Professional Conversation Research Articles

New Voices: A New Teacher’s Guide to Professional Development

“New Voices” raises questions, offers insights, and provides a forum for novice teachers to engage in the professional conversation surrounding the teaching of English.

Professional Development Schools and Critical Friends Groups: Supporting Student, Novice and Teacher Learning

Recently developed Professional Development School standards underscore the importance of professional learning community, inquiry, shared decision-making and a focus on student learning. These standards closely mirror the goals of Critical Friends Groups, a significant movement in education to improve student achievement through teacher collaboration and inquiry. This paper examines the experiences of a teacher candidate, mentor teacher, and university teacher educator when school and university partners at an elementary Professional Development School implemented Critical Friends Groups. Critical Friends Groups helped novices, experienced teachers, and teacher educators to examine teacher and student work by engaging in inquiry-oriented, practice-based, self-disclosing professional conversation.

New Voices: Blind Mice and a Motive--Studying Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap

“New Voices” raises questions, offers insights, and provides a forum for novice teachers to engage in the professional conversation surrounding the teaching of English.

New Voices: Goldilocks and the Three Schools

“New Voices”; raises questions, offers insights, and provides a forum for novice teachers to engage in the professional conversation surrounding the teaching of English.

New Voices:Students Are Ready for Democracy–If the Teachers Can Handle It

“New Voices” raises questions, offers insights, and provides a forum for novice teachers to engage in the professional conversation surrounding the teaching of English.

New Voices: Teaching People

“New Voices” raises questions, offers insights, and provides a forum for novice teachers to engage in the professional conversation surrounding the teaching of English.

New Voices: Teaching Subversively

“New Voices” raises questions, offers insights, and provides a forum for novice teachers to engage in the professional conversation surrounding the teaching of English.

New Voices: Teaching IS Revision

“New Voices” raises questions, offers insights, and provides a forum for novice teachers to engage in the professional conversation surrounding the teaching of English.

Building sustainable futures: emerging understandings of the significant contribution of the professional learning community

This article draws on the experiences of a range of Australian schools engaging with a teacher-centred process of whole-school renewal known as IDEAS (Innovative Designs for Enhancing Achievement in Schools). IDEAS enhances the professional capacity of teachers to improve school outcomes such as student learning, relationships with the community, and the coherence of school operation. The article explores how through their engagement with IDEAS, teacher leaders emerge from the professional learning community of the school. After outlining the essential elements of IDEAS, the article explores: how teacher leaders can work collaboratively with administrators to create a contextualized pedagogical framework that transforms their practice; the key concepts of parallel leadership; alignment; and professional conversation. Working with IDEAS, schools create their own futures, supported by their particular pedagogical framework and ways of working. Examples are drawn from particular schools to illustrate the diversity of their experiences and of their learning.

New Voices: Creating Connections: Helping Students “Discover” Their Schools

New Voices raises questions, offers insights, and provides a forum for novice teachers to engage in the professional conversation surrounding the teaching of English.

New Voices: Reading Successfully? Just What Does Success Mean, Anyway?

“New Voices” raises questions, offers insights, and provides a forum for novice teachers to engage in the professional conversation surrounding the teaching of English.

The science of conversation: Training in dialogue for NNS in engineering

A survey of 1000 undergraduate engineering students clearly revealed students' desire for two types of training in oral communication: training in presentation skills and in the skills of professional conversation. This article briefly describes the survey's design and results, and identifies the lack of conversational training for nonnative English speakers (NNS) as a previously unnoticed weakness in our curriculum. It traces curricular development in conversational training initiated in response to survey results, describes specific challenges to NNS posed by dialogue, and suggests exercises that can help NNS engineering students to improve their fluency and confidence in English conversation.

In Search of Psychology's Philosophical Center

Howard Gardner (1994) observed that “nearly every field begins as philosophy; and psychology continues to foreground its philosophical origins more faithfully than any other discipline” (p. 182). By foreground, no doubt Gardner meant that psychology readily acknowledges and recognizes the prominent role that philosophy played in its creation and development. Philosophy is the parent of psychology. And what a child philosophy begat. Just the other day, my students and I were discussing how amazing it is that an academic discipline of such a tender age should account for the greatest number of academic majors in most universities. Psychology departments are infested with eager suitors, most of whom are unlikely ever to take a philosophy course as part of their program. They are also unlikely to be made aware of philosophy’s role in the creation of their discipline. Even in most History of Psychology classes, the philosophical roots are likely dealt with early on and with alacrity so that ample time can be made for the rise of psychodynamic and behaviorist theories, the challenge of the Third Force, and the recent onslaught of the cognitive revolution. I do not find it surprising at all that, after tracing the genesis of educational psychology as outlined in the discipline’s texts, Murphy’s (2003) students came to the common understanding that the discipline was born out of behaviorism. I would be shocked if they had not come to that conclusion. This divorce between philosophy and psychology (these days one can divorce one’s parent) seems to me to be afflicting not only the preparation of our future scholars but also the professional conversation among the field’s practitioners. Philosophically oriented discussions in and about educational psychology research or theory are largely absent from our major and mainstream journals. Even at conferences, philosophical discourse seems very much the exception and rather prominently absent from the vast number of symposia, paper sessions, posters, and roundtables. Psychology, and in this issue we are concerned with educational psychology, may readily acknowledge and recognize its parentage, but in most universities, the child has long left home and seldom calls her mother. How appropriate that Alexander (2003), who suggested in her Division 15 presidential address that psychology had lost touch with its roots, should entitle her wonderful introduction to this issue, “Coming Home.” When psychological research and theory fail to be undergirded by philosophical understandings, the costs can be high. Philosophical understandings form the paradigmatic world views and foundational tenets that are at the very core of psychological formulating and theorizing. Such understandings form the beliefs and the set of agreements shared by researchers and theorists regarding how the problems within their discipline are to be understood and solved, as well as the methodological practices that will be undertaken to solve them (Kuhn, 1970). Without such foundational understandings, the process of deriving meaning becomes a frustrating enterprise, often serving to distort the very meaning sought. Philosophical understandings form our very vision of reality. Scientific disciplines that distance themselves from their philosophical underpinnings do so at their peril. Kulikowich and DeFranco (2003) are eloquent in describing the tension between our focus on “fallible experience” versus “absolute truth,” and they show how educational psychology can be informed by the types of debates that have led to the development of the science of mathematics. Woods (2003) seeks the “particular go” of truth in educational research and practice and like Murphy (2003) frames this particular go within the promulgation of pragmatic thought and practice of Peirce and Royce. Rosiek (2003) calls for a more methodologically diverse educational psychology grounded in a qualitative experimentalism inspired by Dewey’s educational philosophy. What each author has in common is the call for a renewed conversation between philosophy and psychology, a conversation aimed at resolving what Bruner (1996) suggested has minimized the perceived relevance of psychological theorizing, promulgating, and professing. At the heart of the matter is their concern that, without such a dialogue, educational psychologists face the difficult task of convincing their constituencies that their theories, constructs, and research findings are both meaningful and relevant. EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGIST, 38(3), 177–181 Copyright © 2003, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Professional Conversation and Teacher Learning

Professional Conversation and Teacher Learning

Subject benchmarking and the assessment of student learning

This paper analyses the performance criteria and learning objectives contained in the first 22 QAA subject benchmark statements to be published and considers the implications for assessment. There is much variation in the amount of detail in the statements and there are also implicit performance criteria in the intended learning outcomes listed at the beginning of each. Statements are broad in character so their relationship with standards is loosely‐coupled and open to interpretation. It is argued that attempts to achieve a high degree of precision in specification are likely to prove counter‐productive. There is evidence of some lack of coherence within the benchmark statements and between the statements and the more recently published Level H descriptor in the National Qualifications Framework. Further, the relationship between assessment practice and the statements appears to be problematic. The value of benchmarking statements as an aid to professional conversation about standards would be greatly enhanced if subject communities, perhaps facilitated by Learning and Teaching Support Network subject centres and subject associations, can elaborate for themselves the meanings of words used in the statements of learning outcomes and performance criteria. This elaboration would be aided by the appraisal of exemplars of outcomes at various levels of performance.

Balfour, Garstang and de Beer: The First Century of Evolutionary Embryology

Evolution has been integrated with embryology during two great periods: the latter half of the 19th C as evolutionary morphology/embryology, and the latter third of the 20th C as evolutionary developmental biology. My mandate was to use the contributions of three embryologists/morphologists: Francis (Frank) Balfour (1851–1882), Walter Garstang (1868–1949) and Gavin de Beer (1899–1972) to discuss the foundations of evolutionary embryology in the UK from 1870 (when “every aspiring zoologist was an embryologist, and the one topic of professional conversation was evolution,” Bateson, 1922, p. 56), through the 1920s (“ontogeny does not recapitulate phylogeny, it creates it,” Garstang, 1922, p. 81) to the 1970s (“homology of phenotypes does not imply similarity in genotypes,” de Beer, 1971, p. 15). Evolutionary embryology was driven by a comparative embryological approach that sought homology of adult structures in germ layers and ancestry in embryos, and sought to differentiate larval adaptations from retained ancestral characters. An initial emphasis on a phylogenetic mechanism (recapitulation) slowly gave way to more mechanistic approaches that included heterochrony and the integration of embryology with physiological genetics. Germ layers, homology, larval evolution, larval origins of the vertebrates, paedomorphosis and heterochrony underpinned the origins of evolutionary embryology, and so I discuss each of these topics.

Balfour, Garstang and de Beer: The First Century of Evolutionary Embryology1

Evolution has been integrated with embryology during two great periods: the latter half of the 19th C as evolutionary morphology/embryology, and the latter third of the 20th C as evolutionary developmental biology. My mandate was to use the contributions of three embryologists/morphologists: Francis (Frank) Balfour (1851–1882), Walter Garstang (1868–1949) and Gavin de Beer (1899–1972) to discuss the foundations of evolutionary embryology in the UK from 1870 (when “every aspiring zoologist was an embryologist, and the one topic of professional conversation was evolution,” Bateson, 1922, p. 56), through the 1920s (“ontogeny does not recapitulate phylogeny, it creates it,” Garstang, 1922, p. 81) to the 1970s (“homology of phenotypes does not imply similarity in genotypes,” de Beer, 1971, p. 15). Evolutionary embryology was driven by a comparative embryological approach that sought homology of adult structures in germ layers and ancestry in embryos, and sought to differentiate larval adaptations from retained ancestral characters. An initial emphasis on a phylogenetic mechanism (recapitulation) slowly gave way to more mechanistic approaches that included heterochrony and the integration of embryology with physiological genetics. Germ layers, homology, larval evolution, larval origins of the vertebrates, paedomorphosis and heterochrony underpinned the origins of evolutionary embryology, and so I discuss each of these topics.

Lessons of Inscription: Tutor Training and the "Professional Conversation"

Lessons of Inscription: Tutor Training and the "Professional Conversation"

<Whole Language> as Signifier: Considering the Semantic Field of School Literacy

This article examines the use of the term <whole language> within the educational and national media and by the newspaper and interested parties in 1 college town. Data collected include articles in literacy journals; a search of 5 daily newspapers in the US and other periodicals and TV news; a search of 1 local newspaper; and interviews with 70 teachers, administrators, university faculty, and “concerned citizens” in a mid-sized city in the Southwestern us with a major public university. Using the “discourse-centered approach to culture” proposed by Sherzer (1987) as a revision of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, our interpretive analysis of the data argues that the disputes surrounding the term <whole language> have as much to do with cultural, political, and economic issues confronting the US, and in particular the Southwest, as they do with any philosophical or professional conversation about the “best way” to teach children to read. The implication is that if literacy research is to retain both its legitimacy and its relevance within discussions about literacy, researchers need to become more open about their own cultural and political biases in the stands they take, and more aware of how those positions might be perceived and used by others and by the national media.

Collegial Discourse: Professional Conversation Among Peers.Allen D. GrimshawWhat's Going On Here? Complementary Studies of Professional Talk. Vol. 2, Multiple Analysis Project.Allen D. Grimshaw

<i>Collegial Discourse: Professional Conversation Among Peers.</i>Allen D. Grimshaw<i>What's Going On Here? Complementary Studies of Professional Talk. Vol. 2, Multiple Analysis Project.</i>Allen D. Grimshaw