Pub Date : 2020-11-28DOI: 10.1177/1365480220974225
Reetta Niemi, Anni Loukomies
An in-service training programme was used as an accelerator that scaffolded teachers in four school units in Lappeenranta, Finland, the aim being to find a shared understanding and shared practices, or ‘praxis’, in terms of promoting student participation. In this study we examine the practices that either supported or prevented participation from the perspective of the teachers. We also examine how the arrangements of the practice architectures – cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political – appear in the teachers’ accounts of student participation. The data consists of 22 diamond-ranking forms made by 86 teachers, and an audio-recorded and videotaped group interview. The teachers in the school units found praxis both in the support of student participation (emphasising the students’ role in school councils and giving them a recognised role in everyday practices) and in the challenges (turning participation into pedagogical practice). The arrangements of the practice architectures were identified in the group interview.
{"title":"‘Should we ask the students’ opinions first?’ Practice architectures of student participation from the perspective of teachers","authors":"Reetta Niemi, Anni Loukomies","doi":"10.1177/1365480220974225","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1365480220974225","url":null,"abstract":"An in-service training programme was used as an accelerator that scaffolded teachers in four school units in Lappeenranta, Finland, the aim being to find a shared understanding and shared practices, or ‘praxis’, in terms of promoting student participation. In this study we examine the practices that either supported or prevented participation from the perspective of the teachers. We also examine how the arrangements of the practice architectures – cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political – appear in the teachers’ accounts of student participation. The data consists of 22 diamond-ranking forms made by 86 teachers, and an audio-recorded and videotaped group interview. The teachers in the school units found praxis both in the support of student participation (emphasising the students’ role in school councils and giving them a recognised role in everyday practices) and in the challenges (turning participation into pedagogical practice). The arrangements of the practice architectures were identified in the group interview.","PeriodicalId":45995,"journal":{"name":"Improving Schools","volume":"24 1","pages":"261 - 276"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2020-11-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1365480220974225","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48649200","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-11-20DOI: 10.1177/1365480220973112
Pamela Jacobs, W. Beamish, L. McKay
Limited research is available with a focus on adolescent Autistic girls and their needs during secondary schooling. Consequently, many issues are often not recognised and addressed by educators. The small-scale Australian research reported here explored the experiences of five Autistic girls during their first 2 years of secondary school, with data being gathered via an online survey and semi-structured interviews. Findings are presented from the perspective of the girls themselves and highlight the negative impact of sensory, communication, and social difficulties, as well as the influence of anxiety and executive dysfunction on their learning and academic success. Unique insights into how the girls feel about school and the anxiety they experience there, together with everyday barriers to learning they encounter provide some important messages to schools and teachers.
{"title":"Please listen to us: Adolescent autistic girls speak about learning and academic success","authors":"Pamela Jacobs, W. Beamish, L. McKay","doi":"10.1177/1365480220973112","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1365480220973112","url":null,"abstract":"Limited research is available with a focus on adolescent Autistic girls and their needs during secondary schooling. Consequently, many issues are often not recognised and addressed by educators. The small-scale Australian research reported here explored the experiences of five Autistic girls during their first 2 years of secondary school, with data being gathered via an online survey and semi-structured interviews. Findings are presented from the perspective of the girls themselves and highlight the negative impact of sensory, communication, and social difficulties, as well as the influence of anxiety and executive dysfunction on their learning and academic success. Unique insights into how the girls feel about school and the anxiety they experience there, together with everyday barriers to learning they encounter provide some important messages to schools and teachers.","PeriodicalId":45995,"journal":{"name":"Improving Schools","volume":"24 1","pages":"196 - 209"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2020-11-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1365480220973112","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47303565","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-11-20DOI: 10.1177/1365480220972873
Mette Liljenberg, Ulf Blossing
Organizational building is essential if school leaders are to promote school improvement, but it can be difficult to combine with school leaders’ requirements to satisfy teachers’ personal and relational needs. The the aim of this study is to explore critical aspects when combining organizational building with requirements to satisfy teachers’ personal and relational needs in efforts to strengthen improvement capacity. The paper draws on a 3-year collaborative research project between a research team at a Swedish university and a municipality. It is based on data acquired in 137 interviews with 535 respondents in 28 public school and preschool units. The results highlight the importance of combining organizational building with efforts to improve teachers’ understanding of, motivation to promote, and adaptation to, the goals of the school organization. The significance of the study lies in clearly distinguishing the need to link organizational building and requirements to meet teachers’ personal and relational needs. Continually telling the story of the school and thus enabling teachers to personally connect to the improvement history is suggested as an innovative school leader strategy.
{"title":"Organizational building versus teachers’ personal and relational needs for school improvement","authors":"Mette Liljenberg, Ulf Blossing","doi":"10.1177/1365480220972873","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1365480220972873","url":null,"abstract":"Organizational building is essential if school leaders are to promote school improvement, but it can be difficult to combine with school leaders’ requirements to satisfy teachers’ personal and relational needs. The the aim of this study is to explore critical aspects when combining organizational building with requirements to satisfy teachers’ personal and relational needs in efforts to strengthen improvement capacity. The paper draws on a 3-year collaborative research project between a research team at a Swedish university and a municipality. It is based on data acquired in 137 interviews with 535 respondents in 28 public school and preschool units. The results highlight the importance of combining organizational building with efforts to improve teachers’ understanding of, motivation to promote, and adaptation to, the goals of the school organization. The significance of the study lies in clearly distinguishing the need to link organizational building and requirements to meet teachers’ personal and relational needs. Continually telling the story of the school and thus enabling teachers to personally connect to the improvement history is suggested as an innovative school leader strategy.","PeriodicalId":45995,"journal":{"name":"Improving Schools","volume":"24 1","pages":"5 - 18"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2020-11-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1365480220972873","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45067903","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-11-11DOI: 10.1177/1365480220968744
A. Parfitt
An interpretive narrative inquiry approach is adopted to shed light on the improvement agendas applied in a specific set of coastal schools. The unifying thread between the focal cases is that they had been designated as failures and made notorious through association with their communities’ tainted reputations. These schools feature in a report published by the Future Leaders Trust, which is used as the resource for this paper. The taken for granted deficit discourses implicit in the accounts of how these schools were reformed are relied upon by the school leaders and other stakeholders to justify why they needed to be turned around. These assumptions that come to the fore through analysis, demonstrate that the socioeconomic contexts found in the jaded English coastal communities are not engaged with. Importing approaches that draw on communities’ resistance to relegation could, potentially, build positive discourses that lead to communities reclaiming educational opportunities in such schools, one clear example being that of Countesthorpe in Leicestershire, UK, in the 1970s.
{"title":"Turning around coast-based schools: An interpretive narrative analysis of a report on school reform in English coastal communities","authors":"A. Parfitt","doi":"10.1177/1365480220968744","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1365480220968744","url":null,"abstract":"An interpretive narrative inquiry approach is adopted to shed light on the improvement agendas applied in a specific set of coastal schools. The unifying thread between the focal cases is that they had been designated as failures and made notorious through association with their communities’ tainted reputations. These schools feature in a report published by the Future Leaders Trust, which is used as the resource for this paper. The taken for granted deficit discourses implicit in the accounts of how these schools were reformed are relied upon by the school leaders and other stakeholders to justify why they needed to be turned around. These assumptions that come to the fore through analysis, demonstrate that the socioeconomic contexts found in the jaded English coastal communities are not engaged with. Importing approaches that draw on communities’ resistance to relegation could, potentially, build positive discourses that lead to communities reclaiming educational opportunities in such schools, one clear example being that of Countesthorpe in Leicestershire, UK, in the 1970s.","PeriodicalId":45995,"journal":{"name":"Improving Schools","volume":"24 1","pages":"245 - 260"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2020-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1365480220968744","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47476690","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-11-02DOI: 10.1177/1365480220969296
G. Ayaya
The contribution of community engagement towards shaping leadership development in students is an area that is not well explored in research. A study was conducted to establish the type of leadership skills and values that were acquired by a group of students from an established private school in Johannesburg, South Africa, while they served an underprivileged community. The private school adheres to both Round Square discoveries framework and the International Boys’ School Coalition’s character education and practices the leadership development programs that have been developed by the two organisations. This was a qualitative research study within the constructivist paradigm with a phenomenological approach. Reflection sheets were used to collect data from 120 students. The data was analysed through discourse analysis, where all recurrent terms were coded, and the codes grouped into themes which were then matched against existing literature, the Round Square discoveries framework and the International Boys’ School Coalition’s character education. The study found that community engagement experience helped refine the character of the students, affording them opportunities to develop leadership skills and values that would see them adjust well into the 21st century way of life. The study was, however, not able to determine how other learning areas and developmental fields impacted on the leadership development of the students.
{"title":"Equipping students for leadership through community engagement","authors":"G. Ayaya","doi":"10.1177/1365480220969296","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1365480220969296","url":null,"abstract":"The contribution of community engagement towards shaping leadership development in students is an area that is not well explored in research. A study was conducted to establish the type of leadership skills and values that were acquired by a group of students from an established private school in Johannesburg, South Africa, while they served an underprivileged community. The private school adheres to both Round Square discoveries framework and the International Boys’ School Coalition’s character education and practices the leadership development programs that have been developed by the two organisations. This was a qualitative research study within the constructivist paradigm with a phenomenological approach. Reflection sheets were used to collect data from 120 students. The data was analysed through discourse analysis, where all recurrent terms were coded, and the codes grouped into themes which were then matched against existing literature, the Round Square discoveries framework and the International Boys’ School Coalition’s character education. The study found that community engagement experience helped refine the character of the students, affording them opportunities to develop leadership skills and values that would see them adjust well into the 21st century way of life. The study was, however, not able to determine how other learning areas and developmental fields impacted on the leadership development of the students.","PeriodicalId":45995,"journal":{"name":"Improving Schools","volume":"24 1","pages":"277 - 292"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2020-11-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1365480220969296","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45144623","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-11-02DOI: 10.1177/1365480220968332
Krystallia Kyritsi, J. Davis
The importance of creativity in education has been increasingly recognised by policy-makers and, as contemporary research argues, the way curricula are organised and implemented impact on children’s creativity. Scotland has recently introduced a new curriculum, the ‘Curriculum for Excellence’ (CfE), but there has yet been no research on how the implementation of the CfE has impacted on childhood creativity. This paper uses qualitative data (field-notes and interview transcripts) – from a case study conducted in one Scottish primary school classroom with 1 teacher and 25 children aged 11–12 – to explore what cultural and structural issues influence childhood creativity. This paper is primarily based on teacher’s data and also includes data from seven children. The study found that the CfE can be implemented in both rigid and flexible ways and that structural barriers to creativity emerge when, amongst other causes, cultivation of skills within a tick-box system is perceived as more important than exploration and risk-taking, and when teachers are pressured to evidence the outcomes of their work. This paper concludes that the cultivation of creativity requires schools to build participatory frameworks which leave space for reflection and co-construction and which value diversity, equity and collaboration.
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Pub Date : 2020-10-29DOI: 10.1177/1365480220962865
J. Moore, Chavez Phelps
Despite progress over the past decade in math and reading, proficiency scores of African American boys continue to trail behind those of White, Latino, and Asian male counterparts. African American boys’ reading and math disparities have been attributed to the negative portrayal and the pervasive deficit-oriented discourse about these young men. Using salient characteristics of organizational culture as a framework, this paper offers strategies for creating a culturally responsive environment that supports and promotes high academic performance among African American boys. Attention is given to policy, practice, personnel, programs, and process in schools and their role in culturally competent approaches for improving schools and individual academic achievement.
{"title":"Changing the narrative on African American boys: A systemic approach to school success","authors":"J. Moore, Chavez Phelps","doi":"10.1177/1365480220962865","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1365480220962865","url":null,"abstract":"Despite progress over the past decade in math and reading, proficiency scores of African American boys continue to trail behind those of White, Latino, and Asian male counterparts. African American boys’ reading and math disparities have been attributed to the negative portrayal and the pervasive deficit-oriented discourse about these young men. Using salient characteristics of organizational culture as a framework, this paper offers strategies for creating a culturally responsive environment that supports and promotes high academic performance among African American boys. Attention is given to policy, practice, personnel, programs, and process in schools and their role in culturally competent approaches for improving schools and individual academic achievement.","PeriodicalId":45995,"journal":{"name":"Improving Schools","volume":"24 1","pages":"112 - 123"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2020-10-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1365480220962865","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"65352487","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-10-06DOI: 10.1177/1365480220959865
Terry Wrigley
One of the negative features of a certain type of ‘school improvement’ text has been to regard schools almost as machines for producing exam results and test data. This approach divorces human formation and pedagogy, separating the development of intellect and the promotion of social and emotional maturity. It is a tendency which this journal has resolutely avoided. Across a range of contexts and situations, all of the articles in this present issue quite rightly connect academic progress to personal and social development. They regard both as essential educational aims; they point to ways in which social development supports intellectual learning, and emphasise forms of academic learning which promotes personal and social development. This issue begins with highly topical research into distance learning during the recent coronavirus lockdown. There have certainly been problems in the sudden switch to home learning in many countries, resulting both from teachers’ inexperience and from the lack of computer / internet access experienced by families in poverty. The study published here is based in Norway but written by an English academic Sara Bubb in partnership with Mari-Ana Jones, a researcher based in Norway. It shows more positive results from a well-supported initiative in a Norwegian local authority. Pupils expressed satisfaction at more authentic community-based challenges and tasks, as well as greater autonomy and more personalised feedback. Parents also appreciated the quality and frequency of communications with teachers, which supported their engagement in their children’s learning. The second article reports on a study based in a disadvantaged region of Italy, written by Anna Bussu and Manuela Pulina. Their study identifies factors leading towards dropout, including academic abilities, career expectations, curriculum, school organisation and family and community related issues. The importance of motivating learning activities is emphasised, both in class and extracurricular, along with constructive relations with teachers. Interviews were conducted both with students currently at school and those who had left some years earlier. This is followed by a case study of an isolated rural school in Pakistan whose principal has been engaged in increasing students’ active participation in school life and decision-making. The school is not content with teaching children but serves as a hub for the entire community. Researchers Mir Afzal Tajik and Abdul Wali describe how student participation in leadership can contribute to social justice and help create a democratic community. The article is a tribute to the principal’s desire to produce more humane and less hierarchical relationships, and develop a sense of agency and engagement among students. The fourth article, by Scott Wurdinger, Ron Newell and En Sun Kim, studies 11 schools in the USA which place a strong emphasis on project-based learning. Their research shows how this helps students devel
某种类型的“学校改进”文本的负面特征之一是将学校几乎视为产生考试结果和测试数据的机器。这种方法脱离了人的形成和教育，将智力的发展与促进社会和情感成熟分开。这是本刊坚决避免的一种倾向。在各种背景和情况下，本期的所有文章都非常正确地将学术进步与个人和社会发展联系起来。他们将两者视为基本的教育目标；他们指出了社会发展支持智力学习的方式，并强调了促进个人和社会发展的学术学习形式。这一问题始于最近冠状病毒封锁期间对远程学习的热门研究。在许多国家，突然转向在家学习肯定存在问题，这既是由于教师缺乏经验，也是由于贫困家庭缺乏计算机/互联网接入。这项研究发表在挪威，由英国学者Sara Bubb与挪威研究员Mari Ana Jones合作撰写。它显示了挪威地方当局一项得到充分支持的举措所产生的更积极的结果。学生们对更真实的基于社区的挑战和任务，以及更大的自主权和更个性化的反馈表示满意。家长们也很欣赏与老师沟通的质量和频率，这有助于他们参与孩子的学习。第二篇文章报道了Anna Bussu和Manuela Pulina在意大利贫困地区进行的一项研究。他们的研究确定了导致辍学的因素，包括学术能力、职业期望、课程、学校组织以及与家庭和社区相关的问题。无论是在课堂上还是课外，都强调了激励学习活动的重要性，以及与教师的建设性关系。对目前在校的学生和几年前离开的学生进行了采访。随后对巴基斯坦一所孤立的农村学校进行了案例研究，该学校的校长一直致力于提高学生对学校生活和决策的积极参与度。学校不满足于教孩子，而是作为整个社区的中心。研究人员Mir Afzal Tajik和Abdul Wali描述了学生参与领导如何有助于社会正义和帮助创建民主社区。这篇文章向校长致敬，他希望建立更人道、更少等级的关系，并在学生中培养代理感和参与感。第四篇文章由Scott Wurdinger、Ron Newell和En Sun Kim撰写，研究了美国11所非常重视项目学习的学校。他们的研究表明，这有助于学生发展一系列生活技能和学习技能，以及更大的归属感、参与感和能动性。学校对“项目”有着广泛的看法，包括建筑和设计、视频制作和社区调查。作者认为，基于项目的学习增强了识字和算术能力，但也增强了解决问题和希望的态度。959865 IMP0010.1177/13654802059865改善学校编辑编辑2020
{"title":"Education, intellect and wellbeing","authors":"Terry Wrigley","doi":"10.1177/1365480220959865","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1365480220959865","url":null,"abstract":"One of the negative features of a certain type of ‘school improvement’ text has been to regard schools almost as machines for producing exam results and test data. This approach divorces human formation and pedagogy, separating the development of intellect and the promotion of social and emotional maturity. It is a tendency which this journal has resolutely avoided. Across a range of contexts and situations, all of the articles in this present issue quite rightly connect academic progress to personal and social development. They regard both as essential educational aims; they point to ways in which social development supports intellectual learning, and emphasise forms of academic learning which promotes personal and social development. This issue begins with highly topical research into distance learning during the recent coronavirus lockdown. There have certainly been problems in the sudden switch to home learning in many countries, resulting both from teachers’ inexperience and from the lack of computer / internet access experienced by families in poverty. The study published here is based in Norway but written by an English academic Sara Bubb in partnership with Mari-Ana Jones, a researcher based in Norway. It shows more positive results from a well-supported initiative in a Norwegian local authority. Pupils expressed satisfaction at more authentic community-based challenges and tasks, as well as greater autonomy and more personalised feedback. Parents also appreciated the quality and frequency of communications with teachers, which supported their engagement in their children’s learning. The second article reports on a study based in a disadvantaged region of Italy, written by Anna Bussu and Manuela Pulina. Their study identifies factors leading towards dropout, including academic abilities, career expectations, curriculum, school organisation and family and community related issues. The importance of motivating learning activities is emphasised, both in class and extracurricular, along with constructive relations with teachers. Interviews were conducted both with students currently at school and those who had left some years earlier. This is followed by a case study of an isolated rural school in Pakistan whose principal has been engaged in increasing students’ active participation in school life and decision-making. The school is not content with teaching children but serves as a hub for the entire community. Researchers Mir Afzal Tajik and Abdul Wali describe how student participation in leadership can contribute to social justice and help create a democratic community. The article is a tribute to the principal’s desire to produce more humane and less hierarchical relationships, and develop a sense of agency and engagement among students. The fourth article, by Scott Wurdinger, Ron Newell and En Sun Kim, studies 11 schools in the USA which place a strong emphasis on project-based learning. Their research shows how this helps students devel","PeriodicalId":45995,"journal":{"name":"Improving Schools","volume":"23 1","pages":"207 - 208"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2020-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1365480220959865","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44296464","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-09-30DOI: 10.1177/1365480220958498
J. Casey, Susan Simon, W. Graham
School improvement frameworks and their associated reform efforts often have limited durability and are frequently not fully implemented. Improving their viability, requires a more realistic understanding of contextual organisational structures and the school culture in which the reform is to be implemented. Internationally, and in Australia specifically, education research has informed policy heavily promoting collaboration as a school improvement strategy, with the aim of building teacher capability and student achievement. Consequently, secondary school leaders are charged with promoting the need for teachers to collaborate meaningfully with hundreds of students, carers, parents and colleagues each week across the ‘silos’ of subject departments and grade levels in their school. Social Brain Theory suggests that there are cognitive limits on the number of natural face-to-face social interactions that one can have and maintain. Relationships require significant investment in time and frequency. Additionally, sociality is much more cognitively demanding than at first thought, having unforeseen influence on improvement efforts. The number of interactions required in a collaborative environment, an individual’s likely cognitive overload and the ‘silo’ nature of the school’s organisational structure must all be considered. This paper offers an alternative theoretical framework to support policy makers and leaders in optimising school improvement efforts.
{"title":"Optimising leadership: Conceptualising cognitive constraints of sociality and collaboration in Australian secondary schools","authors":"J. Casey, Susan Simon, W. Graham","doi":"10.1177/1365480220958498","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1365480220958498","url":null,"abstract":"School improvement frameworks and their associated reform efforts often have limited durability and are frequently not fully implemented. Improving their viability, requires a more realistic understanding of contextual organisational structures and the school culture in which the reform is to be implemented. Internationally, and in Australia specifically, education research has informed policy heavily promoting collaboration as a school improvement strategy, with the aim of building teacher capability and student achievement. Consequently, secondary school leaders are charged with promoting the need for teachers to collaborate meaningfully with hundreds of students, carers, parents and colleagues each week across the ‘silos’ of subject departments and grade levels in their school. Social Brain Theory suggests that there are cognitive limits on the number of natural face-to-face social interactions that one can have and maintain. Relationships require significant investment in time and frequency. Additionally, sociality is much more cognitively demanding than at first thought, having unforeseen influence on improvement efforts. The number of interactions required in a collaborative environment, an individual’s likely cognitive overload and the ‘silo’ nature of the school’s organisational structure must all be considered. This paper offers an alternative theoretical framework to support policy makers and leaders in optimising school improvement efforts.","PeriodicalId":45995,"journal":{"name":"Improving Schools","volume":"24 1","pages":"19 - 32"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2020-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1365480220958498","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45504743","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-09-28DOI: 10.1177/1365480220959148
Dennis S. Davis, Jill S. Jones, Nermin Vehabovic, Robyn DeIaco
In this article, we discuss tensions that emerged as we collaborated with teachers to iteratively design and refine an afterschool reading intervention approach that emphasizes inquiry and disciplinary learning for upper elementary readers positioned as struggling in school. Our findings are organized around four design tensions that help us consider what it takes to re-imagine the ‘ofcourseness’ that dominates traditional approaches to tiered intervention in schools. These design tensions are: (1) competing priorities in student learning; (2) compromised forms of inquiry-based instruction; (3) negotiating how texts are chosen; and (4) complexities of responsiveness. These tensions underscore the messy challenges that must be addressed in school reform efforts related to reading intervention for older elementary readers.
{"title":"Reading and inquiring in an afterschool tutoring program: Working to re-imagine the reading intervention paradigm","authors":"Dennis S. Davis, Jill S. Jones, Nermin Vehabovic, Robyn DeIaco","doi":"10.1177/1365480220959148","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1365480220959148","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, we discuss tensions that emerged as we collaborated with teachers to iteratively design and refine an afterschool reading intervention approach that emphasizes inquiry and disciplinary learning for upper elementary readers positioned as struggling in school. Our findings are organized around four design tensions that help us consider what it takes to re-imagine the ‘ofcourseness’ that dominates traditional approaches to tiered intervention in schools. These design tensions are: (1) competing priorities in student learning; (2) compromised forms of inquiry-based instruction; (3) negotiating how texts are chosen; and (4) complexities of responsiveness. These tensions underscore the messy challenges that must be addressed in school reform efforts related to reading intervention for older elementary readers.","PeriodicalId":45995,"journal":{"name":"Improving Schools","volume":"24 1","pages":"165 - 181"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2020-09-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1365480220959148","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44116577","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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