Politics,Civil Rights,and Disproportional Identification of Students with Emotional and Behavioral Disorders

The civil rights movements involving skin tone, gender or gender orientation, disability, and other physiognomic features remain important in securing the legal rights of individuals to equal treatment and equal opportunities regardless of their personal characteristics of color, origin, gender, and so on. Unfortunately, these welcome civil rights movements have led to a misunderstanding of unfairness in another group of individuals whose rights and opportunities have often been abridged—students with disabilities. Individual rights and opportunities must be insured, but doing so requires the discrimination of differences among differences. That is, not all differences require the same remedy to insure equal rights and opportunities. Misunderstanding of differences and their implications have led to political concerns about disproportional representation, particularly of students with emotional or behavioral disorders, which place unwarranted constraints on special education services.     

Teachers' emotions and test feedback

A qualitative methodology, grounded theory, was used to examine the thoughts and emotions of teachers who delivered test feedback to students. The goal of this study was to develop a conceptual model of test-feedback processes that was grounded in observational and interview data. Seven college teachers were interviewed and observed as they planned and conducted testfeedback sessions. During the test-feedback sessions, these teachers experienced a variety of negative emotions when they encountered challenges from students in the classroom. Strategies developed by these teachers reflected their attempts to organize test feedback in ways that were consistent with their goals and beliefs, but that also limited their negative emotions and stress during the feedback session. These findings are discussed in terms of their contribution to existing research on teachers' interactive thought and emotion and on the ways that teachers cope with stress in the classroom.     

TEACHING GERONTOLOGY VIA DISTANCE EDUCATION: VARIETY IS THE KEY TO SUCCESS

Teaching gerontology via distance education is growing in popularity. Yet, many challenges are encountered by those teaching gerontology at a distance; some technological and others pedagogical in nature. Successful strategies for structuring and teaching televised gerontology courses are presented in this paper. Strategies focus on types of teacher preparation, use of pedagogical tools, development and maintenance of rapport with students at remote sites, and ways to improve teaching of distance education classes in gerontology. It is argued that workload and compensation for instructors teaching distance education need to be addressed by administration in order to develop high quality distance education programs.     

Student teacher portfolios: A portrait of the beginning teacher

Abstract

This article describes a student teacher portfolio for use as an interviewing tool. A review of the research on hiring practices indicated that prospective employers reviewed the following competencies of teacher candidates: planning skills, classroom management philosophy, reflective abilities, knowledge of appropriate assessment methods, and the initiative to do more than is expected. Therefore, the recommended sections of the student teacher portfolio are Self‐Assessment; Philosophy of Classroom Management; Planning, Implementation, and Assessment Skills; and Special Projects and Activities. Because prospective employers indicated that they would devote limited time to reading a portfolio, student teachers are instructed to make all sections only six to eight pages long. Professionally arranged appendixes can then be used to provide the employer with specific evidence for claims made in the main body of the portfolio.     

Protection of the librarian

This article deals with a proposed initiative to train library managers on the African continent. It is argued that such an education initiative will contribute to the socio-economic development of Africa. Issues addressed in the article include the following: the background to and rationale for this initiative, justification for the University of Pretoria to be the degree-issuing institution, the delivery mode, outline of the proposed curriculum and expected outcomes of this initiative.