Current Issues in Education (E-Journal, Arizona State University)
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The Desired Cooperator: Preservice Preferences and Role Confusion During the Teaching Practicum
Get PDFTeacher educators lament the lack of innovation in new teacher practice, and often attribute it to cooperating teachers role confusion. Few consider the contributions of student teachers. This study examined possible origins of practicum role confusion among preservice candidates who described desirable qualities of a cooperating teacher and preferred type of pedagogical interaction. Preservice preferences for pedagogical interaction were found to be a potential source of confusion. Important differences were found based on intended certification level. Preservice teachers most desired a cooperator who possesses professional knowledge about teaching, and they anticipated some imitation, more guidance, but less scaffolded interaction. Discussion focuses on the utility of using anticipated interaction as a frame for explicitly examining conflicting perceptions of roles
Resistance to Technological Change in Academia
Get PDFInitiating changes in technology, promoting utilization, and managing resistance by faculty may be among the most pressing challenges for academic leadership. Change that involves new technology is an ideal example of the systemic nature of organizational change because it includes infrastructure, expert knowledge, training, long-term vision, cost-benefit equations, and sufficient utilization to sustain the change. The literature on organizational change supports this premise that is exemplified in this article by anecdotal evidence from two universities. The first example describes the challenges in promoting utilization of Internet2 technology and the second describes the introduction of a project involving Voice-over Internet Protocol
Mentoring Experiences of Women in Graduate Education: Factors that Matter
Get PDFThis exploratory study focused on the mentoring experiences of women faculty members and graduate students within a counseling psychology graduate program. Results from semi-structured interviews and focus groups identified the womens contextual mentoring experiences in higher education and highlighted several factors that contribute to mentorship experiences unique to women in graduate higher education. Findings demonstrate the importance of relational mentoring relationships and investment by mentors. Implications for building upon mentoring theories for women and future research are discussed
The Pedagogy of African American Parents: Learning from Educational Excellence in the African American Community
Get PDFThis qualitative study of how parents teach their children to excel academically in the African American community seeks to establish the validity of the pedagogical practices of working class African American families by investigating the educational leadership of two families on Chicago's south side. The study acknowledges the significance of non school factors (Schubert, 1986) that contribute to academic success. Parent pedagogical strategies are consistent with research findings on the sponsored independence parent involvement style reported by Clark, (1983). Findings demonstrate the significance of intergenerational educational practices, expectations, experiential motivation, parent advocacy, rituals and other factors
The Continuing Trouble with Collaboration: Teachers Talk
Get PDFThe institutionalization of collaborative working environments is widely considered to be critical to the creation and maintenance of schools as professional learning communities. Prevailing thought suggests that improved student performance may be fully realized only when teachers routinely function as teams and abandon their traditional norms of isolationism and individualism. This interpretive study involving teachers in 45 North Louisiana schools suggests that while some schools and school districts are indeed characterized by elements of the `learning community' others remain largely mired in customary practices that are counterproductive to realizing the newer collaborative standards. Participating teachers report that, despite the rhetoric, major impediments to joint professional work remain and they make suggestions for better meeting the continuing collaborative challenge
Ethos and Pedagogical Communication: Suggestions for Enhancing Credibility in the Classroom
Get PDFWhether at the conscious or unconscious level, a student's perception of the teacher's ethos, or speaker's character, has an important impact on how he or she will react to the teacher and how effective the teacher will be in the classroom. Erosion of a teacher's ethos can quickly spell disaster in the classroom.This article looks at the critical relationship between ethos and pedagogical communication. The analysis will explore the definition of ethos, its various dimensions, and suggestions for improving it in the classroom
Editorial The Evolution of Current Issues in Education: Building Upon a Solid Foundation
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Children's Comprehension and Local-to-Global Recall of Narrative and Expository Texts
Get PDFWe examined underlying mechanisms for comprehension differences across expository and narrative text while controlling for factors confounded in the extant literature. Fourth grade students (n=32) read both an expository and a narrative text, and completed both a local comprehension assessment, and a global retelling assessment for each text. Children recalled more information from narrative than expository texts in the global processing task, but there was no difference in the local processing task. Our findings are consistent with psycholinguistic studies on the formation of mental models from text, and suggest that narrative structure may facilitate memory for global information even when local comprehension of exposition and narrative is equivalent
Using Student Test Scores to Award Merit Pay: A Look at the 2012 Pay-for-Performance Program for Idaho Schools
Get PDFIn the fall of 2012, Idaho implemented a plan to award bonus pay to schools whose students demonstrated academic growth based on the Betebenner (2008) method. This study examined the relationship of the amount of bonus paid to a school, the percentage of students from low income families associated with a school, and the location of the school (urban, suburban, town, or rural). Using hierarchical set regression, a statistically significant negative relationship was found between the percentage of students eligible for subsidized meals and per pupil school bonus pay. When school location was added as a predictor, rural school location emerged as a positive predictor of the amount of per pupil bonus money received by a school. The percentage of students eligible for subsidized meals also predicted whether a school received any bonus money.
Elaborating a Change Process Model for Elementary Mathematics Teachers Beliefs and Practices
Get PDFThis report focuses on the processes of change in beliefs and practices experienced by practicing elementary school teachers during a sixteen-session course using two of the modules from the Developing Mathematical Ideas (DMI) materials. We identify a collection of six metaphors for knowing, learning, and teaching mathematics to succinctly describe and categorize teachers beliefs. We present three case studies representing a continuum of change in beliefs observed among the participants of the DMI course. We relate this continuum both to the beliefs teachers brought to the course and to their degree of engagement in various components of a change process model. Using this model of change, we analyze the ways in which teachers expressed interest in change, problematized their beliefs, experimented with possible solutions, and reflected on experimental results leading to changes in beliefs and practices. The results of our analysis indicate that variations in change among participants can be explained by variations in their levels of engagement in particular elements of the change model by the learning activities of the DMI course