Ensuring Content‐Area Learning by Secondary Students with Learning Disabilities

Three factors tied with secondary student success in content‐area reading are demonstrated: (a) validated teacher‐focused and student‐focused interventions, (b) integrated and comprehensive service delivery systems, and (c) well‐designed, data‐based professional developmental programs. Difficult challenges face secondary students with LD and their teachers with regard to these students’ participation and success in required general education classes. Recently, instructional methods and materials have been developed and validated for promoting these students’ success. Some of them focus on how general education teachers plan and teach their content‐area courses; others focus on giving students the strategies they need to respond independently to the demands of their courses. This article describes these instructional methods, a service‐delivery model for implementing these interventions in secondary schools, and professional‐development mechanisms and administrative support that must be in place for the model to be maintained effectively.     

Toward a Programmatic Pragmatism: A Response to Naoko Saito

Naoko Saito has made a good case for emphasising the 'tragic' dimension within Dewey's pragmatism. My response suggests ways in which Saito has not gone far enough. She does not adequately move beyond 'procedural pragmatism' to a 'programmatic pragmatism' which offers substantive articulations about the human good. In addition, her emphasis on 'Emersonian perfectionism' is misguided. Both the language of 'perfectionism' and the figure of Emerson are unsuitable for the project she intends. Speaking more concretely of a 'tragic–comic meliorism' allied to the novelist Hawthorne, it is suggested, provides a more fruitful path.     

Collaborative Research: Policy and the Management of Knowledge Creation in UK Universities

Collaboration in research activity is now the rule not the exception. It is encouraged by government, funding bodies and research councils. However, the concept of collaboration is difficult to define. It occurs at many different levels, driven by a complex research system-policy dynamic. Three different models of collaboration – inter-personal, team and corporate – are identified, each with their own rationale, structure, benefits and costs. The paper examines the institutional implications of these models. It argues that institutions and individual researchers conceptualise and operationalise research collaboration in different ways. Although vital to institutional mission, collaborative research is rarely mapped by senior managers with any precision. In general, institutional approaches to the management of collaborative research lag behind the policy rhetoric. The paper concludes with an overview of the key dilemmas for institutional strategists and policy makers posed by the shift towards more collaborative approaches to research.     

A Pastoral Care Teacher's Theory of Action, Interactive Thinking and Effective Teaching Practice

Through the employment of a hybrid research model blending concept mapping and stimulated recall methodologies, this study explored the nature of a Pastoral Care Teacher's theory of action; the relationship between those beliefs and ideals and interactive thinking; and specific actions in effectively teaching a Pastoral Care issue. In undertaking the research a group of Year Eight boys at the Anglican Church Grammar School (Churchie) provided the context. The study shows that: (i) the teacher possessed a broad knowledge and understanding of the nature of Pastoral Care at Churchie; and (ii) the lessons undertaken, the pedagogy employed, and the knowledge elicited closely resembled the teacher's philosophies and thinking.