The developing educator: from novice to expert in Agricultural Education

Summary

The paper raises questions about how inexperienced lecturers (whether initially trained or untrained) develop a mastery of skills within their chosen profession. To do this, an analysis of what constitutes ‘mastery’ is needed. This is borrowed from the work of Schon (1983 and 1987) on the reflective practitioner, and of the Dreyfus brothers (1986) on human intuition and expertise. The paper next reports the results and tentative conclusions of a small-scale study in May–June 1996 of how long it has taken for 20 agricultural educators in six British Colleges of Agriculture to have developed their skills from their teaching experience, and their perceptions of the influences which have facilitated or inhibited that process.     

Museums and the gifted

The integrative curriculum combines subject‐matter studies, mini‐courses, and long term projects which allows for individual differences and provides a qualitatively different instruction program for the gifted.     

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.     

OLD AGE AND LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW

Rural hospitals face difficult times as Medicare health insurance threatens their survival. A small community in Polk County, North Carolina, developed a program that was designed to take advantage of the Medicare skilled nursing benefit as a payment source and which can be implemented by any rural hospital that has Medicare-certified swing beds or distinct nursing facilities. This program involves the development of a special unit, the Restorative Care Unit (RCU), which provides subacute care to older adults. A major element in the RCU care system is a highly structured continuing education program for hospital staff. The continuing education component trains personnel to implement and manage the RCU care system using a team approach. The Appalachian Geriatric Education Center Consortium recognized the need for dissemination of this model of service. They took the concept, developed a curriculum and implemented it with eight rural hospitals. The purpose of this article is to describe in detail the RCU care system continuing education element, and present results from a qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the program. The stages of the development of the program are described, in addition to the content of the curriculum.     

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.