This study examines how newcomers use colleagues as role models in organizational socialization, taking a multiple level approach to organizational socialization as individual, social and cultural learning processes. The newcomers most important personal characteristics are expectations, experience, self-confidence and competitive instinct. These…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to review the literature on observation of teaching in a Higher Education (HE) context with a view to proposing some guidelines for the design and practice of institutional systems to observe teaching. Design/methodology/approach: A literature review and a proposed model for a system of observation of teaching…

Do 9-month-old infants motorically simulate actions they perceive others perform? Two experiments tested whether action observation, like overt reaching, is sufficient to elicit the Piagetian A-not-B error. Infants recovered a toy hidden at location A or observed an experimenter recover the toy. After the toy was hidden at location B, infants in…

Objective: New residency training directors are often faced with multiple competing tasks such as meeting Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) Psychiatry Program Requirements and achieving successful completion of residency review committee (RRC) site visits. For many years, the authors have presented workshops on this…

Fifty-two clinic-referred (20) and volunteer (32) mother-child dyads were observed in their home settings for 1 hour per dyad. Observers monitored the mothers' responsiveness during interactions with their children, and mothers' use of ''do'' and ''don't'' instructions were recorded; the children's compliance with instructions was also recorded,…

Alternate forms reliability of the Behavioral Relaxation Scale (BRS; Poppen,1998), a direct observation measure of relaxed behavior, was examined. A single BRS score, based on long duration observation (5-minute), has been found to be a valid measure of relaxation and is correlated with self-report and some physiological measures. Recently,…

In this article, the author discusses a project involving the observation of 12 teachers in different schools, teaching pupils at Key Stage 3 of differing ages and abilities, noting both questioning techniques used and pupils' responses. The teachers involved were volunteers, chosen to give a range of experience, styles, and school, and included a…

Students' established conclusions about the world can often hinder a teacher's efforts to suggest new ideas and new ways to pursue alternative explanations. Flexible thinking helps students practice the value that one's present conclusions should remain tentative and subject to re-evaluation. Meinig's ten alternative perspectives for seeing a…

This article reports an empirical study of classroom observation of two general English lessons that examined the effects of teachers' referential questions on learners' responses in two ESL classrooms. The study found that in both classes, the teachers asked many more referential questions than display questions, contrary to earlier findings.…

This paper gives an overview of the situation of home education in Germany. The first results from a predominantly qualitative research project are presented. This combines participant observation, content analysis and qualitative interviews for a thorough sociological analysis of the German home education movement. Compulsory school attendance…

The application range of Cohen's Kappa is extended to the field of sequential observation data, where omission mistakes of an observer may often occur. It is shown how the omission mistakes can be incorporated into the calculation of the Kappa coefficient without violating the statistic it is based on. The enhanced coefficient is termed Kappa…

This study investigated the practice of an expert reading coach as she provided lesson observation and feedback to an experienced kindergarten teacher. Data sources for the study included three cycles of observation of coaching sessions and guided reading instruction, as well as interviews. The report describes (a) the coach's modeling of…

This paper reviews New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's education reform agenda, "Children first", in the light of organizational theory. I argue that this reform agenda reflects both coercive and mimetic isomorphism, as Bloomberg uses mayoral control to apply business concepts and practices to New York City's public school system.…

Videoconferencing is not a new technology and it has been widely used in educational settings since the mid-1980s. Videoconferencing has evolved into the integration of personal computers to what is now referred to as Web conferencing. In the mid-1990s, Internet Protocol (IP) was introduced into the mainstream but the educational community has…

Evaluation of teaching remains an inaccurate undertaking. Many believe that taking into factor the numbers of classes taught, students taught, graduate students supervised, honors contacts made, and undergraduates mentored are the best quantifiable measures for teaching. However, this author argues that such measures do little to provide a useful…