An examination of teachers in early childhood settings. Areas covered include: factors that impact on teacher quality; transformative pathways in becoming an early childhood teacher; Sensei - early childhood education teachers in Japan; and beliefs of early childhood teachers.

This volume explores early childhood education policies and practices in the Caribbean. Early childhood development has gained increasing importance as part of national agendas to achieve social and economic goals. Regional guidelines and action plans have been developed, but progress across nations varies. Chapters in the book analyze child policies and issues, critically examine progress on alignment between policies and practices, and propose recommendations for advocacy and implementation that may advance the early childhood development agenda throughout the Caribbean. The book includes the perspectives of early childhood practitioners, policymakers, caregivers, representatives from family agencies as well as other key stakeholders in the education of young children. Across these diverse viewpoints is a shared commitment to children's well being and the necessity of an integrated response that captures the challenges and opportunities of early childhood development services and initiatives that are framed based on contextual relevance and cultural appropriateness. Part One includes chapters that advocate for national policies throughout the Caribbean to support young children. Chapters in Part Two call for quality early childhood programming that is based on the tenets of developmentally appropriate practice. Part Three considers the pedagogical dilemmas that arise in math and literacy when schools negate purposeful and engaging early childhood curriculum. Part Four presents various perspectives on child protection and the necessary infrastructure of policies and practices to ensure cognitive, social, and physical development of young children in the Caribbean. This important resource promotes critical discourse on the current status of children and efforts that have been developed to effectively advocate for the rights of the young.

An up-to-date, authoritative and accessible exploration of the knowledge and skills necessary to be an effective teacher of secondary physical education. The central theme of the book is the promotion of learning, and the selection of content has been designed to ensure coverage of the theoretical and practical aspects of effective teaching for learning. Each chapter includes directed activities encouraging critical and active engagement with the text. 'Learning More' sections direct readers to further sources of guidance, web resources and key texts. Essential reading for those studying physical education at undergraduate and postgraduate level. >

Based on extended, intensive fieldwork in an Australian high school, Challenging the System illuminates issues faced on a daily basis by teachers and educational administrators in many parts of the world. Forsey highlights the tensions arising between neo-liberal emphasis on individual school communities as the engine for competitive excellence in education, and the need for those responsible for running public education to maintain some degree of equity across the whole system. He shows that reforms based purely on market forces are not only undesirable, they are imposible to achieve. Governments do not want to lose control of highly significant cultural and political

Widespread obesity, poor nutrition, sleep-deprivation, and highly digital and sedentary lifestyles are just a few of the many challenges facing young people. Although public schools in the United States have the potential for meeting these challenges on a mass scale, they are slow to respond. The emphasis on discrete subject areas and standardized test performance offers little in the way of authentic learning and may in reality impede health. Healthy Teens, Healthy Schools: How Media Literacy Education can Renew Education in the United States reframes health education as a complex terrain that resides within a larger ecosystem of historical, social, political, and global economic forces. It calls for a media literate pedagogy that empowers students to be critical consumers, creative producers, and responsible citizens. This book illustrates holistic health education through school-community initiatives and innovative partnerships that are successful in magnifying all curriculum subjects and their associated teaching practices. Vanessa Domine offers teachers, teacher educators, school administrators, community organizers, public health professionals, and policy makers with a transmedia and transdisciplinary educational approach to adolescent health to demonstrate how our collective focus on cultivating healthy teens will ultimately yield healthy schools.

Catholic high schools in the United States have been undergoing three major changes: the shift to primarily lay leadership and teachers; the transition to a more consumerist and pluralist culture; and the increasing diversity of students attending Catholic high schools. James Heft argues that to navigate these changes successfully, leaders of Catholic education need to inform lay teachers more thoroughly, conduct a more profound social analysis of the culture, and address the real needs of students.
After presenting the history of Catholic schools in the United States and describing the major legal decisions that have influenced their evolution, Heft describes the distinctive and compelling mission of a Catholic high school. Two chapters are devoted to leadership, and other chapters to teachers, students, alternative models of high schools, financing, and the key role of parents, who today may be described as ''post-deferential'' to traditional authorities, including bishops and priests.
Written by an award-winning teacher, scholar, and recognized educational leader in Catholic education, Catholic High Schools should be read by everyone interested in religiously- affiliated educational institutions, particularly Catholic education.

People generally acknowledge the superiority of adolescents in using technology tools needed for learning in the future. The purpose of this book is to describe an online polling strategy that allows adolescents to make known how they view conditions of learning at their school. A school improvement model illustrates how to combine results of student polling with stakeholders' perceptions in the scheme of school reform. Student polling differs from other strategies because the target for gathering data is a single school. This deliberately narrow base for sampling student opinion ensures poll results have local relevance that can motivate stakeholder involvement and guide their response. Over 14,000 secondary students have completed polls examined in the text. These ten polls include: career exploration, time management, selective attention and distraction, motivation for Internet learning, tutoring, peer support, cheating, frustration, cyberbullying, and school stress. Students are the stakeholders with the most to gain or lose in efforts to keep American education competitive. Accordingly, their views should be sought as part of decision making about reform. When student opinion and adult observation are considered, an intergenerational perspective can emerge that more accurately portrays institutional strengths and limitations. School principals, superintendents, and state department of education leaders are invited to consider a collaborative project with the authors. Software offers administrators rapid feedback on whole school results. Finding out how special education, gifted and talented, and second language acquisition students view their conditions of learning gives additional insight about school improvement.

Mastering Primary English introduces the primary English curriculum and helps trainees and teachers learn how to plan and teach inspiring lessons that make English learning irresistible. Topics covered include: * Current developments in English * English as an irresistible activity * English as a practical activity * Skills to develop in English * Promoting curiosity * Assessing children in English * Practical issues This guide includes examples of children's work, case studies, readings to reflect upon and reflective questions that all help to exemplify what is considered to be best and most innovative practice. The book draws on the experience of two leading professionals in primary English, Wendy Jolliffe and David Waugh, to provide the essential guide to teaching English for all trainee and qualified primary teachers.

This monograph celebrates the 50th anniversary of Michael Young's iconic book "The Rise of the Meritocracy" by analysing the ideas behind meritocracy, citizenship and education and offering an extension to Young's initial findings.Young's iconic book "The Rise of the Meritocracy", not only coined the word meritocracy but contained a prescient warning about the dangers of pursuing the vision of a meritocratic society.This fascinating book takes this anniversary as its starting point for an analysis and critique of meritocracy, citizenship and education. Part I begins with two substantial chapters - the first discussing Young's book and its influence, and the second the revival of support for meritocracy under New Labour in the UK, with particular reference to its implications for education; the third chapter then examines and critiques the ways New Labour has interpreted the idea of active citizenship.Part II examines issues of continuity and change in New Labour policy on schools, the curriculum, and the professions (especially but not only the teaching profession).Issues raised in Part I are revisited in Part III, which is devoted to an analysis of policy responses to the problems of multiculturalism and their relation to immigration policy and ideas of a common civic culture in both Britain and overseas. In all the sections, the aim is to go beyond exposition to develop a sustained critique, particularly of New Labour's over-centralizing tendencies and the associated erosion of local and institutional democracy.

This book offers a unique and critical explication of teachers' understanding and experience of care during a period of regulatory scrutiny and 'notice to improve'. Written following research in a primary school in the north of England, it draws on the findings of an institutional ethnography to reveal the institutional mediation of the teachers' everyday work. Written from a critical interpretivist standpoint, the focus moves away from care as essentialist practice by foregrounding the teachers' talk, through 'I' poems, to explicate the political mediation of care. Care is understood, experienced and operates in a social milieu. It is not fixed and, importantly, is not understood as a practice or an emotional exchange between one person and another. In this book, Joan Tronto's (1993) argument for a 'political ethic of care' is utilised as a conceptual framework for understanding teachers' experiences. It is an alternative to approaches that individualise a teacher's caring practices as only belonging in the intimate, proximal domains of care giving and care receiving.

This book offers unique insights into elite Nigerian parents' engagement with, and use of, the international secondary education market as they attempt to retain their social standing - via their children - under today's shifting global conditions. Throughout, the book tackles two important, albeit uncomfortable questions: Why does whiteness hold the highest possible value in postcolonial societies such as Nigeria? And, more importantly, why do black people accept the hegemonic discourse that West/white is best? Combining the theoretical frameworks of Pierre Bourdieu and Frantz Fanon, the book reveals 'Whiteness' as a highly valuable form of cultural and symbolic capital that plays a crucial role in the formation of, and struggle for, elite status and distinction in modern-day Nigeria. Drawing on rare qualitative data sets along with postcolonial literatures, the book reveals how British whiteness is used by those working at and for British private schools in Nigeria (BPS-NIG) as an informal but powerful mechanism of 'quality' control, and in constructing the image of 'world-class' educational establishments.

As anyone who lives, works, or spends any time with teenagers knows, adolescence can be both the best of times and the worst of times. Teenagers are undergoing miraculous, world-altering shifts. In light of these changes, how can society help adolescents move safely from teen to adult? How can adults and adolescents engage with each other in ways that are positive and mutually beneficial to one another's journeys?

In "We Reap What We Sow," author Dr. Anne W. Nordholm blends philosophical and educational approaches to demonstrate how you can cocreate an abundant future and help you guide a young person toward an engaging and meaningful adult life. She first describes what it means to know ourselves and the difference that knowledge can make. She then offers strategies that, when modeled by adults, adolescents absorb not from what we say but how we behave.

Every person must figure out a life that is individual, is connected to a community, and has a particular historical context. This guide explores how we know and connect to our communities and how historical consciousness assists us in finding and creating meaningful work. It also considers how we can be better guides to the next generation via skilled and disciplined communication and reconsiders the institutions we've established for adolescent learning to better reflect what we understand as effective adult maturation.

Through the strategies presented in "We Reap What We Sow," adults can help youth navigate adolescence to become healthy, thriving human beings.

Research on middle level education indicates that student learning at the middle level has a deep and abiding influence on post-secondary opportunities and career paths. As research continues to highlight the urgency of engaging middle level students in academic learning, it is increasingly clear that these students' multiple literacies must become a part of teaching and learning. Understanding how to infuse the literacies of middle level students across classroom activities is a critical part of improving student achievement. This volume in The Handbook series shares literacy research from multiple contexts and deepens our understanding of the literaciesthat middle level students use in and out of school. This volume includes research that identifies how to best teach and learn with our increasingly diverse students. The perspectives that emerge from this volume help us examine the current state of new and evolving literacies and construct a cutting edge research agenda for middle level literacy education. Research reports focus on digital literacies including social networking media and games, English language learners, high stakes literacy tests and middle level learners, specifically boys, and literacy teaching and learning in middle level teacher education programs. A wide range of research methods and modes are used in these reports including case studies, teacher research, narrative inquiry, survey research, and action research.

As an exchange student, you receive the opportunity to venture into another culture and see it through your own eyes. By living with a host family and attending a secondary school, you become part of the local community, you learn the language, and you experience a new culture from the inside out. Even so, an exchange year is not one long holiday. It can be tough, and it may take time to adjust to the new culture and find new friends. In The Exchange Student Guidebook, author Olav Schewe presents a practical handbook to prepare you for life as an exchange student and help you tackle common challenges. It provides useful advice regardless of your destination country, but also contains a special section for students destined for the United States. In plain English and from a student's perspective, it gives you the information you need to make your experience successful and memorable. Schewe considers understanding the basics of student exchange; evaluating reasons for going; choosing a destination country and exchange organization; living in a foreign culture; staying with a host family; finding new friends; and dealing with homesickness and other challenges. Filled with practical advice and tips, The Exchange Student Guidebook provides you with a foundation for enjoying a year abroad.

This book explores how concepts and values of contemporary democracy are variously understood and applied in diverse cultural contexts, with a focus on children and childhood and diversity. Drawing on a range of methodological approaches relevant to early childhood education, it discusses young children's engagement and voice. The book identifies existing practices, strengths, theories and considerations in democracy in early childhood education and childhood, highlighting the democratic participation of children in cultural contexts. Further, it illustrates how democracy can be evident in early childhood practices and interactions across a range of curriculum contexts and perspectives, and considers ways of advancing and sustaining practices with positive transformational opportunities to benefit children and wider ecological systems. It offers readers insights into what democracy and citizenship look like in lived experience, and the issues affecting practice and encouraging reflection and advocacy.

Researchers, educators, professional organizations, administrators, parents, and policy makers have increased their involvement in the assessment and evaluation of early childhood education programs. This interest has developed swiftly during the last decades. The National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) and the National Association of Early Childhood Specialists in State Departments of Education (NAECS/SDE) developed a position statement titled, "Early childhood curriculum, assessment, and program evaluation: Building an effective, accountable system in programs for children birth through age 8," to address related trends, issues, guiding principles, and values. Appropriate and well-designed evaluations need to address several audiences including researchers, educators, policy makers, children, and parents. They need to encourage the implementation of a strong foundation that improves the quality of the children's education. Child assessment and program evaluation can lead to effective results and better accountability for preschool, kindergarten, and primary school programs. The purpose of this volume is to share a collection of research strands on contemporary perspectives on research in assessment and evaluation in early childhood education. It provides a review and critical analysis of the literature on assessment and evaluation of programs, children, teachers, and settings. The volume begins with a brief introductory chapter that presents the reader with a map of the area, laying out the issues and alternatives, and linking these to the chapters that follow. It addresses several areas including (1) understanding assessment and evaluation with young children, (2) schools and assessment implications, (3) teacher evaluation and professional development, (4) social relationships and assessment, (5) content areas in early education assessment, (6) technology and assessment, and (7) conclusion with future research directions in assessment and evaluation in early childhood education. The volume is of interest to researchers, educators, policy makers, university faculty, graduate students, and general readers who are interested in research on assessment and evaluation in early childhood education. The chapters are authored by established scholars in the field.

Mastering Primary Science introduces the primary science curriculum and helps trainees and teachers learn how to plan and teach inspiring lessons that make science learning irresistible. Topics covered include: * Current developments in primary science * Science as an irresistible activity * Science as a practical activity * Skills to develop in science * Promoting curiosity * Assessing children in science * Practical issues This guide includes examples of children's work, case studies, readings to reflect upon and reflective questions that all help to exemplify what is considered to be best and most innovative practice. The book draws on the experience of two leading professionals in primary science, Amanda McCrory and Kenna Worthington, to provide the essential guide to teaching science for all trainee and qualified primary teachers.