The Staff Conference: A Medium for Staff Development

Solihull's development of delegated budgets began in 1981. The experiences of schools and Centre led to the acceptance by Council in 1987 of a scheme for general implementation. The detailed scheme is included in an Appendix to the article, together with examples of vital financial management systems. In his article, the Director of Education explores the effects of delegation of the budget, and with it, the decision‐making process. The school heads’ role gains the natural extension of facility to implement management decisions, but what of the role of the Centre?     

De la ciudad aislada a la aldea global: El microordenador como catalizador del aprendizaje cooperativo y del intercambio cultural

Hace ya algunos años Cole y Scribner, con una investigación transcultural que se ha hecho clásica, establecían una distinción clave entre la lecto-escritura como código por una parte y los usos concretos que de ella se hace, por otra. Con el ordenador en la educación ha llegado también el momento de hablar quizá menos del aparato en sí y más de los usos psico-educativos que hacemos de él. En este artículo se analizan los usos del ordenador en la escuela y las implicaciones psicopedagógicas de esos usos, y se plantea también la materialización de la profecía McLuhiana de la aldea global y del aula sin muros. Por primera vez el aula puede cubrir todo el globo y conectar telemáticamente a niños de todas las culturas.     

Indirect Impact: How Early Childhood Educator Training and Coaching Impacted the Acquisition of Literacy Skills in Preschool Students

Learning to read becomes a difficult task for many children, particularly if they have not been reared in early childhood settings where literacy-based activities, interactions, or materials are prevalent. This study examined the impact that providing a college-level course in research-based instructional strategies for literacy development to early childhood educators had on the development of early reading skills in the preschool children they taught. In addition, impact on children’s rates of literacy skill attainment was examined when a coaching component (i.e., a Literacy Coach) was added.     

Adaptation and evaluation of a learning analytics dashboard to improve academic support at three Latin American universities

Despite the success of academic advising dashboards in several higher educational institutions (HEI), these dashboards are still under-explored in Latin American HEI's. To close this gap, three different Latin American universities adapted an existing advising dashboard, originally deployed at the KU Leuven to their own context. In all three cases, the context was the main ruling factor to these adaptations. In this paper, we describe these adaptions using a framework that focuses on four different elements of the context: Objectives, Stakeholders, Key moment and Interactions. Evaluation of the adapted dashboards in the three different Latin American universities is conducted through pilots. This evaluation shows the value of the dashboard approach in different contexts in terms of satisfaction, usefulness and impact in academic decision-making and advising tasks. The main contribution of this paper is the systematic reporting of the adaptations to an academic advising dashboard and showing the value of an academic advising dashboard on academic decision-making and advising tasks.     

Gendered positionality among Irish male primary teachers: the staff room as a site of performative masculinity

The concept of masculinities has traditionally been defined in terms of crises associated with boys’ underachievement, the violence of homophobia, the under-representation of males in caring occupations, the rituals and discourses of laddism, and perceptions of disaffected and unrealised talent. Whereas the topic of masculinities has long been associated with warrants for distinctive and diverse male identities, it has a comparatively more recent history in the research on male Irish primary teachers as a particular social category. Two key findings are discussed in relation to performative masculinities – a form of strategic manoeuvring designed to exploit gender discourses, practices for control, power and privilege. First, the findings show the staffroom as a bellwether or highly developed locus for teacher socialisation through gendered discourses, events and actions. Second, the findings show nonsynchronous performative masculinities not only between male and female teachers but also with male colleagues. Therefore, it is argued that this frequently forgotten and neglected seam in the grand narrative of schools and schooling in Ireland needs to be more fully understood as a variable of quality, social justice and democratic practices across the full scope and sequence of the teacher continuum and as a prerequisite component in all teacher leadership programmes.     

Technology column: public libraries as civic technology hubs

Civic technology is used to improve how citizens, businesses, and other groups engage and conduct business with governments. Libraries across the United States are uniquely positioned to be key players in the civic technology movement. Libraries offer community spaces where everyone is welcome and where people can come together, learn about new technologies, access information, and solve shared problems. By bringing our unique attributes and resources to bear, libraries can play a part in developing applications and services that power our communities.