Search results

Global focus on reforming teachers has resulted in the inclusion of multiple survey questions about teachers’ professional learning activities in large-scale international studies. A cross-national analysis of these survey data will likely enhance our understanding and inform the future direction regarding teacher professional development policy and practice. Yet we do not know whether these surveys measure the key features and their contextual factors of teachers’ professional learning activities to allow a systematic cross-national analysis. Based on international and U.S. literature, I develop a conceptual model of teachers’ professional learning activities in global context and analyze relevant survey items used in three major international studies – TIMSS, PIRLS, and TALIS. I conclude the chapter with a discussion of the coverage of these survey items and a direction for improving data collections of teachers’ professional learning activities in large-scale international studies.

The school counselor can reduce barriers to college access for students in underserved communities but there is a lack of focused support and professional development resources to assist them with this task. The purpose of this paper is to gain insight into how a collaborative partnership reframed professional development to increase counselors’ capacities and enrich their role in addressing educational inequities in a local context.

The authors employed an action-oriented qualitative case study through the lens of social justice to critically consider how urban school counselors took action to address local educational inequities in the postsecondary process. Data were collected over a ten month period and consisted of semi-structured interviews, 17 hours of meeting transcriptions, meeting notes, field observations, numerous field notes, researcher reflections, weekly e-mail correspondence, electronic data, counselor demographic surveys, and document analysis.

The inter-agency networked learning community model encouraged the school counselors to take ownership for their professional development, starting small led to greater collaboration, the counselors engaged in collective learning and counselors took a responsibility for the broader school community.

Inter-agency partnerships can address social inequities and initiate transformative change but further research is needed to explore how to address what happens as actors move in and/or out of the partnership. Acknowledging and validating the experience of the school counselors empowered them to take risks, invite new ideas, and adapt the new idea to their local school site. Reframing professional development began to transform how the counselors were viewed by the broader school community. Further research is needed to explore how educational systems can be empowered to engage in conversations to embrace change.

This study illustrated the transformative power of school counselors in building community, collaborating, and constructing bridges between each other, school administrators, and postsecondary researchers. Unless the current devaluing of school counselors shifts, the benefits associated with networked collaborative partnerships will likely go unrealized. We call on policymakers to reconsider the role of school counselors and call on them to ensure these positions are mandatory in all K-12 schools.

This study demonstrated how an inter-organizational collaboration between a university and a K-12 local education agency initiated transformative change. The collective action of the network equipped counselors with tools to build community with each other, within their individual school sites, and in the local community. Many studies provide models regarding what school counselors should do but few explore how to empower them to use the models to enact change. The action-inquiry approach provided an opportunity to explore how urban school counselors experienced and understood the process of engaging in professional development designed to help them try something new in addressing educational inequities in underserved communities.

Much of the literature on innovation and entrepreneurship in education focuses on how external ideas, processes, and techniques can be applied to education systems, schools, and classrooms to improve educational performance. Little research, however, addresses the ways that internal ideas, processes, and techniques within educational systems, schools, and classrooms impart innovation and entrepreneurial skills to youth worldwide. This chapter identifies ways that these skills can be developed in youth through mass education systems. Particular attention is given to the ways that youth are prepared to participate in the knowledge economy by becoming information innovators and knowledge entrepreneurs.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a review of the most frequently cited English articles of five models of collaborative professional development for mathematics teachers, aiming to describe the character of the development addressed and its quality issues.

The most frequently cited articles were chosen for their impact on the scientific discourse; they identify what aspects of the models are most focused and of interest. The research questions were: how is professional development described in the articles?, and what improvements are the models trying to increase or what problem are the models trying to solve? The review of these articles was also analyzed in relation to four quality indicators for praxis improvement (Holmqvist Olander, 2015): (A) ecological validation for predictive power, (B) generalization in theory, (C) cross-setting interventions, and (D) continuing professional development.

The result shows differences in focus. Educational action research focuses on solving the participants’ problem in the school environment while learning study tests different instructional designs to find the most powerful relationship between instruction and student learning. Lesson study and teacher research groups are collaborative professional development models integrated into the teachers’ ordinary work to develop everyday teaching and learning, and educational design research is mainly designed by researchers studying areas of interests, which can be shared by teachers.

The articles used for the analysis are a selection, and not a total sample of everything published about the models. This can be both a limitation and strength. A very small sample of typical studies is used for the analysis, even though the models are used in several other situations and contexts as well, which can be seen as a limitation. However, as the selection of articles have the strongest impact on the research of each model, as they are the most cited articles and affect the way they are used. The contexts differ and this can be seen as a limitation as the models might be more efficient in some cultural settings than other.

Based on the articles’ findings, these five models can all be recommended to develop students’ mathematical knowledge as well as teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge. The results of this review can be used to guide what model to use depending on the need for professional development.

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (2015) and Hattie (2013) state that effective professional development is positioned as close to practice as possible, and that research questions should be raised and outcomes tested in teachers’ workplaces as a form of collaborative professional development. There is a contradiction between such claims and how we traditionally value research. Collaboration with teachers in research projects can, as well as aiming to have an impact on practice, sometimes be considered to be less scientific than a more objective standpoint that follows traditional indicators of scientific quality. This review shows how professional development can inform practice-based research and contribute with new knowledge of how to develop teaching and learning in the classroom.

The overview is different from an ordinary research review, as the focus is on the most cited articles. This is made to capture the main shape of how the models are presented in an international research context as the articles have an impact of how the models are understood and shared between contexts in different countries.

This paper presents recently published resources on library instruction and information literacy, providing an introductory overview and a selected annotated bibliography of publications covering various library types, study populations and research contexts.

This paper introduces and annotates English-language periodical articles, monographs, dissertations, reports and other materials on library instruction and information literacy published in 2020.

The paper provides a brief description of all 440 sources and highlights sources that contain unique or significant scholarly contributions.

The information may be used by librarians, researchers and anyone interested in a quick and comprehensive reference to literature on library instruction and information literacy.

In a global context characterised by a growing recognition of the role that educational leaders play in ensuring school effectiveness and the consequent need to design effective leadership preparation programmes, many educational leadership preparation providers around the world have borrowed international standards and frameworks in order to guide their programmes and assure their quality. This trend has been on the rise as a response to globalisation pressures and a growing interest in acquiring international recognition through accreditation agencies. However, this raises important questions about the potential repercussion of using foreign, mainly Western, frameworks to develop or assess national leadership preparation provision. Evidence from relevant literature indicates that these frameworks, when applied to local contexts, need to take contextual factors into account. In this chapter, we engage with existing literature in relation to leadership preparation, internationalisation and professional standards to reflect on our experience of using international standards to develop the Masters in Educational Administration programme offered by Sultan Qaboos University (SQU) in Oman. We hope to contribute to existing internationalisation literature by providing a different perspective on educational administration and leadership preparation from a non-Western tradition, thereby expanding the understanding of meaningful leadership preparation in general.

Fostering the development of professional character in student physicians remains the most essential, yet challenging and sometimes elusive goal of those in medical education. Current understandings and contemporary approaches to learning and teaching can provide perspectives that may inform our thinking. In this chapter, learning with and from others is explored along with approaches that form the foundation for the development of professional character that integrates moral conduct into professional practice. The implications for both teaching and learning and the importance of the learning environment are discussed. Education as a moral endeavor and values-based practice is emphasized.

The main goal of the one semester long intervention for first-year Bachelor of Social Services students was to enable them to increase their awareness of a variety of cultures and practices encountered in social pedagogical work and to support the development of their ability to interact empathically with clients.

The aim of this article is to describe an educational intervention focused on teaching Qualified Empathic skills to social work students in higher education at Metropolia University of Applied Sciences in Finland. We introduce the concept of Qualified Empathy to describe professional empathic working skills and define it as: Qualified Empathy requires compassion for empathic action and it includes the ability for professional self-reflection, emotional skills and a healthy set of boundaries. Qualified Empathy encompasses the ability to tell the difference between sympathy and empathy, as it includes the capacity to use compassion to act in an empathic way in professional contexts (Raatikainen et al., 2017). The study was a case study, designed to explore the students' experiences of their one semester long educational intervention (n = 20). Our research question was: How do students construct Qualified Empathy as a dimension of their own professional expertise?

The results of the study demonstrate the progress areas of the students' Qualified Empathy skills. The development stages in the three progress areas are: (1) from emotional reaction to emotional response, (2) from understanding to empathic acting and (3) from client perspective to a more systemic approach. Implications of the results for Social Services students are discussed.

In this study, as in all studies, some limitations need to be taken into account. One limitation of this study is the size and “nature of data”. Secondly, challenges with the concept of Qualified Empathy need to be addressed and more research is needed to define it more concretely. Even so, as it is a new concept, we need more discussion on the differences in the definition of empathy and Qualified Empathy. However, this study offers one new perspective for discussion which is the need for empathy training, in social work education practices and in the field. An important ethical aspect of research emphasizes that its implementation must not be to the detriment of the people being researched (Juuti and Puusa, 2020, pp. 168).

Our findings demonstrate that educational interventions can improve students' empathy skills to more qualified skills. We emphasized that maintaining the skill demands continuous reflection as a lifelong process. This article provides an overview of an educational intervention to improve students' Qualified Empathy skills and suggests a definition for educators to frame the teaching of professional empathy or empathy in a professional context – especially in the social work context. Furthermore, with this educational intervention in social work, we offer a way to support the students to – not only – have a more professional approach to empathy but also to find a way to establish a more emotionally sustainable environment for professionals in social services. It is essential for social work education to focus on the growth of Qualified Empathy in students through supervision and guidance which supports their professional competence. By doing so, we contribute to the development of more sustainable working environments in the social work context.

Professional empathy is seen as an important factor in building a socially sustainable society from the perspectives of employees, clients and patients. We noticed that it is important to allow time and space for the learners to internalize the concept of Qualified Empathy. When we allow for this, students begin to recognize and assign more value to it and, as we suggest, they become more adept in their interactions and work with clients.

The study was a case study, designed to explore the students' experiences of their one semester long educational intervention (n = 20). Our research question was: How do students construct Qualified Empathy as a dimension of their own professional expertise? The results of the study demonstrate the progress areas of the students' Qualified Empathy skills. The development stages in the three progress areas are: (1) from emotional reaction to emotional response, (2) from understanding to empathic acting and (3) from client perspective to a more systemic approach. Implications of the results for Social Services students are discussed.

Identity exploration is a central mechanism for identity formation that has been found to be associated with intense engagement, positive coping, openness to change, flexible cognition, and meaningful learning. Moreover, identity exploration in school has been associated with adaptive motivation for learning the academic material. Particularly in the fast-changing environment of contemporary society, confidence and skills in identity exploration and self-construction seems to be increasingly important. Therefore, promoting students’ identity exploration in school within the curriculum and in relation to the academic content should be adopted as an important educational goal. The purpose of this paper is to describe a conceptual framework for interventions to promote students’ identity exploration within the curriculum. The framework involves the application of four interrelated principles: (1) promoting self-relevance; (2) triggering exploration; (3) facilitating a sense of safety; and (4) scaffolding exploratory actions.

We begin the paper with a conceptual review of identity exploration. We follow by specifying the conceptual framework for interventions. We then present a methodological-intervention approach for applying this framework and describe three such interventions in middle-school contexts, in the domains of environmental education, literature, and mathematics.

In each intervention, applying the principles contributed to students’ adaptive motivation and engagement in the academic material and also contributed to students’ identity exploration, though not among all students. The findings highlight the contextual, dynamic, and indeterminate nature of identity exploration among early adolescents in educational settings, and the utility of the conceptual framework and approach for conceptualizing and intervening to promote identity exploration among students.

This paper contributes to the conceptual understanding of identity exploration in educational settings, highlights the benefits and the challenges in intervening to promote identity exploration among students, and discusses the future directions in theory, research, and practice concerned with the promotion of identity exploration in educational settings.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how principals and school supervisory authorities understand and use feedback from mandatory proficiency tests (VERA) in the low-stakes context of Germany. For the analysis, the authors refer to a theoretical model of schools that differentiates between Autonomous and Managed Professional Organisations (Thiel, 2008a).

The empirical basis of the qualitative research are contrastive case studies which are focusing on individual schools and on school supervisory authorities. The selection of cases was oriented on Theoretical Sampling according to Glaser and Strauss (2005). For the analysis, the authors used a sample of upper track secondary schools (Gymnasien), four from Berlin and five each from Thuringia, Brandenburg and Baden-Wuerttemberg. In total, the authors conducted 229 structured interviews over two periods in 19 schools with different protagonists on all levels of the educational system (principals, heads of subject departments, teachers and school supervisory officials). The interview data were descriptively analysed according to procedures of qualitative content analyses (Mayring, 2010).

The analyses show a clear tendency in the direction of the Autonomous Professional Organisation within the context of VERA. However, some principals reported activities according to a Managed Professional Organisation. The traditional decoupling remains and the supervisory authorities retain their picture of the individual school as an Autonomous Professional Organisation. Both levels have a major deficit in a competent use of VERA and lack profound experience with accountability and evaluation processes.

The sampling has certain restraints: schools of a particular type, few schools within one state, four of 16 states.

Even though German test-based school reforms have been in progress for one decade, systematic analyses of the reform’s relevance for leadership and for school supervisory authorities’ actions in a low-stakes context have not been conducted yet. The analysis meets this lack of research with an explorative reconstruction of principal leadership within the context of test-based school reform as well as the corresponding school supervisory officials.