The Responsibilities of White Teacher Candidates and Teacher Educators in Developing Racial Literacy

This article aims to help teacher educators consider how to build racial literacy in their White teacher candidates, providing guidance through pedagogical strategies and approaches based on our and others’ research. In addition, much of the pedagogy that we developed in working with our White teacher candidates can be translated to teachers working with White students at other levels, and it can also help teacher educators develop their own racial literacy.     

Critical corridor talk: Just gossip or stoic resistance? Unrecognised informal Higher Education leadership

This mixed methods paper considers whether or not invisible forms of morally resistant collegial leadership are progressively challenging policy and managerial quasi‐market instrumentalism in a minority of low trust dysfunctional situations in a stratified United Kingdom (UK) Higher Education system. A theoretical model of stoical critical corridor talk (CCT) is proposed, arising from selected empirical data and reflective observations in 2005–2017. The data demonstrated that resistant academic critique is increasingly questioning economically driven command and control authoritarianism. The model builds on the concept of critical being to consider whether or not CCT amongst academics provides informal stoical leadership to alleviate stresses exacerbated by poor management. The highly functioning criticality of negative capability facilitates self‐reflexive resistance against the false necessity of supposedly deterministic imperatives to validate policy‐driven audit‐based managerialism. Yet to foster trust, informal leadership needs to practise correct moral principles itself when resisting performativity in dysfunctional environments in which some overstep the acceptable roles of good management.     

Teaching the partial products algorithm with the concrete representational abstract sequence and the strategic instruction model

Elementary standards include multiplication of single-digit numbers and students advance to solve complex problems and demonstrate procedural fluency in algorithms. The ability to illustrate procedural fluency in algorithms is dependent on the development of understanding and reasoning in multiplication. Development of multiplicative reasoning provides the foundation for advanced mathematics and algebraic reasoning. For students who struggle in mathematics, instruction in multiplication algorithms should ensure conceptual understanding so that students have a foundation for success in advanced mathematics. The concrete representational abstract (CRA) sequence addresses conceptual understanding and the strategic instruction model (SIM) supports procedural knowledge. The current pilot study combined these methods to teach elementary students the partial products algorithm. Twelve students in grades four and five participated in the study, receiving instruction from teachers in their school during an intervention period. Within a pre-experimental design, using pre- and postintervention data, students showed a significant change in performance. The article will describe and show how teachers implemented the CRA-SIM interventions and discuss implications for practice.     

Linking Community,Industry and Tertiary Education Community‐based Student Units in Social Work Education

Professional social work education in Australia requires students to undertake supervised and assessed field practice in addition to theoretical classroom‐based education. Field education placements take place in a wide range of social and community service organisations ‐ often partly funded by these organisations. However, in a climate of economic restraint and cutback, the social and community services sector increasingly looks to education for resources for field education. One solution is the development of student units, especially designed to offer practice‐based experience for students. This paper is motivated by the high value Phillip Institute of Technology places on student units in field education. It addresses the question, “What are student units?”, presents a tentative categorisation of types of social work student units and concludes with a possible framework for evaluation.     

Teacher Consultation to Enhance Implementation of School-Based Restorative Justice

ABSTRACT

Restorative justice (RJ) is an alternative approach to school discipline that has been gaining recognition in the public and academic spheres as a way to engage students who misbehave in school. RJ has promise to address racial/ethnic, gender, and disability disproportionality in school discipline. One aspect of school-based RJ that has received almost no attention in the literature is the professional development and ongoing support of teachers in schools using RJ. This article provides a review of extant literature on school-based RJ, teacher training, and consultation methods. Integrating the empirical literature on school consultation and teacher professional development, we argue that schools should implement a multitiered model of professional development to build teacher competency in RJ, specifically including the use of targeted teacher consultation. The proposed model is complementary to an RJ framework, systematic, and capable of evaluation; future research is needed to evaluate its effectiveness in practice.     

Inter-Parietal White Matter Development Predicts Numerical Performance in Young Children

In an effort to understand the role of interhemispheric transfer in numerical development, we investigated the relationship between children's developing knowledge of numbers and the integrity of their white matter connections between the cerebral hemispheres (the corpus callosum). We used diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) tractography analyses to test the link between the development of the corpus callosum and performance on symbolic and non-symbolic numerical judgment tasks. We were especially interested in the interhemispheric connections of parietal cortex in 6-year-old children, because regions of parietal cortex have been implicated in the development of numerical skills by several prior studies. Our results revealed significant structural differences between children and adults in the fibers of the corpus callosum connecting the left and right parietal lobes. Importantly, these structural differences were predictive of individual differences among children in performance on numerical judgment tasks: children with poor numerical performance relative to their peers exhibited reduced white matter coherence in the fibers passing through the isthmus of the corpus callosum, which connects the parietal hemispheres.