Fidelity of Problem Solving in Everyday Practice: Typical Training May Miss the Mark

Social skills training interventions have been used extensively for remediating interpersonal deficits of children and adolescents. These interventions represent an essential component of school curricula for at-risk and handicapped students, and have been incorporated into treatment programs for youngsters receiving services in psychiatric hospitals or clinics, residential facilities, and correctional institutions. As the degree of specialized knowledge necessary to effectively implement social skills training programs increases, the need for consultation services becomes more acute. Specific functional relationships among child characteristics, target behaviors, and interventions, for instance, must be analyzed with respect to ecological parameters and constraints. In this article, I discuss the use of consultation for conceptualizing and implementing social skills training with youngsters. Integrating consultation into social skills training requires developing a dynamic and collaborative relationship with practitioners. Current issues and misconceptions pertinent to social skills training are proffered in order to enhance consultant's role as problem solver and to ensure treatment integrity. This article also delineates the nexus among assessment information, target behavior selection, and intervention factors that are considered essential for providing comprehensive and effective social skills training.     

Field-based teacher education in literacy: preparing teachers in real classroom contexts

For the past two decades, scholars have advocated for reforms in teacher education that emphasize relevant connections between theory and practice in university coursework and focus on clinical experiences. This paper is based on our experiences in designing and implementing an integrated literacy methods course in a field-based teacher education program. We describe issues involved in helping preservice teachers learn to differentiate literacy instruction for diverse learners in urban schools and describe how we use Grossman’s framework of representation, decomposition, and approximation of practice to connect theory and practice. We offer insights about the importance of using recursive cycles of practice and carefully scaffolded learning through attention to different aspects of practice. Initial successes and challenges in implementing field-based literacy education are discussed.     

“Doing What I can,but I got no Magic Wand:” A Snapshot of Early Childhood Educator Experiences and Efforts to Ensure Quality During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Early Childhood Education Journal - The COVID-19 pandemic impacted early childhood programs serving infants, toddlers, and preschoolers in dramatic ways. After temporarily closing, many educators...     

The Effects of Faculty Demographic Characteristics and Disciplinary Context on Dimensions of Job Satisfaction

This study applies Kalleberg’s framework to better understand the effects of diverse demographic faculty characteristics on dimensions of job satisfaction. We also extend his work and the work of others to explore the contextual effects of academic disciplines on faculty job satisfaction. We find that women are consistently less satisfied than their male colleagues and that the effect of being female varies by discipline on levels of job satisfaction. We also find race/ethnicity has mixed effects on dimensions of job satisfaction but the effects of race/ethnicity tend to be constant across discipline. Our findings hold important implications for those seeking to understand the experiences of college faculty from diverse demographic backgrounds.     

Relative Effects of a Comprehensive Versus Reduced Training for Head Start Teachers Who Serve Spanish-Speaking English Learners

With increased demand for improved early childhood education services, it is important to better understand the essential professional development resources that have the greatest impact on both teacher and child outcomes. This study compared the effectiveness of two teacher-training models in bilingual Migrant and Seasonal Head Start and Head Start classrooms. Both conditions included the use of a technology-based student progress-monitoring tool. The progress monitoring provided detailed feedback on students’ progress 15 across the academic year and helped organize instructional groupings. The comprehensive treatment condition included biweekly professional development sessions, in-class mentoring, and provision of classroom materials, whereas the treatment-control condition included only the provision of a limited set of classroom materials. Across multiple sites in Texas, 49 pretest and posttest teacher observations and bilingual child assessments were collected on a subsample of students (n = 387). Research Findings: Improvements in teaching behaviors were observed in both experimental conditions; no significant differences were observed between teachers across conditions. Three measures of child language and literacy growth differed significantly, favoring the comprehensive treatment model, but most outcomes did not differ significantly between groups. Practice or Policy: Implications of these mixed findings and future research directions are discussed.     

Differential inhibition and stimulus generalization cannot account for value transfer in simultaneous discrimination learning by pigeons: Reply to Aitken

Aitken (1999) argues that, in a simultaneous discrimination, reports of the transfer of value from the positive to the negative stimulus can be more readily explained in terms of an artifact produced by the procedure in which differential inhibition accrues to the negative test stimuli during training, together with stimulus generalization (similarity between the positive and negative stimuli). We argue that (1) there is little evidence for differential inhibition, and it often occurs in the wrong direction; (2) value transfer can be demonstrated when differential value is established to the positive stimuli afterdiscrimination training, when differential inhibition is not likely to be a factor; and (3) on both logical and empirical grounds, stimulus similarity does not provide an adequate account of the transfer of value from the positive to the negative stimulus (i.e., the strongest evidence for value transfer occurs when there is least stimulus similarity). We propose that value transfer occurs whenever there is relatively little experience with the negative stimuli. However, when there is extended experience with the negative stimuli, contrast will be found.     

Portraits of Partnership: The Hopes and Dreams Project

This article describes an innovative practice in family involvement developed by one early care and education center engaged in professional development. The Hopes and Dreams Project documented family involvement in children’s lives and education through the pairing of pictures and narratives about their lives, histories, priorities, goals, and responsibilities with the school community. Narrative inquiry was a powerful method for increasing understanding of complexity of family involvement. Findings showed that families’ priorities in forming partnerships included the importance in belonging to the community, being involved in their children’s lives and education, experiencing diversity, and experiences in childhood for children’s futures. This research supports the importance of redefining family partnerships in early care and education in a manner that is inclusive of family values and priorities. The implications are that early care and education providers have an important role in developing and defining involvement practices that empower families and educate professionals.     

Preschool teachers’ literal and inferential questions and children's responses during whole-class shared reading

This study examined the extent to which preschool teachers used literal and inferential questions during classroom-based shared reading. Specific foci included (a) investigating the association among the level of literal or inferential language in the text, teachers’ text-related questions, and children's responses using sequential analysis, and (b) examining the relation between teachers’ inferential questioning and children's vocabulary outcomes. Participants included 25 preschool teachers and 159 four-year-old children. Teachers videotaped their whole-class shared reading of an informational narrative text. Teachers and children's extratextual talk was analyzed and children completed standardized vocabulary assessments in fall and spring of the academic year. When reading this informational narrative text, teachers posed, on average, slightly more inferential questions than literal questions. Significant sequential associations were observed between the level of teachers’ questions and child responses, with inferential questions consistently eliciting inferential child responses. Few characteristics of teachers’ questions were associated with children's vocabulary outcomes. Results suggest that preschool teachers can use inferential questioning to encourage children to participate in conversation at complex, inferential levels; informational texts appear to provide a successful context for this inferential discourse. Implications for teachers and allied professionals are discussed.     

Teacher ownership versus scaling up system-wide educational change: the case of Activity Based Learning in South India

A significant challenge for large-scale system-wide educational change is reconciling the importance of teacher ownership with the work of scaling up successful innovations. This article explores this dilemma in the context of a remarkable statewide transition to Activity Based Learning (ABL) in the government schools of Tamil Nadu, India. ABL, a pedagogical approach grounded in child-centered philosophies of learning, was developed by classroom teachers and educational leaders seeking to reach children disengaged from school. Advanced by reformers who respected teachers and understood the importance of teacher ownership in educational change efforts, ABL reached every primary-level government school in the state through a rapid scale-up. Drawing primarily on interviews with teachers, reform leaders, and other state-level officials, we explore the roles and forms of participation made available to teachers at different stages of the reform initiative. We also discuss how leaders built responsiveness to teacher feedback into each stage of scaling. We argue that the case of ABL in Tamil Nadu illustrates a powerful rethinking of system-level change, one that promotes teacher ownership through a movement-like approach in which leaders build egalitarian partnerships with classroom teachers and invite them into the educational change process, even through rapid and extensive scaling.