AbstractsPrincipal leadership: what does it look like, and how might it evolve?
Number 42, June 2008
In the 1980s literature on school leadership called for principals to be instructional leaders. However, research found that such a leadership style was uncommon, especially at secondary level. Principals reported difficulties in playing this role, and ‘teachers, importantly, did not believe principals should be involved in instructional leadership’. In reality principals understand that there are different ways to lead effectively, influenced by different contexts. Ken Leithwood and his colleagues offer a helpful definition of school leadership that covers four elements. Firstly, leaders build a vision and set a direction for the school, establishing a shared sense of purpose and high expectations of performance in pursuit of group goals. Secondly, leaders understand and develop the knowledge, skills and dispositions of their staff. This aspect of leadership embraces individualised support, fostering intellectual stimulation and role modelling. Thirdly, leaders redesign the school as an organisation, to create supportive working conditions and to connect the school effectively to parents and the wider community. Fourthly, leaders manage the school learning program, monitoring school activity and protecting teachers from undue distractions. All these elements of leadership take account of the school’s circumstances – the type of school, including its location, governance and demographic makeup – and the wider political context. Leaders are not put off by complexity; rather, they celebrate it. Leaders also need to keep up-to-date with theories of learning and apply this knowledge. Leaders should be able to demonstrate expertise in at least one curriculum area and be able to discuss all areas. Leaders need to make decisions based on evidence, and be able to understand research findings and apply them to policy, programs and practice. KLA Subject HeadingsSchool principalsSchool leadership Leadership Seeing thinking on the Web
Volume 41
Number 3, May 2008;
Pages 305–319
Useful historical sources abound on the Internet, but History students need to learn how to evaluate them. The website historicalthinkingmatters.org offers teachers ways to show and impart the nature of historical reading and thinking. The site provides video clips of ‘think alouds’ in which historians, presented with an historical text to examine, articulate their efforts at interpretation. Their talk is ‘filled with the hems and haws, false starts and switchbacks, wrong turns and self-corrections’. The clips are no longer than 90 seconds, so as to hold students’ attention and limit use of bandwidth. The documents are on subjects entirely outside the historian’s area of expertise. An important part of their role is to describe what they don’t know and to ‘find problems’ for themselves. The website owners write commentaries on each historian’s contributions, spelling out the strategies evident in what they say. For example, PhD student Natalia Mehlman, whose area of expertise is bilingual and sex education in California in the 1970s, was asked to ‘think aloud’ about the text of an 1898 Senate speech praising land expropriation in Indiana. Using gesture and tone to communicate meaning, she described the context of westward expansion at the time, and she ‘read the silences’ in the text, eg the removal of indigenous peoples. The website commentary on her think aloud explained some terms she used such as ‘expropriation’. It drew attention to her contextualisation and her reading of silences and explicitly asked students to apply these techniques to their own work in future. Other historians’ contributions raised issues such as sourcing, and explicitly trying to identify to themselves what they do not know regarding a text. The website also includes clips from and commentaries about selected school students. The commentaries identify the students’ limitations and errors, such as ungrounded assumptions of causality or failure to address contradictions in sources, while also generalising these shortcomings from the individual student contributors. Key Learning AreasStudies of Society and EnvironmentSubject HeadingsHistoryThought and thinking Elearning Teaching and learning Multimedia systems Websites United States of America (USA) Web-based Holocaust denial: blurring information literacy boundaries
Volume 43
Number 2, 2008;
Pages 35–39
School subjects relating to ICT and the Internet tend to focus on technical mastery of technology. A number of resources on information literacy are available to overcome this limitation, including Tony Taylor’s Making History handbook. The handbook gives students a valuable approach to the critique of websites. It covers ways to locate information, validate sources, investigate the motivations of content creators, detect bias, assess the relevance of information, and separate fact from opinion. These strategies, all of which derive from print-based critical scaffolds, can be complemented by further strategies focusing on the distinctive features of the Web environment – features which Holocaust denial websites often exploit. Shane Borrowman applies the term ‘Ethos’ to two techniques used to enhance websites’ credibility. Academic Ethos refers to credibility based on academic recognition of a site’s contributors. Techno Ethos derives from the technical sophistication of the site. The current author’s own research in 2006 has led him to suggest further categories, which Holocaust denial websites exploit for rhetorical purposes. Liberal Ethos starts from the vast amount of Web material not filtered by processes traditionally used to review printed sources. Denial sites suggest to readers that such material includes ‘ideas the “thought police” do not want them to see’. Through Hypertext Ethos, denial sites build scholarly credibility through hyperlinks to a range of authoritative sources, intermingled with links to other denial websites. Mutual hyperlinks between websites can also be used to create an impression of a consensus of opinion around the ideas they espouse. Search Engine Ethos exploits the common illusion that search engines are an objective, comprehensive index of the Web. In fact, result rankings are influenced by popularity and also by meta-tags, so that, for example, the denial website air-photo.com may rank highly on search results for ‘Treblinka photos’. Multimedia Ethos has been used to enhance the impact of racist websites through the inclusion of interactive games and other appealing software. The article lists a range of Holocaust denial websites. The author, a Blashid Fellow at the Sydney Jewish Museum, advises teachers to obtain approval from the school and parents before using such material in classrooms. Key Learning AreasStudies of Society and EnvironmentSubject HeadingsWebsitesHistory Racism Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Information literacy Teaching Australian history: a temporally inclusive approach
Volume 26
Number 1, May 2008;
Pages 25–31
It is important that students learn to view history as intrinsically relevant to the present and the future as well as the past, as an ‘extended present’ characterised by multiple narratives that intersect and often conflict. However, this approach is not reflected adequately in the 2007 publication Guide to the Teaching of Australian History in Years 9 and 10 by the AHCRG. The topics of study end with the year 2000 and there is little, if any, discussion of how past events impact on the present and help to shape the future. History teachers and students need to develop the ‘temporal mobility’ to move freely between different perspectives on past, present and future, but the Guide is structured in a linear, chronological fashion. Its focus on the nation state as the unit of analysis is also questionable. More desirable would be the use of ‘temporally inclusive pedagogies’ that explicitly emphasise connectedness between past, present and future. For example, a history lesson on water shortages might begin with information on
Key Learning AreasStudies of Society and EnvironmentSubject HeadingsHistoryAustralia Secondary education The use of dynamic testing to reveal high academic potential and under-achievement in a culturally different population
Volume 24, 2008;
Pages 67–81
Children from non-European and low-SES cultural backgrounds are underrepresented in gifted education programs. This is partly due to a bias in the methods used to identify gifted students. A recent Australian study has used a dynamic testing method with Aboriginal students in Grades 3 to 5 in a rural district of New South Wales, using a pretest-intervention-posttest format to gauge children’s receptivity to instruction. The method was designed to identify ‘invisible’ underachievers, those whose school-assessed potential is significantly lower than their actual potential. The project involved 79 children and was endorsed by the Indigenous communities involved. The Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices (RSPM) test was used, a visual test that measures Spearman’s ‘g’ or ‘general intelligence’ without using language. Children were split into two groups matched according to their RSPM pretest scores. The experimental group received an intervention based on metacognitive skills, while the control group was given a placebo intervention. Both groups were retested after the intervention and again six weeks afterwards. Children in the experimental group scored significantly higher after the intervention, an effect which was persistent after six weeks. One child moved from the 18th percentile to the 91st percentile of performers in that age bracket. Children in the control group did not improve significantly post-intervention, but did show a slight improvement after six weeks. This was attributed to the socio-emotional aspect of the intervention that was given to both control and experimental groups, which focused on potential inhibiting factors in motivation and test performance. Four of the children scored in the ‘gifted’ range only after six weeks post-intervention, suggesting that the socio-emotional strategy instruction had a long-lasting effect. Based on initial test scores, only three per cent of children scored in the ‘gifted’ range, far below the expected rate in the general population. After the intervention this improved to 17 per cent, which approximated and even slightly exceeded the expected rate. Dynamic testing therefore appears to be effective in identifying gifted underachievers in a cultural minority population. KLA Subject HeadingsGifted childrenAboriginal students Australia Socially disadvantaged Assessment The production and distribution of Burarra talking books
Volume 23
Number 1, June 2008;
Pages 19–23
Talking books have been created in an Indigenous language to support children’s literacy in their home language. The Burarra language is spoken by approximately 1,000 people in Arnhem Land in the KLA Subject HeadingsLanguage and languagesInformation and Communications Technology (ICT) Aboriginal students Aboriginal peoples Northern Territory Literacy Australia A new beginning: Indigenous education
Volume 7
Number 3, September 2008;
Pages 34–37
The Prime Minister’s apology to the Stolen Generations earlier this year addressed the trauma and grief that is part of daily life for many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities around KLA Subject HeadingsAustraliaAboriginal students Child abuse The effectiveness of distance education vs. classroom instruction: a summary of Bernard's meta-analysis with implications for practice
Volume 35
Number 2, 2008;
Pages 138–144
Many studies have compared the effectiveness of distance education with classroom instruction, but many of them incorporate an inbuilt researcher bias. Attempts between 2000 and 2003 to synthesise the existing research proved inconclusive, reaching opposite conclusions and employing questionable methodologies. An extensive meta-analysis of 232 studies published since 1985 was conducted in 2004. The researchers were careful to avoid the methodological biases of previous work. The article summarises the findings of this detailed analysis and offers some implications for distance education practice. The study used three types of outcome measures: achievement, measured by objective test results; attitude, subjective opinions and evaluations; and student retention, the proportion of enrolled students completing a course. In total, the analysis included 57,019 students with achievement outcomes, 35,365 students with attitude outcomes, and 3,744,869 students with achievement outcomes. The most compelling finding was the extreme variability in distance education quality and outcomes. The strongest ‘predictor’ of student achievement and attitude was research methodology, indicating that differences in research design affected the findings substantially. Quality pedagogy was found to predict higher student achievement, regardless of instruction type, and the electronic media used also had a small but significant influence on achievement. In synchronous learning environments (real-time contact with the teacher), media but not pedagogy predicted students’ attitudes. In asynchronous learning environments both media and pedagogy had an impact on attitude. Student retention was not predicted by methodology, pedagogy or media type, but classroom instruction had a small positive effect on retention rates. Students learning mathematics, science and engineering in classrooms outperformed their distance education counterparts, while the reverse was true for computing, military and business subjects. The achievement of distance education students receiving asynchronous instruction was higher than for synchronous instruction, perhaps because of the added time for reflection. However, dropout rates and attitudes were substantially worse for asynchronous classes. Overall, distance education showed a slight advantage in terms of student achievement but a disadvantage in terms of retention rates and learning attitudes. Implications include the need for greater focus on pedagogy in distance education and finding a way to mix synchronous and asynchronous course delivery that retains the benefits of both. KLA Subject HeadingsDistance educationHave you Googled your teacher today? Teachers' use of social networking sitesMay 2008;
Pages 681–685
Social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace carry the potential to publicise teachers’ personal lives in an unprecedented way. Their use is extremely common among younger and pre-service teachers, who are often not aware of the professional implications of their online actions. An increasing number of teachers in the KLA Subject HeadingsTeaching professionTeacher-student relationships Internet Technology Teacher training Teaching and learning Teacher tool mimics social networking sites27 August 2008
An increasing number of US States are introducing online networking tools for teachers. The sites use the ‘learning team’ approach to professional development, which has educators discuss and reflect on teaching practices. The networks, for example TLINC, allow teachers to contact each other outside of working hours. They are based on social networking websites such as Facebook, and most of them connect new teachers to others in their teacher preparation classes, or to those who teach the same subject or year level. One network in KLA Subject HeadingsNetworkingTeaching profession Rural education Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Professional development The inherent interdependence of teachersJune 2008;
Pages 751–754
Teacher collaboration has been shown to help students learn, but collaboration is not the norm in most schools. Teachers of the same subject and year level are rarely given paid time for discussion and teamwork, and those who do conduct meetings are often forced to do so before or after school hours. Research in the KLA Subject HeadingsTeaching and learningTeaching profession Curriculum planning Gifted and talented: kick 'em while they're down?
Volume 7
Number 3, September 2008;
Pages 38–41
Catherine Scott’s opinion piece in The Professional Educator, April 2008 (see abstract in Curriculum Leadership, Vol 6 No15) argued that 'gifted' is an unhelpful label for children. This response to Scott's piece argues that gifted and talented children do in fact need special attention. The ‘gifted-and-talented industry’ is in fact very small, and the academics specialising in gifted and talented education have no higher status or salary than other academics. Educators in KLA Subject HeadingsGifted childrenGifted and talented (GAT) children Australia There are no Conferences available in this issue. |