Behind Successful Refugee Parental Engagement: The Barriers and Challenges

This two-year study examined the barriers and challenges encountered by refugee parents as they negotiate their children’s successful transition into a new school system. The researchers sought to determine what can be learned from parent and educator experiences of these obstacles in order to optimize parent–teacher collaboration for refugee families. Contextualized within a LEAD (Literacy, English and Academic Development) program in an urban centre in Western Canada, the study triangulated data from focus groups comprising Syrian and Iraqi Arabic-speaking families, teachers, and settlement workers. The data were qualitatively analyzed by incorporating Epstein’s six types of parental involvement, a culturally responsive model accounting for parental engagement within the context of home-school-community collaboration (Epstein & Sheldon, 2006). From this model, the researchers make recommendations that include province-wide initiatives to support leadership and teacher training, mandated programming to support refugee and immigrant youth, and the establishment and expansion of board and in-school settlement best practices province-wide.

Õpimustritest muusikateose omandamisel klaveri algõppes

This article was inspired by the first author’s observations in the teaching process, which refer to different learning patterns in studying a piece of music. I have noticed that although I teach all the students by using quite the same methods, part of them remember the pieces rather quickly and they prefer to play and practise them from memory. Some others, on the other hand, prefer to play from notes, and they continue doing it during the whole learning process. The aim of this article is to find, by an evidence-based method, the occurrence of the abovementioned learning patterns and describe their characteristic features. In case peculiarities occur, which can be projected against the typology of different learning patterns, it is possible to study connections with the earlier learning styles and learning and information processing theories. It also enables us to offer applications for a more person-centred approach in piano pedagogy to enhance both the learning process, student-teacher collaboration, and the student’s development as well as make them subjectively more pleasant for both parties. To investigate the learning patterns in basic piano studies, I video-recorded the classes with students of possibly similar backgrounds, giving them tasks testing their memory and note-reading skills. Based on the analysis of the collected information, I made conclusions about the existence and nature of hypothetical intuitive learning patterns. The interesting observations made by formal and non-formal examination add material for future in-depth studies, as the described phenomenon should be approached, above all, as a continuum, which enables us to estimate students’ inclination towards one or the other side to a greater or lesser extent, and consequently, the application of a better adapted teaching strategies.

Repetita Iuvant? A Repeated Randomized Controlled Trial on the Effectiveness of an At-Scale Teacher Professional Development Program

Background A recent stream of literature recognizes the impact of good/poor implementation on the effectiveness of programs. However, implementation is often disregarded in randomized controlled trials (RCTs) because they are run on a small scale. Replicated RCTs, although rare, provide a unique opportunity to study the relevance of implementation for program effectiveness. Objectives Evaluating the effectiveness of an at-scale professional development program for lower secondary school math teachers through two repeated RCTs. Research Design The program lasts a full school year and provides innovative methods for teaching math. The evaluation was conducted on two cohorts of teachers in the 2009/10 and 2010/11 school years. The program and RCTs were held at scale. Participating teachers and their classes were followed for 3 years. Impact is estimated by comparing the math scores of treatment and control students. Subjects The evaluation involved 195 teachers and their 3940 students (first cohort) and 146 teachers and their 2858 students (second cohort). Measures The key outcome is students’ math achievement, measured through standardized assessment. Results In the first wave, the program did not impact on students’ achievement, while in the second wave, a positive, persistent, and not insignificant effect was found. After excluding other sources of change, different findings across waves are interpreted in the light of improvements in the program implementation, such as enrollment procedure, teacher collaboration, and integration of innovation in daily teaching. Conclusions Repeated assessment of interventions already at-scale provides the opportunity to better identify and correct sources of weak implementation, potentially improving effectiveness.

The Fourth Wall of Professional Learning and Cultures of Collaboration

Recent innovations in professional development are rife with a wide array of efforts focused on teacher collaboration. In this essay, we address some of the unexamined assumptions about the nature and significance of interactions in teacher professional collaboration, drawing on the concept of the “fourth wall” from theater and film studies. The fourth wall is a term used to describe the invisible wall that separates actors from their audience. We use this metaphor to interrogate the function of the fourth wall in professional learning and argue that it reflects a culture of professional learning that, despite innovations that tout teacher collaboration, upholds isolation in teaching and teacher learning and deep embedded norms of noninterference in one another’s practice. We also attend to the possibilities for supporting teacher learning that breaching the fourth wall affords when shared enactments of practice are used as a context for teachers’ sensemaking and collaboration.

Development of an intervention framework for school improvement that is adaptive to cultural context

The challenge of educational improvement, due mainly to the complexity of educational systems, is well-known. The aim of this study is to provide knowledge regarding the process of change within schools to better understand how it might depend on cultural context and the characteristics of individual schools. Based on interventions in four compulsory schools (6–15 years old students) in Iceland, the study uses both qualitative and quantitative data. The process of change was guided by a framework grounded in professional learning community principles and designed to be adaptive for cultural contexts as well as the interdependence of different factors of educational systems. Theories of drivers of change and indicators of schools as professional learning communities were used to understand cultural conditions within them. The main findings indicate that the change process in team-driven schools with relatively high levels of teacher collaboration and engagement works well in the framework. By contrast, the change process seemed restrained in the profession-driven and problem-driven schools characterised by either a high level of teacher autonomy and lack of collaboration or engagement in solving several generic problems. The study provided valuable insights regarding the complexity of facilitating change, particularly, the importance of identifying main drivers of change affecting an intervention process at the initiation stage.