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Recent years have seen a movement toward using active learning to ground professional development in classroom practice. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The present case study describes how a group of middle school mathematics teachers improved classroom instruction through the use of lesson study.

This case study suggests the success of the lesson study in supporting teachers’ active learning.

For the lesson study, teachers’ active learning is assessed across four dimensions.

The VDML Project shows how the Information Environment can enhance the work of staff and students in small foreign languages departments. It aims to combat teacher isolation, develop better learning materials and increase the variety of learning activities for students. The project has developed a pilot virtual department, linking Danish students and teachers in three UK universities. For the past year, teachers have used this to share the development of new learning tasks that have been used by students. The project is therefore concerned both with content development and re‐use, and with changing working practices for teachers and students.

The heady system of high‐pressure Continental air that drifted across the Atlantic and collided with the traditional cyclonic patterns of U.S. literary academe in the mid‐1960s precipitated a “Theory Revolution” that has brought a couple of decades of stormy and stimulating weather to the campus. The collision has produced occasionally furious debate and resulted for higher education in the kind of public attention customarily reserved for athletic scandals; it has kept tenuring processes in turmoil and publish‐or‐perish mills working round the clock.

Purpose – This chapter describes the “Teen Alliance for Prepared Parenting–SPIN” (TAPP-SPIN) unwanted pregnancy prevention intervention for pregnant/parenting adolescents and their adult parent(s) in primarily African American and Latino communities in the District of Columbia (DC).

Methodology/approach – We augment TAPP services with SPIN Video Home Training (VHT)11Called Video Interaction Guidance in the United Kingdom., an intervention to build Parent–Child Connectedness (PCC). SPIN VHT aims to (1) improve adult–teen interaction to strengthen the supports teen parents need to continue to progress toward life success and (2) build the teen's ability to engage in warm, attuned, and skillful parenting of her child.

SPIN VHT uses a guided, strengths-based analysis of videotaped parent–child interactions to identify examples of the parent's competencies that support the child's well-being and optimal development. Collaborative review of an edited collection of video helps guide participants to integrate what has been effective into their daily patterns of interaction and communication.

Findings – The randomized experiment compares TAPP to TAPP-SPIN with a sample of 400 15- to 18-year-olds and their parents (dyads). After a baseline survey, we collect follow-up data at 6, 12, 18, and 24 months post-baseline. We collect outcome data on health information-seeking, pregnancy prevention communication, cognitions related to parenting and subsequent pregnancy, improved parenting, and clinical outcomes including subsequent pregnancy.

Social implications – The TAPP-SPIN intervention aims to advance the state of pregnancy prevention research in a population facing multiple health disparities.

Originality/value of chapter – This chapter describes the first ever randomized controlled trial of the SPIN approach to improving PCC.

This study proposes to examine whether tales from childhood influence the psyche and self of the adult in their professional role as a leader in a large organization. It is positioned within a social constructionist and postmodernist framework.

The methodology development was challenging; to capture the level of abstraction within which it was positioned. Using narrative inquiry allowed for a less rigid methodology, data collection and analysis. The data were collected using a non‐structured single interview with a known subject, the data analysed using an initial thematic analysis followed by an in‐depth analysis of the themes against the background of an Enid Blyton novel.

This research project has shown how all are products of their whole life experiences to date; thus the tales from childhood must also impact on adult lives. This project identified links between the adult professional self and the characters in the tales, which were read as children. Leadership can be read as an adventure story or fairy tale, a myth born out of the narratives and language often used to describe it, reflecting tales of quest and achievement.

The interpretations on offer are only one version; another reader or teller would experience a different interpretation; finding her own story, while constructing herself as a researcher, was unexpected and surprising. There are at least two stories running throughout predominantly: the subjects’ story and the story of the research.

The bystander effect is one of the most well researched and replicated phenomena in social psychology. It repeatedly shows that the presence of other people inhibits the impulse to help due to the concept of diffusion of responsibility. Recently, researchers have studied this phenomenon online in the context of e-mails, internet chat rooms, and discussion forums. The results provide evidence that the presence of “virtual” others decreases the likelihood of helping behavior. Personalization is another factor that strongly influences helping behavior. Referring to a person by name when soliciting help request increases the likelihood of receiving assistance. Yet, with the most popular activity on the internet now being social media, it would be beneficial to know if diffusion of responsibility and personalization also occurs in this part of the online world. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

To investigate the validity of diffusion of responsibility as well as personalization in a social media context, 176 participants sent out one private Facebook message soliciting help in the form of an online survey to one, three, six, or nine of their Facebook friends. They greeted their friend(s) by name or just said “Hi” or “Hi all.”

Responses to the survey provided strong support for personalizing the greeting, but did not support the theory of diffusion of responsibility.

This study has many practical implications. For one, with social media being used not only by individuals but by businesses and industries, it is important to know the most effective way in eliciting help and responses from individuals. It is also beneficial for researchers as well who are increasingly using social media as a recruitment tool to find participants. This study suggests that personalizing salutations is an effective way of eliciting more responses and raises important research questions about the validity of diffusion of responsibility in online environments.

This study also has originality and value in that it provides a start for understanding helping behavior in a social media environment as well as applying relevant social psychological theories to online behavior. It highlights the similarities as well as differences between offline and online human behavior as well as highlights the importance of personalization in online requests.

Few scholars become notable figures in their areas of specialization. Understanding how and why some scholars are identified by their unusual accomplishments, therefore, can be difficult, especially when some scholars achieve more notable careers and are invisible in their professions than others, more recognized colleagues. The reasons for some scholars’ visibility and their colleagues’ invisibility may be unclear or ambiguous. One common reason for invisibility is being a woman in a patriarchal discipline. Men’s ideas, values, and careers are privileged and more highly rated in a patriarchal subject like sociology.

Here, I analyze case studies of invisibility that emerge from deliberate suppression but focus on the more hidden processes of making women invisible in sociology. These less overt processes of invisibility require different theories, networks, and methods to discover the women’s notable careers than those used in examples of more overt processes.

Making invisible women visible requires multiple processes, over time, by a number of professionals and gatekeepers.

Top-level operations leaders can drive organizational performance across a broad range of pro-environmental objectives. The authors’ focus is on understanding which specific leadership competencies are most conducive to green performance outcomes. The authors further consider the influence of Lean thinking on the importance of these competencies.

In study 1, of a multi-method investigation, the authors interview executive search professionals, on how green objectives impact top-level operations leadership searches. In study 2, the authors adopt a multi-attribute choice task to examine how Lean thinking impacts competency preferences. Finally, in study 3, the authors merge secondary data on corporate environmental performance with a survey of top-level operations managers’ assessments. This triangulating multi-method approach provides an integrated and holistic view into these dynamics.

Results show particularly strong associations between resource and energy management outcomes and the specific leadership competencies of stewardship. This set of leadership competencies play the greatest role when Lean thinking is deficient.

While the authors’ focus is on top-level operations managers, and their under-explored impact on environmental performance, such an impact represents only one dimension of corporate social responsibility (CSR) that these managers may be critically influencing.

The associations uncovered in this research suggest critical leadership characteristics to consider in developing and recruiting top-level operations managers, when specific environmental objectives exist.

The study’s findings draw attention to the importance of leadership characteristics among influential corporate decision-makers, instrumental in the environmental progress of firms.

This work fills a critical gap in the authors’ understanding of how top-level operations managers influence green corporate objective, and how their contributions are valued across settings.

8.43 am Enter the reading room by the spiral staircase from the boiler room. The Janitor snaps up the house lights, dims Terry Wogan and almost reaches ‘attention’ before recognising that it's only the Skeleton Staff coming on‐stream for another Bank Holiday tour de jour.