This article argues that education leaders in this country, and indeed leaders of other public services, are facing life-changing decisions. The way ahead is full of possibilities and pitfalls. The article employs the metaphor of a railway journey to explore these. In particular it considers the implications for leaders in terms of how they…

Someone says, "I see what you mean"--a moment of relief. So, the reader has taken up-what I know, it is clear, they understand my point of view--they see what I see. But who is it that sees, and how exactly do they see? What if I cannot see what you see--if you cannot have my vantage--what if my vision was blurred, or dimmed, or absent? When I…

One of the nicest things about being on a search committee is getting to meet people from all over the campus, some of whom one had little or no contact with before. The downside of any search, though, despite some meals in classy restaurants, is the extra meetings, endless phone calls, numerous Equal Employment Opportunity and human-resources…

Based on 30 interviews with and observations of professionals, 5 prototypical metaphors of learning are described and related to existing theories about learning. Two of the metaphors were previously described by Sfard: the acquisition and participation metaphors. As well, three new metaphors were found: the discovery metaphor, the apperception…

This article examined whether semantic indeterminacy plays a role in comprehension of complex structures such as object relative clauses. Study 1 used a gated sentence completion task to assess which alternative interpretations are dominant as the relative clause unfolds; Study 2 compared reading times in object relative clauses containing…

This conceptual paper suggests and elaborates on the use of physiological metaphors pertaining to the systems and parts of the body as an approach for fostering an understanding of organizational theories among students of educational administration. The importance of this pursuit is related to the recognition that the students often reject the…

This research examines the role of teaching assistants (TAs) working with children with special educational needs (SEN) in an increasingly complex and diverse context. The role of the TA has been given more attention recently, partly due to the increased focus on their effectiveness within an inclusive education system in a time of workforce…

In a workshop setting, two pieces of recorded music were presented to a group of adult non-specialists; a key feature was to set up structured discussion within which the respondents considered each piece of music as a whole and not in its constituent parts. There were two areas of interest, namely to explore whether the respondents were likely to…

In spoken language comprehension, syntactic parsing decisions interact with prosodic phrasing, which is directly affected by phrase length. Here we used ERPs to examine whether a similar effect holds for the on-line processing of written sentences during silent reading, as suggested by theories of "implicit prosody." Ambiguous Korean sentence…

In this article I examine the collocational behaviour of groups of semantically related verbs (e.g., "head, run, manage") and nouns (e.g., "issue, factor, aspect") from the domain of business English. The results of this corpus-based study show that much of the collocational behaviour exhibited by these lexical items can be explained by examining…

This study presents our emerging understanding of the meaning of collaborative self-study as one of the mechanisms that facilitates effective, productive collaboration. Stemming from our experience of collaborative professional life over eight years, we explore the crisis we confronted as a professional learning community, the tensions underlying…

In this article the authors argue that the researcher reflective journal is a critical interpretive tool for conducting educational policy analysis. The idea for this research grew from the experiences of a doctoral candidate (Ruth) in pursuit of a policy focused dissertation and a series of on-going conversations with her qualitative…

In recent years, L2 researchers from the sociocultural and cognitive linguistic perspectives have emphasized the importance of properly organized explicit and in-depth grammar instruction for second or foreign language learning. Such instruction is believed to lead learners to systematic understanding of the target features faster and more…

Thousands of U.S. faculty travel abroad each year to teach host-country students (George, 1995). This study explores the "teach-abroad classroom", defined as "the teaching and learning processes and interactions between faculty and students" in this learning environment (George, 1987, 1995; Slethaug, 2007). Faculty and student…

With the highest attrition rate of any minority group enrolled in higher education institutions, American Indian/Alaska Native students rightly garner considerable attention. Researchers and administrators study the factors for both attrition and persistence. Such scrutiny calls for studies of those individuals who successfully navigated the…