In a system that increasingly stakes all on measuring success for students, teachers, and institutions against a common testable standard, we risk losing sight of the person at the foundation of our work. Patricia Carini offered a meaningful counternarrative through systematic, evidence-based documentation from observations, interviews,…

It was fundamental to Martin Thrupp's politics that he would work with teacher unions and assist them in their struggles against government policies that were anti-teacher and educationally unsound. I made contact with Martin even before he had arrived back in New Zealand to ask him to do a piece of work for PPTA and NZEI on standards for…

Two classic questions in epistemology concern whether knowledge is firstly propositional or firstly practical (the know-that/know-how debate) and whether testimony is a basic source of epistemic justification (the reductionism/anti-reductionism debate about testimony). In this paper, I consider the relationship between these two classic debates in…

Although most teachers are familiar with growth mindsets, many conflate it with other terms or concepts or have difficulties understanding how to best foster growth mindsets in their students. Shelby Clark and Madora Soutter describe how growth mindsets are related to, yet distinct from, intellectual risk-taking and share strategies for fostering…

The achievement gap has been the focus of a good deal of research, attention, and hopeful new practices, yet it has hardly decreased. Using insights from sociolinguistic and sociocultural studies of classrooms in concert with practices developed by teacher researchers in the tradition of the Brookline Teacher Researcher Seminar, the author…

As school education systems worldwide adopt standardized performance measures, teacher effectiveness frameworks have become more influential. This article draws on Australian mixed methods research that aimed to understand the processes behind quality arts pedagogy. Following an in-depth quantitative study, nine high-performing case study arts…

The idea that the educational needs of secondary school students are best met by providing them with learning experiences that are both intellectually challenging and connected to the world beyond the classroom underpins several recent pedagogical initiatives in Australia. However, such learning experiences are rarely found in practice. Many…

In her new book, Yvette Jackson shows educators how to focus on students' strengths to inspire learning and high intellectual performance. Jackson asserts that the myth that the route to increasing achievement by focusing on weaknesses (promoted by policies such as NCLB) has blinded us to the strengths and intellectual potential of urban…

In this conceptual paper, we provide a heuristic that organizes dispositions in a manner that is useful for prospective teachers and teacher educators. The heuristic is organized around three domains of dispositions--intellectual, cultural, and moral. We use a small sample of teacher candidate journal entries to ground the discussion of each…

Author discusses the course that led him to the field of sociology. He argues that sociologists' strength is their immediacy to the subject studied, the social world, and their weakness, sociologists' propensity towards moralism and social ideology. Author advocates detachment for a full understanding of how the social world functions.

This paper demonstrates how a well-conceived conceptual framework developed and supported by the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh College of Education and Human Services became a catalyst for significant change in teacher education. It begins by examining catalysts for change, then describes the university's conceptual framework, which works to…

A study analyzed faculty goals for intellectual development in introductory college courses, to examine disciplinary differences and similarities. Faculty usually assumed intellectual development would occur in conjunction with knowledge acquisition. Differences were found between disciplines, but not along conventional hard/soft discipline lines.…

This paper discusses teaching psychological foundations courses to undergraduate preservice teachers. It is argued that the current approach to pedagogy in this area is ineffective because it does not take account of the fact that most prospective teachers, after years of acting as participant observers of the acts of teaching and learning, have…

Lists the values acquired through the study of foreign languages. These include an acquisition of a sense of a relevant past; expansion of one's world view; contribution to the creation of a student's personality; development of the intellect; encouragement of respect for other peoples; and exposure to modes of thought outside one's native…

Jane Tompkins, a Duke University (North Carolina) English professor, is working to transform the conventional approach to college teaching from combative to communal, focusing on students' personal development as well as their intellect and deemphasizing faculty career development. Critics feel her approach is extreme and unreasonable; supporters…