Breaking the Cycle: Future Faculty Begin Teaching with Learner-Centered Strategies after Professional Development

The availability of reliable evidence for teaching practices after professional development is limited across science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines, making the identification of professional development “best practices” and effective models for change difficult. We aimed to determine the extent to which postdoctoral fellows (i.e., future biology faculty) believed in and implemented evidence-based pedagogies after completion of a 2-yr professional development program, Faculty Institutes for Reforming Science Teaching (FIRST IV). Postdocs (PDs) attended a 2-yr training program during which they completed self-report assessments of their beliefs about teaching and gains in pedagogical knowledge and experience, and they provided copies of class assessments and video recordings of their teaching. The PDs reported greater use of learner-centered compared with teacher-centered strategies. These data were consistent with the results of expert reviews of teaching videos. The majority of PDs (86%) received video ratings that documented active engagement of students and implementation of learner-centered classrooms. Despite practice of higher-level cognition in class sessions, the items used by the PDs on their assessments of learning focused on lower-level cognitive skills. We attributed the high success of the FIRST IV program to our focus on inexperienced teachers, an iterative process of teaching practice and reflection, and development of and teaching a full course.     

Development of Category‐Based Induction and Semantic Knowledge

Category‐based induction is a hallmark of mature cognition; however, little is known about its origins. This study evaluated the hypothesis that category‐based induction is related to semantic development. Computational studies suggest that early on there is little differentiation among concepts, but learning and development lead to increased differentiation based on taxonomic relatedness. This study reports findings from a new task aimed to (a) examine this putative increase in semantic differentiation and (b) test whether individual differences in semantic differentiation are related to category‐based induction in 4‐ to 7‐year‐old children (N = 85). The results provide the first empirical evidence of an age‐related increase in differentiation of representations of animal concepts and suggest that category‐based induction is related to increased semantic differentiation.     

Building Inclusive Pedagogy: Recommendations From a National Study of Students of Color in Higher Education and Student Affairs Graduate Programs

In this study, we share the racialized experiences of 29 students of color in higher education and student affairs graduate programs, focusing specifically on their relationships with faculty, their experiences in classrooms, and the strategies they recommend for inclusion. Participants indicated that they are expected to serve as the racial expert in classrooms and that many faculty fail to effectively facilitate discussions related to race and racism and to intervene in instances of racial microaggressions. Participants convey effective strategies to build racially-inclusive classrooms which include authenticity, vulnerability, and validation.     

From the cheap seats: one consideration of school-based PE's position in contemporary American schools

Background: As the USA enters the second decade of the twenty-first century, it does so in a polarized political, social, and educational climate heretofore unseen in its relatively short history. Such a climate has implications for what role schools play in American society and especially how school-based physical education (SBPE) may need to reinvent how and what it contributes to the schooling of American children and, ultimately, the common good. Currently, SBPE receives verbal endorsement from the public and politicians yet little in the way of policy and financial support from legislators at national, state, and local levels.

Aims: The purpose of this essay is to present a US-centered perspective on the current ‘position’ of SBPE and offer some modest (and hardly earth-shattering) suggestions for the immediate future from the perspective of a mid-career physical education teacher educator. Recommendations are made that may enable SBPE to make valuable contributions (perhaps even more that it currently does) and, hopefully, remove SBPE from the divided debate on what public schooling should include and how it should be provided.

Conclusions: SBPE is in a precarious position where it can be severely wounded or even wiped out by those issues plaguing it or it can emerge from this time as a subject matter of great import. More importantly, it can emerge as this important piece of education on its own terms.     

Conductive Education: towards an 'educational model'

Caroline Coles, Headteacher of Horton Lodge School in Staffordshire, and Liz Zsargo, Lecturer in Conductive Education at Keele University, consider the development of Conductive Education (CE) in the UK, and place it in the context of some of the sociological analyses of disability. They argue that CE can provide the basis for an educational model of disability (in which disability is seen as a result of a complex interaction between the environment and the individual), that all children have the right to an education suitable for their needs, and that a lack of access to an appropriate education can be a disabling factor.     

‘“Navvy” import alions [sic]’: the schooling of navvy children in the Midlands in the 1890s

The children of navvies were subject to the vagaries of an itinerant lifestyle, and during the latter years of the nineteenth century this invariably affected their relationship with an educational system that mandated compulsory attendance. Based primarily on school records, this article explores the contrasting ways in which teachers perceived navvy children who were admitted to a number of schools during the construction of one particular railway in the mid-1890s. Perceptions concerning the children’s behaviour, attendance, abilities and educational progress, together with evidence of the treatment they received, are considered in the context of contemporary attitudes towards the navvy community and aspects of the navvy lifestyle. The admission of navvy children also had logistical implications for schools, and these are assessed in terms of the pressures placed upon financial resources and teaching staff. This illustrates the disparity that could exist between small rural schools and larger schools in urban areas.     

Teacher Perceptions of School Consultant Social Influence Strategies: Replication and Expansion

The goals were to (a) replicate the findings of previous research with regard to the Consultee/Teacher Version of the Interpersonal Power Inventory (IPI), and (b) advance the literature by examining IPI scores about a current consultation relationship. Sample 1 included 99 elementary school teachers (44.4% Hispanic) who completed the IPI. Results replicated Erchul et al. Sample 2 (N = 37; 45.9% Hispanic) represented a subset of Sample 1 who participated in a consultation project and completed the IPI about influence in their current consultation relationship. The results advance the literature by offering evidence for convergent and predictive validity of the IPI soft power bases. Teachers who reported being influenced by soft power strategies experienced greater change in their behaviors and their students’ behaviors than those who reported being not influenced by such strategies. Implications for research and practice in school consultation are discussed.