation which is premised on the development of self-awareness about current practice and its consequences. Such a debate could bring about a number of benefits. It would encourage individual scholars to develop self-aware and ethical citation; it would also clarify current expectations about citation and enable academic communities to reflect on whether enquiry is well served by them.     

School grades,school context and university degree performance: evidence from an elite Scottish institution

This paper investigates degree classification outcomes for students with SQA Higher qualifications at an elite Scottish university. Students are characterised according to a new indicator based on their secondary school’s academic performance relative to the national (Scottish) average. The results show that our school context indicator provides valuable information for interpreting school qualifications with respect to a student’s potential to benefit from their university studies. If school context is ignored, raw school grades alone may be an incomplete measure of academic ability and the probability of success at university.     

An Educator's Guide to the Development of Advanced Practice Competencies in Clinical Social Work

The 2008 Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards identified 10 core competencies that all social work graduates should master. MSW programs found themselves with a need to identify knowledge, values, and skill statements that reflected what concentration-year students were expected to know and be able to do. In 2009 a group of educators convened at the Council on Social Work Education in Alexandria, VA to develop a model of advanced practice in clinical social work. This article describes the work group's process; identifies and describes the resulting advanced clinical knowledge, values, and skills statements; discusses the key debates and issues that arose during the development of the statements; and concludes with the implications for social work education and practice.     

Some directions for research in knowledge sharing

This paper reviews some issues associated with knowledge sharing, and identifies what the author considers to be potentially interesting and fruitful avenues of future research. The inadequacy of the common distinction between tacit and explicit knowledge is examined, and the importance of providing experience in which the tacit knowledge of the individual can be generated is highlighted. Storytelling, in particular, is identified as one such generation mechanism. The differing ways in which communities of practice may support knowledge sharing and generation are discussed. A link between the health of the communities of practice in an organisation, the nature of its organisational memory, and the ability of the organisation to operate flexibly is hypothesised.     

Promoting Mathematical Communication in the Classroom: Two Preservice Teachers' Conceptions and Practices

Recent reforms in mathematics education have encouraged teachers to engage their students in various forms of communication. Scholars have begun to consider questions such as: In what ways do teachers facilitate and guide classroom discourse? How does the quality of students' reflections impact the development of rich mathematical understanding? In order to address these and similar questions, the authors provide a framework of four constructs that can be used to analyze various forms of classroom communication: uni-directional communication, contributive communication, reflective communication, and instructive communication. Throughout the article,the authors both develop and use these constructs as they consider two preservice teachers concepts of communication and their corresponding classroom practices.