AbstractsQuest for continual growth takes root
Volume 27
Number 2, Autumn 2006;
Pages 28–30, 35
Kaizen is a Japanese word for continual improvement and higher quality performance. In an educational setting, kaizen can be implemented by identifying student needs, creating avenues to address them and developing teacher leadership. This has been done in the Vestal Central School district of KLA Subject HeadingsTeaching professionSchool leadership School culture Educational planning Professional development Six challenges are key for high-performing schools that aim to achieve more
Volume 27
Number 2, Spring 2006;
Pages 22–27
For meaningful change to occur there needs to be displeasure with the status quo and a perceived urgency for change. Such conditions are present every day in many schools. Some schools, however, are hallmarks of academic performance, their students sought by colleges and universities. These high-performing schools face unique challenges for continuous improvement, as there may be reluctance to seek even higher levels of achievement. The Minority Student Achievement Network (MSAN) has proposed several challenging suggestions for such schools. Teachers should be clear about what is meant by success and access to success. Intended or not, actions can send strong messages about school beliefs. The school culture should be such that a teacher feels it is safe to take risks, rather than just support the status quo. Scripted protocols set around improving staff–student relationships may be followed during staff meetings, which then become professional conversations and discourses. As staff explore issues, they feel safer in trying new practices and sharing results. The evolving teacher evaluation process also offers opportunities for teachers to identify goals for improvement. Teachers should be encouraged to collect their own achievement data and determine their own professional development. Improvement goals must be few, focused on class work, specific and measurable, observable and developed by the staff involved. Commitment to a long-term strategy will avoid short-lived and short-sighted initiatives. Staff should come, work and stay together, and stay focused for long enough to assess progress. Staff should ‘connect the dots’ between tradition and change by making clear how each change fits into a process of continuous improvement. Teachers should commit to high levels of achievement for all. Professional development should focus on appropriate strategies for those students found to be ‘at risk’ for reasons that may relate to race, class or gender. A school is no more successful than its least successful students, so there is always room to improve, even for highly performing schools. KLA Subject HeadingsSchool leadershipSchool culture Leadership Educational planning Educational innovations Design do's and don'tsNovember 2006;
Pages 12–14
School buildings represent a serious commitment of community resources, and should be planned to last for up to five generations. To respond to community needs, their design requires community input, and the building will in turn affect the community. The trend in design is towards deeply collaborative multidisciplinary teams working together from the beginning. Along with architects, engineers and educational planners, teams now include technology designers, green building consultants and maintenance planning advisors. Making best use of daylight might involve the architect, site designer, technology designer and mechanical and electrical engineers. The different participants should be required to collaborate – forcing the development of a group consciousness based on mutually determined goals. The author proposes a list of 'do's' for school leaders. Create a written consensus statement of values, goals and objectives. Insist on a schedule, budget, quality and safety, and be prepared to enforce the schedule. Reflect on long-term energy consumption. Evaluate design principles based on long-term costs. Consider ease of maintenance and operation. Start the design process by considering different learning modalities, and how these might require different learning spaces, and why, and how indoor and outdoor spaces should be related. Do not begin with a discussion of traditional building-centred approaches such as how many classrooms might be needed, and their proposed size. Include a comprehensive asset-based maintenance plan and business plan showing revenue and expenditure over the building’s life. Provide flexibility to accommodate future changes. Include appropriate current educational literature. Focus on wired and wireless pathways that will serve devices available in the near future. Accept that the distant future is unknowable. Don't use carpet in classrooms or low ceilings, and 'don’t forget the kids'. KLA Subject HeadingsSchool buildingsDesign Linking literacy teaching with assessment: a continuing professional development initiative for secondary schools
Volume 40
Number 2, 5 July 2006;
Pages 115–122
Key Learning AreasEnglishSubject HeadingsProfessional developmentAssessment Reading Literacy Students and buildings: the vital linkNovember 2006;
Pages 6–8
The Australian chapter of the Council of Educational Facility Planners International (CEFPI) opened in 2000. This year a member of the Australian chapter won the CEFPI President’s Award for their work with KLA Subject HeadingsSchool buildingsLiteracy assessment, New Zealand style
Volume 64
Number 2, October 2006;
Pages 74–79
Commenced in 1995, KLA Subject HeadingsEducational evaluationAssessment New Zealand Standards Coming to grips with assessment in TESOL: a personal perspective
Volume 16
Number 1, August 2006;
Pages 3–9
The author, a former secondary English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher, found the assessment-driven secondary curriculum compromised his ability to meet the needs of low-proficiency English language learners. Throughout his subsequent career in various academic and government ESL positions, he came to understand the potential of assessment to support student learning. In his first job at a university English language centre, he observed testing being used to place students into ability-level classes. This made both teaching and learning easier than in classes grouped by year level in the school system. He also observed ‘oral interviews’ being used for assessment purposes, which contrasted with the emphasis on written language he had encountered in school assessments. Later, as part of his postgraduate research, the author evaluated the cloze assessment procedure, where students fill in every nth word deleted from a text. This type of assessment has little learning value if deletions are made randomly, but can guide learning if deletions are carefully selected. He also explored telephone-based language assessments, finding that, as with oral interviews, the nature of the assessor had a significant impact on the outcome of the test. The author’s next roles involved developing controversial English entry tests for a university, and for government immigration services. These positions exposed him to the ‘harsh political realities’ of English testing. Returning to work in an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) course again immersed him in exemplary assessment practice, including extensive discussion, feedback and authentic assessment tasks. Teachers in the course spent as much time developing and implementing assessment as they did on their teaching, underlining the synergy between teaching and quality assessment for learning. The author now works as an education lecturer in language assessment. Key Learning AreasEnglishSubject HeadingsSecondary educationEducational evaluation English as an additional language Assessment Building a sustainable futureNovember 2006;
Pages 16–19
The Cornish campus of KLA Subject HeadingsCurriculum planningCompulsory education Project based learning School buildings Classroom activities Critical literacy, or just clear thinkingNovember 2006
Recent defences of critical literacy claim that its opponents do not fully understand the concept. With extensive experience and qualifications in English education, the author seeks to put forward an informed opposing view. The author and like-minded commentators, 'contrary to what advocates of critical literacy suggest', are in favour of teaching students to think critically and independently. Evaluating arguments, recognising techniques and understanding the manipulative power of texts have long been elements of the English curriculum, formerly termed ‘clear thinking’. The current view of critical literacy re-badges clear thinking under a left-wing political banner. Instead of being valued for their aesthetic and moral qualities, traditional texts are being reduced to cultural artefacts and deconstructed in terms of power relationships. For critical literacy advocates such as the Australian Association of English Teachers, the definition of literacy has moved far beyond just learning to read and write. Students are now being educated to become activists towards a ‘better world’, loosely defined as embodying the beliefs and values of the ‘cultural left’. Education should not be confused with indoctrination, but should value both change and continuity. As well as questioning and critiquing society, there is also a need to accentuate the universal and unchanging aspects of English literacy. Rather than regarding texts primarily as cultural weapons in a struggle for power, literacy education should embrace the ‘enduring truths about human nature that cross time and culture’ that can be found in all great writing. Key Learning AreasEnglishSubject HeadingsLiteracyThought and thinking Education philosophy MULTILIT book levels: towards a new system for levelling textsDecember 2005
The most appropriate reading texts for children are neither too easy nor too hard. Guiding children’s reading choices is therefore important, especially for struggling readers who often choose books at inappropriately high levels. Historically, a variety of approaches have been used to make it easier for teachers to match their students with texts at the right level. Prior to the 1980s, the staple reading diet of most school children were vocabulary-controlled readers, deliberately written according to formulaic readability standards. The repetitious and often contrived nature of these stories motivated educators to use ‘real’ texts. While thought to be more interesting to students, these texts were not graded, so standards for levelling them had to be developed. Both qualitative and quantitative measures have been developed for these standards. Quantitative measures include counting sentence length, syllables, word frequency or syntactic complexity. Cloze procedures have also been used to determine text level according to how well a test group of students can fill in every nth word in a modified text. Qualitative book levelling procedures expand on formulaic approaches by taking into account additional factors such as content, page format and use of illustrations. These approaches tend to be time-consuming and require extensive training. There is no empirical evidence to suggest that increasing the number of features that are assessed results in more accurate levelling. Key Learning AreasEnglishSubject HeadingsLiteracyReading English language teaching Tracking and the effects of school-related attitudes on the language achievement of boys and girls
Volume 27
Number 3, July 2006;
Pages 293–309
Although gender gaps in some school subjects are closing, boys still tend to achieve lower results than girls in language education. It is well documented that more boys than girls have negative attitudes to school, perhaps resulting from sociocultural norms that associate school diligence with feminine, not masculine, identities. Belgian researchers investigated whether boys’ negative attitudes to schooling and lower achievement in language may be related. During their last four years of secondary schooling, 2,342 students participated in tests of their language ability, general cognitive ability and attitude to school. Background variables, including socioeconomic status and language spoken at home, were also tested, to eliminate the possibility of differences in achievement being attributable to external factors. In KLA Subject HeadingsLanguage and languagesBoys' education Girls' education Belgium The impact of screening and advice on inattentive, hyperactive and impulsive children
Volume 21
Number 3, August 2006;
Pages 321–337
Children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) are more likely to experience behavioural, attitudinal and achievement difficulties in education than their peers. Although medication has produced the most significant results in helping students with ADHD, certain school-based interventions have also proved effective. Research was undertaken into the impact of two types of ADHD interventions for children in their first year of schooling in 2,040 English primary schools. In the first type of intervention, carried out in around 500 schools, children entering school were screened for ADHD symptoms, including inattentiveness, hyperactivity and impulsive behaviour. Screening results were provided to the schools. Another 500 schools were given an information booklet written especially for the project, providing advice about teaching students with ADHD. The remaining schools received either both interventions, or no interventions at all. Various interventions were also provided at the level of Local Education Area (LEA) administration, but no significant differences emerged. At the school level, simply identifying children with ADHD-like symptoms had no impact on teacher or student behaviour, attitudes and performance. Over two years, the advice booklets had a small positive impact on children with ADHD-like symptoms, and on the quality of life of their teachers. Only 12.2 per cent of the schools who received the booklet reported having used it, suggesting that further research is necessary on persuading teachers to access research advice. A surprising result was that schools receiving both interventions demonstrated lower reading and mathematics attainment for children with ADHD-like symptoms. The research supported two clear conclusions: that screening children with ADHD is unlikely to improve their educational outcomes, and that providing schools with research-based advice may be a cost-effective way of achieving some positive impact if teachers can be encouraged to access it. KLA Subject HeadingsSpecial educationBehavioural problems Attention Great Britain Using a learning journal to improve professional practice: a journey of personal and professional self-discovery
Volume 7
Number 3, August 2006;
Pages 333–348
The author, a managerial consultant, describes how he improved his professional practice using a reflective journal. As an ‘expert’ teaching others, he also felt a special responsibility to attend to his own learning and development. His instructional role provided few opportunities to receive collegial feedback, so he had to rely on the honesty of his own reflections to assess his performance. His journal entries began as ‘streams of consciousness’, simply recording thoughts as they arose. Over time, he started structuring each entry to describe what had happened, how he felt about it, what he thought about it, what he had learnt from it and the action he would take as a result of this learning. This format greatly assisted him in making sense of the complexity of his professional experiences. He often supplemented text entries with mind maps, photographs and drawings to help him reconnect to experiences in later reflection. Initial reflections often led to further reflection on the resultant changes to practice, creating a continuous spiral of improvement. By recording and analysing specific interactions, the author learned how best to reach the people he was teaching. As well as improving his practice, the journal enabled him to better understand the nature of his work. Common themes emerging in the journal led him to research and situate his practice in related theoretical literature. He also came to critically examine his values and beliefs, and how these were sometimes inconsistent with his practices. After a while, concerns that the journal focused too much on the negative led the author to experiment with a more affirmative stance, where he recorded what he felt was ‘right’ about his practice. This approach produced some increases in his own and his clients’ enthusiasm, but ran the risk of reducing the journal to a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’. The author concluded that problematising his work, without being negative, was the most effective means of achieving sustained interrogation and continual improvement. KLA Subject HeadingsProfessional developmentTo adopt, adapt or ignore? Challenging corporate type performance measures in State schools
Volume 12
Number 1, Winter 2006;
Pages 76–90
Education KLA Subject HeadingsSocially disadvantagedState schools Queensland Educational evaluation Educational accountability Education and state What (so-called) low-performing schools can teach (so-called) high-performing schools
Volume 27
Number 2, Spring 2006;
Pages 43–45
A comparison of schools in affluent and low socioeconomic areas in the KLA Subject HeadingsSocially disadvantagedSocial classes United States of America (USA) Standards Education policy There are no Conferences available in this issue. |