School-based Educators Research Articles

Assessing the Practicum in teacher education – Do we want candidates and mentors to agree?

One of the most important components of teacher education is the practical part, the Practicum, and assessment of the candidates’ performance plays a major part in forming the future generation of teachers. Little is known about the extent of agreement between the two main actors in the Practicum, the candidates and the school-based teacher educators. The aim of this paper is to add information about a rather blurred area of assessment in teacher education. The findings indicate there is a considerably extent of disagreement about assessment in the Practicum between the mentors and the candidates. It is suggested that instead of seeing the disagreements merely as obstacles to valid assessment, they can be exploited to initiate professional learning for the candidates.

Exploring alternative pedagogical terrain: Teaching and learning in art museums

For school-based education, museums provide important learning opportunities that potentially bridge the gap between the classroom and the world beyond, enabling education to fulfil its aim of preparing students for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of adult life. However, little research has specifically addressed the pedagogical demands and challenges of school-based teaching and learning in the specific context of art museums. This paper reports on a doctoral study that engaged the previously largely unrepresented voices of school-based educators and student audiences, in an investigation of interactions between schools and museums, with a specific focus on art educators and art museums. A pedagogical model is proposed that addresses the structural characteristics of art museum contexts while also exploring how approaches to teaching and learning can engage individual subjectivities, to make the invisible determinants of action visible, and to activate the possibilities of agency. The organising structure of the model extends the pedagogical repertoire of school-based educators, equipping them with approaches that allow for the development of purposeful and integrated educational experiences. In the provision of theoretical positions and strategies for inter-and intra-field interactions, the model ultimately identifies art museums as distinctive sites for transformative and inclusive school-based pedagogies that potentially provide a foundation for future cultural practice.

Empowering school- and university-based teacher educators as assessors: A school – university cooperation

The focus of this paper is to present a model for empowering all parties in the Practicum triad, school-based and university-based teacher educators, as well as student teachers, in assessment. Assessment of the Practicum, which shares a number of commonalities with Work-Based Learning, plays a crucial role in the certification of new teachers. However, we know little about the quality of the assessment competence of the assessors. The assessment process is complex, and the partners involved need to engage in a dialogue about what and how to carry out the assessment. The current model is introduced as part of a new framework for student teachers' Practicum within a school-university partnership at a Norwegian university to guide such a dialogue.

Mentor Teachers’ Work with Prospective Teachers in a Newly Formed Professional Development School: Two Illustrations

Background/Content Since a large gap exists between the rhetoric of reform-minded teacher education and what actually transpires in student teachers’ field experiences, this study sought to fill a gap in current scholarship which has yet to document how mentor teachers, conceptualized as school-based teacher educators, shape and conduct their own work with student teachers assuming the role of full-year undergraduate interns. Focus of Study The purpose of this study was to explore how two successful mentor teachers enact their work with interns in a newly created inquiry-oriented professional development school. Research Design This investigation uses case study methodology informed by both ethnographic and phenomenological perspectives. Using these lenses and data collected over an eighteen-month period, the stories of two mentor teachers are captured and analyzed. Conclusions Three themes emerged within each case that characterized the unique work of each mentor. The three themes that shape the work of the first mentor offer insight into a conceptual illustration represented by a gardening metaphor. The three themes of the second case suggest a mentor as co-inquirer's approach to mentoring. A look across the cases augments our understanding of mentoring prospective teachers.

It's good to talk: Adolescent perspectives of an informal, peer-led intervention to reduce smoking

Although peer education has enjoyed considerable popularity as a health promotion approach with young people, there is mixed evidence about its effectiveness. Furthermore, accounts of what young people actually do as peer educators are scarce, especially in informal settings. In this paper, we examine the activities of the young people recruited as ‘peer supporters’ for A Stop Smoking in Schools Trial (ASSIST) which involved 10,730 students at baseline in 59 secondary schools in south-east Wales and the west of England. Influential Year 8 students, nominated by their peers, were trained to intervene informally to reduce smoking levels in their year group. The ASSIST peer nomination procedure was successful in recruiting and retaining peer supporters of both genders with a wide range of abilities. Outcome data at 1-year follow-up indicate that the risk of students who were occasional or experimental smokers at baseline going on to report weekly smoking at 1-year follow-up was 18.2% lower in intervention schools. This promising result was supported by analysis of salivary cotinine. Qualitative data from the process evaluation indicate that the majority of peer supporters adopted a pragmatic approach, concentrating their attentions on friends and peers whom they felt could be persuaded not to take up smoking, rather than those they considered to be already ‘addicted’ or who were members of smoking cliques. ASSIST demonstrated that a variety of school-based peer educators, who are asked to work informally rather than under the supervision of teaching staff, will engage with the task they have been asked to undertake and can be effective in diffusing health-promotion messages. Given the serious concerns about young people's smoking behaviour, we argue that this approach is worth pursuing and could be adapted for other health promotion messages.

Developing Joint Accountability in University-School Teacher Education Partnerships

This paper reports on a professional development intervention coupled with an empirical research study focused on a mentor teacher study group. An unanticipated outcome of the study group was an evident development in the sense of accountability displayed by participants toward the work of teacher education in their school. In effect, teachers' identities were transformed from relatively passive cooperating teachers, following the direction of teacher education program guidelines and procedures, to active school-based teacher educators, consciously developing repertoires of mentoring practice, and taking initiative to remake the culture of their school as a context for learning to teach. The paper proposes a theoretical analysis to explain the evolution of accountability among study group members, examines five different examples of how such accountability was manifested, and suggests implications for teacher education programs.

The Role of Teachers and Other Educators in the Prevention of Eating Disorders and Child Obesity: What Are the Issues?

This paper examines the important contribution that teachers and other educators (including health educators, school nurses, school counselors, school psychologists, and sports coaches) have to offer in the prevention of eating disorders and child obesity. Our paper notes the important contribution of school educators whilst warning of the current need to specifically examine how teachers and school personnel may be best trained and prepared for such a preventive role, whether they currently feel willing and able to undertake such a role, and whether some groups of teachers may be personally susceptible to body image and eating problems. It is vital to understand the knowledge, behaviors, attitudes, and expectations of educators implementing prevention programs in order to ensure that they are personally and professionally capable of carrying out prevention initiatives in schools. Individuals involved in food and exercise-related careers have been identified as being at environmental and situational risk for body image and eating problems, and it may be possible that they chose their career path due to their own personal experience with eating disorders or weight issues. In such cases, specific training or assistance may be required in order to enable the educators to conduct effective preventive activities. Discussion focuses on what needs to be done in order to enable teachers and other school-based educators to perform most effectively in the implementation of school based eating disorder and child obesity prevention programs.

Making use of theories about literacy and justice: teachers re-searching practice

This article considers teachers’ work as they grapple with theories in practice in the everyday worlds of their classroom. It argues that Bourdieu’s theory of practice and the concept of habitus may be useful in moving past theory/practice dichotomies. After establishing the historical context for teacher research in South Australia, the work of two school-based literacy educators with an overt social justice standpoint is explored. The complexity of teachers’ intellectual work and identity formation over time is outlined and implications for teacher education are discussed.

Being and becoming a mentor: school-based teacher educators and teacher educator identity

Drawing on Gee's (Social linguistics and literacies: ideology in discourses, RoutledgeFalmer, New York, 1996) categories of “ways” to view identity, a case study is constructed of a secondary school teacher's struggle to move beyond her identity as a teacher to assume a mentor's identity in her year-long work with two English-teaching interns. Data of various kinds were gathered: from the interns, weekly e-mails and a paired peer interview, and from the teacher, interview, a peer interview, a mentoring log, and transcripts of a mentoring seminar. Based on these data, the author argues for the importance of attending to identity in teacher education and mentoring and describes conditions that would facilitate mentor identity formation.

Craft Knowledge: The Road to Transforming Schools

Teachers take pride in their autonomy, but there is a downside to the tradition of working independently. If the teaching profession is to advance, Ms. Burney suggests, practitioners will need to share their individual knowledge with one another, and districts will need to create the conditions that make this possible. IN THE ONGOING effort to transform education, policy makers and educators are increasingly looking to for solutions to the problems of The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, as a number of commentators have noted, contains more than 100 references to scientifically or research-based practices. The recognition that knowledge is essential to transform educational practice is heartening. Yet for this transformation to occur, we need to rethink what we mean by research and practice. The traditional model, based on separate and distinct and practice communities, with the former possessing knowledge that will inform the latter, is no longer valid. We need to think of the road between and practice as a two-way street, where both are valid sources of knowledge about teaching. To be sure, teachers need to study and conduct on learning and cognition and to incorporate up-to-date findings of into their At the same time, they can also gain important knowledge about teaching through their own and one another's experience. Researchers, for their part, need to carefully examine the knowledge that teachers and school leaders have acquired. Only by recognizing and using both sources of knowledge can educators truly transform our schools and turn teaching into a true profession. Consider the way other professions operate. Medical doctors command enormous respect because of their knowledge and skill, and their expertise gives them a voice in health care policy. In everything they do, they draw upon a vast and substantive body of knowledge. But this knowledge does not come solely from research, at least the published in journals. It also comes from doctors' training, their practice of medicine, and their communication with colleagues -- what we might call their craft knowledge.1 Craft knowledge, like the findings gleaned from formal studies, is collected, codified, legitimated, and shared by professional bodies. Each source of knowledge is equally important -- each feeds the others, expands the body of medical knowledge, and holds the entire profession to very high standards. The education profession functions differently. To be sure, educational has produced a rich body of knowledge, but it is shared only haphazardly among teachers. And knowledge is largely hidden because there are no institutional arrangements for codifying, legitimating, and sharing it. Teachers have little sense of belonging to a professional community and only a weak voice in policy arenas because they do not, as a body, share an authoritative, proven understanding of the work they are charged to do. Educators, therefore, are more vulnerable to politics than doctors. Although politicians would never tell a doctor to treat an inflamed appendix with aspirin, they insist time and again that educators cure deeply ailing schools with bandages. Underlying causes of school failure are seldom even mentioned, because neither external stakeholders nor school-based educators know how to identify or treat these causes. If policy makers really want to cure our schools, instead of simply bandaging them where they bleed, they will need to help practitioners and researchers build a foundation of professional knowledge that incorporates researchers' findings and draws from what teachers already know and what they can learn from one another. Teachers, like doctors, already possess a great deal of knowledge -- a mixture of expertise, theories, propositions, and tacit knowledge applied in the daily conduct of their …

Early Literacy Policy: National and Local Instantiations

This paper explores the political, social, and cultural contexts of current early literacy federal policies in the United States. Building upon existing critiques of the policy and its epistemological stances, this paper first analyses the planning and discussion surrounding the introduction of the policy to state leaders and also how it is first discussed and planned for in one local context. The paper poses questions of how language and literacy are being defined and for whom, and explores these discussions in both federal and local uptake in the implementation process. A Foucaultian analysis is used to document and explore the beginnings of the implementation of the policy. By examining the techniques of power, knowledge, and surveillance exacted through the policy, the paper also sheds light on how these explicit and sub-textual messages are mediated by school-based educators. The paper closes by averring that language and literacy policies would do best to recognise and work within the complex learning settings of schools and classrooms.

Black parental involvement in education

The South African Schools Act of 1996 (SASA) provides formal power in education to parents as well as communities. SASA creates the expectation for parents to be meaningful partners in school governance. It envisages a system where school-based educators would collaborate with the parents to ensure quality education, including curriculum matters such as outcomes-based education (OBE). An ethnographic study was conducted in historically disadvantaged black secondary schools. The study focused on the effects of black parental involvement on the success of their children. For a period of twelve months spread over two years (2002/2003), 24 parents with learners in eight different historically disadvantaged secondary schools (HDSS) were investigated. The findings of the study revealed that the black parents' role is crucial in the enhancement of learner success. Parents who played little or no role in their children's homework and study programmes contributed to the poor performance of their children in the classroom. Also, the extremely limited success thus far in the implementation of OBE in historically black communities was significantly due to the absence of co-operation between the school and the home. This study affirms the view that community input is crucial in the development of curriculum in schools. Without proactive black community involvement, HDSS are less likely to succeed in their efforts to improve education. South African Journal of Education Vol.24(4) 2004: 301-307

Speaking of Sustainable Development and Values... A Response to Alistair Chadwick's Viewpoint Responding to Destructive Interpersonal Interactions:A way forward for school-based environmental educators

It may be considered unfair to respond to a paper from the point of view of another discipline, especially if central issues or assumptions in that article are discussed critically. In this paper, comments are made on Alistair Chadwick’s paper from the point of view of philosophy and ethics, but these are offered in the spirit of a constructive dialogue across narrowly conceived disciplinary borders. The general theme of these comments also calls for interdisciplinary dialogue: the language that we use in our debates about environmental education, ethics and action. As such, language is a themeabout which every discipline in the social sciences can make a meaningful contribution, and this is what I would like to offer here. In this Viewpoint I will focus on only one issue, namely certain problems that may arise if we accept the language in which Chadwick speaks in his paper about ‘sustainable development’ and ‘values’ respectively. I will raise a number of critical points in this regard, not because there is one and only one appropriate language within which we can discuss our environmental concerns and our (educational) responses to them, but rather because we should be self-consciously aware of the assumptions and implications hidden in the language that we choose to discuss these matters, thus enabling us to disect and evaluate these assumptions and implications with a view to determine to what extent they enhance or undermine our efforts to understand the nature and extent of the environmental challenges that we are faced with.

Restructuring and Reculturing: Practicum supervision as professional development for teachers

This paper reports a small case study in which selected experienced co-operating teachers were appointed as school-based teacher educators (SBTE) undertaking a supervisory/ mentoring role for the 3-week period of the first practicum for students in a one-year Graduate Diploma of Education-Secondary (GDE) course. The study identifies any benefits that accrue as a result of changes to the traditional triadic arrangement and any changes in perception about the various roles of participants. The findings illuminate the opportunities for a more collaborative practicum model that has the potential to benefit all participants.

Conceptions of school-based teacher educators concerning ongoing teacher education

In this work we describe and analyze the conceptions of 28 teacher educators on the principles, contents, methods, and evaluation of ongoing teacher education, taking the model of teacher-researcher as the theoretical referent. The data obtained with an Inventory of Beliefs on Teacher Education were submitted to classical statistical and to multifactorial analyses. The statistical analysis showed that most of the subjects agree that ongoing teacher education has to be developed around problems of professional practice and in contexts of curricular innovation, and disagree with a technical model of this education developed around academic disciplines. The multifactorial analysis identified four factors which together account for more than 50% of the variance, and which generally reaffirm these tendencies.

Conceptualising Intercultural Contact in the Supervision of Indigenous Student Teachers

James Cook University is the site of an off-campus, community-based program of teacher education for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples living in remote parts of Queensland, Australia. Known as the Remote Area Teacher Education Program (RATEP) it has had considerable success, but some unsolved problems persist. Field components of the program include a practicum in the second last year in urban schools. This study set out to explore the opportunities and challenges faced by the RATEP Indigenous students and by their school-based teacher educators during the course of these practica sessions in urban schools. Utilising a framework that conceptualises intercultural contact as boundaries rather than borders, differences and similarities between and within participants' experiences of the intercultural aspects of the practicum were identified. The research has illuminated many areas for action, which have already led to changing practices in the RATEP program. In addition, this research has indicated a need for much more knowledge and understanding about intercultural supervision of student teachers from a minority group.

Collaboration and the Negotiation of Power

This paper deals with the study of the outcomes and the degree of collaboration achieved in a project involving a planning group of university- and school-based participants and education students. The group was formed to consider how the practicum component of a course leading to a Graduate Diploma in Education might be improved through collaboration between university- and school-based educators. The literature on collaboration and on cultural politics comprises the conceptual framework for the analysis of the data collected. Cultural politics suggests that collaboration involves a struggle over meanings in the interest of particular groups. Based on an analysis of the events in the project, the impact of institutional arrangements and the perceptions of the participants, implications are drawn for what needs to be done to further develop collaborative work between educational institutions. It is suggested that collaboration may be the discourse for the transformation of institutional cultures and subjectivities in universities and schools, in order to attain the benefits of working together which are unavailable through traditional teacher education practices and structures.

Standards‐Based Scoring and Traditional Grading Practices

The forward and preface to this 224-page paperback warn the reader that the will not put you at ease (p. ix) as the focus is upon the intractable (p. xiii) of grading and reporting student achievement. Editors Trumbull and Farr observe that and district staffs as well as parents are beginning to wake up to the contradictions between standards-based scoring and traditional grading (p. xix). The editors suggest that it is time to revisit the idea that grading practices are and always will be a problem in theory and practice. Through Trumbull and Farr's reflection on current grading practices, and the collected essays of ten other educators (Bisesi, Busick, Carr, Casanova, Farr, Greene, Haydel, Langdon, Stiggins, and Waters), readers are presented with a number of practical recommendations for improving the alignment of standards-based education with the practice of grading and reporting student achievement. The audiences for this collection of essays include school district staff responsible for evaluation and testing, school principals and teachers who work to align grading and reporting with the principles of standards-based education, and the faculties who teach measurement courses. NCME members are also challenged to read and review this book as the essays promise to narrow the gap between school-based educators and the so-called assessment experts (p.18)! The book is particularly germane to NCME members as it responds to the Standards for Teacher Competence in Educational Assessment of Students developed as the result of collaborations between the American Federation of Teachers, National Council on Measurement in Education, and the National Education Association (1990). Five of the book's nine essays provide logical answers to questions about the meaning of grades. In addition, rationales are developed for articulating the need for grades, and for describing the type of grading methods commonly used, the methods for converting rubric scores to grades, and the assignment of grades in a standards-based school setting. The first essay presents an excellent review of the history of grading practices and the related technical issues of grading. Four subsequent essays focus on the theory, purpose, and techniques used for reporting grades. Among the highlights of these five essays are the writers' apparent agreement that grades should report achievement alone and that norm-referenced classroom assessment is inappropriate. Two of the book's nine essays are reserved for discussions of the issues of bias and equity in reporting grades. Although each of these essays offers suggestions for

No Satisfaction: “A Case of ‘The Monkey’s Paw,’ ” Top-Down School Reform, and the Conduit

Tom Hatch’s research interests in school reform and theories of action and my research interests in teachers’ narrative knowledge and the shaping effects of context come together in this issue of Curriculum Inquiry. Tom offers an important response to my article and raises key points. I am grateful to him and the editors for the opportunity to continue the discussion. I also am thankful to the T. P. Yaeger educators who carefully read the manuscript and the review, participated in rich conversations about the pieces, and reiterated what they knew and did not know about the statedirected, national reform initiative introduced to their school. This rejoinder is informed not only by my own thinking, but also by the school-based educators’ interpretations of, and responses to, Tom’s comments and by my more extensive experiences of reforming school contexts in the time since the paper was written.In his personal reading of “A Case of ‘The Monkey’s Paw’” piece, Tom Hatch found a story of reform and repetition, the stuff that makes the history of school reform “legendary.” In this reply I will provide a kind of a metalevel narrative analysis where I will further unpack the original research, keeping Tom’s commentary on the T. P. Yaeger reform experience and his questions and wonders sharply in view. In the process, I will weave in my own set of reflective queries arising from Hatch’s interpretation of the article, namely, (1) why the repetition in reform occurs and (2) why the practical/theoretical dissatisfaction with educational reform continues. I begin with the tale (i.e., Fletcher, 1996) passed along in the oral tradition that provided the creative seed for Jacobs’s short story. It offers powerful images that are useful to keep in mind as this metal-level narrative analysis unfolds.

Many-Faceted Rasch Modeling Expert Judgment in Test Development

The purpose of this study was to model expert judgment in test and instrument development using the many-faceted Rasch model. A 150-item value orientation inventory-2 (VOI-2) assessing the value of physical education curriculum goals was developed and evaluated by 128 university educators and 103 school-based physical educators. The experts were asked to rate the consistency of each item to represent one part of the broad curriculum goals using a 5-point rating scale. The many-faceted Rasch model was used to calibrate the rating scores, and 6 facets -- gender, ethnicity, employment type, rater, content area, and item -- were defined. Severity and consistency of the experts' judgments were examined and corrected before being applied to item evaluation. Further, the impact of group membership on expert judgment was examined. Items were then evaluated based on their logit scores and the consistency of their performance. Results suggest that most VOI-2 items were content domain representative and the raters were truly experts. The many-faceted Rasch model demonstrates a psychometrically appropriate technique for applying expert judgment in test development.