Table 7 - uploaded by Snezana Jokic
Content may be subject to copyright.
Source publication
Citations
... is ecological perspective results in our seeing schools as living systems -inherently unstable, interdependent networks that cannot be understood through mechanical analytical processes. Instead, we envision a holistic interpretation of how a school's social systems are created by the people within: interconnected, developing, and progressing (Clarke, 2000;Mitchell & Sackney, 2011;Wheatley, 1999). In this ecological view, no one aspect of a system is thought of as a separate entity from other parts; instead there is an emphasis on connectedness, relationships, and contextual interdependency. ...
Anchored within the pan-Canadian research exploration of teacher induction and mentorship programs, this hopeful and resource-filled book provides a unique collection of perspectives on the bliss and blisters
of early career teaching. Over 40 educators offer a wide, deep, and rich array of descriptions of, and prescriptions for, both the difficult and the delightful realities associated with being a new teacher and supporting
new teachers. This book is an excellent resource for teacher educators, mentors, scholars, program coordinators, practicum and course instructors, school administrators, policy makers, teacher candidates, and
new teachers who wish to hear the voices of their colleagues, mentors, and experts with across-Canada viewpoints.
... Life skills have been defined as -the abilities for adaptive and positive behavior that enable individuals to deal effectively with the demands and challenges of everyday life (Clarke, 2001). Life skills include psychosocial competencies and interpersonal skills that help people make informed decisions, solve problems, think critically and creatively, communicate effectively, build healthy relationships, empathize with others, and cope with managing their lives in a healthy and productive manner (Clarke, 2001). ...
... Life skills have been defined as -the abilities for adaptive and positive behavior that enable individuals to deal effectively with the demands and challenges of everyday life (Clarke, 2001). Life skills include psychosocial competencies and interpersonal skills that help people make informed decisions, solve problems, think critically and creatively, communicate effectively, build healthy relationships, empathize with others, and cope with managing their lives in a healthy and productive manner (Clarke, 2001). Essentially, there are two kinds of skills -those related to thinking termed as thinking skills and skills related to dealing with others termed as social skills. ...
... Improving student support is inextricably tied to student engagement, and engagement for each student can only be accomplished through a more personalized academic and intellectual programme. Various researchers (Clarke, 2001;Delgado, 2001;Gartin, 2002;Burden, 2005) have referred to student support as including: mentoring, counseling, coaching, advice and guidance and tutoring. In addition, students can be given academic support through extra lessons, remedial lessons, reading labsthese should be facilitated by a qualified and dedicated person who supports the school's vision. ...
... Gerçeklik özneldir ve duruma özgü bulgular önem taĢır. Bilgi, öğrenenlerin kapasiteleri ve ilgi alanlarına göre istedikleri zaman ulaĢabilecekleri bir hale gelmiĢtir (Clarke, 2000 Resim 2 düşünce düzeyinde meydana gelen oldukça devamlı bir değişiklik (BaltaĢ, 2004) olarak kabul eden görüĢler tamamen geçersiz olmasa da, bilgi ve öğrenmeye iliĢkin yeni ve daha kapsamlı bir tanımlama ihtiyacını doğurmaktadır. Öğrenme, günümüz dünyasında, soyut ve dinamik bir süreç olarak karĢımızda durmaktadır (Öneren, 2008). ...
... This community tries to adapt and improve rather than deliberately achieve specific goals. This in turn presupposes a shift in thinking about leadership itself, with an increasing call for 'transformational' approaches which distribute and empower, rather than 'transactional' approaches which sustain traditional concepts of hierarchy and control (Clarke, 2000; Harris et al., 2013). Transformative leadership is fully compatible with instructional leadership, since both point to school development and improvement through inspiration, intellectual stimulation and individual consideration (Antonakis, Avolio, & Sivasubramaniam, 2003; Bass, Avolio, & Atwater, 1996; Leithwood, 1992; Leithwood, Tomlinson, & Genge, 1996). ...
This study aims at investigating primary school principals’ work on a daily basis in order to understand the ways in which the centralized educational system affects their practices. Four typical cases of principals were selected and asked to keep daily records for a period of four months. Data from logs were complemented with data collected through semi-structured interviews with the principals as well as through discussions with the teaching staff. Results show that the transactional-bureaucratic model in line with the current legislation and administration tradition shapes principals’ activities to a large extent. School administration, school organization and internal relationships are the most important areas of principals’ activities. Educational-pedagogic issues constitute only a marginal area of their activities. The homogenization of principals’ activities is so high that they do not seem to be affected either by school contextual factors or by the individual principals’ personal traits. However, features pointing towards a more transformative-instructional model of leadership were identified. These features are: (a) the democratic-participative nature of decision-making, (b) the intimate relationships existing in most schools and (c) the motivation that some principals have towards creating a unique identity of their school and communicate it to the hierarchy and the community.
... Utilizing this ecological perspective, we view schools as living systems -inherently unstable, interdependent networks that cannot be understood through mechanical analytical processes, but through a holistic interpretation of how a school's social systems, created by the people within it, interconnect, develop and progress (Clarke, 2000;Mitchell & Sackney, 2011;Wheatley, 1999). In the ecological view, no one aspect of a system can be thought of as a separate entity from any other part; instead, there is an emphasis on connectedness, relationships and contextual interdependency. ...
As establishing and fostering trust are imperative activities for school leaders, cognizance of the fundamental importance of trust is essential for the leader’s moral agency and ethical decision-making. In this article, we use an ecological perspective to uncover the dynamics of the lifecycle of trust as evident from extant literature on leadership in general and educational leadership in particular. Upon describing the role of trust in leadership and moral agency, we outline the importance of trust in school organizations and describe its fragile nature. Furthermore, we review the pertinent literature with respect to lifecycle stages (most often overlapping and without any set boundaries) of establishing, maintaining, sustaining, breaking and restoring trust in educational settings. We conclude that understanding the dynamic nature and ecological lifecycle of trust is an important undertaking for school leaders because they, as moral agents, are called to model and mediate the pervasive trust-related processes in schools.
... The place of formal regulations is taken by the patterns of work embedded in the organizational culture, much more suitable for dealing with the growing uncertainty that characterizes teachers' work in postmodern societies. This approach leads towards a free-flowing and emergent approach to strategy (Clarke 2002) which means that, although some actions will be developed from formal and intentional plans, many others will not. Instead, they will emerge from a wide span of individual and group initiatives. ...
The need for innovation in the Spanish educational system has become
more evident in the wake of the last PISA reports. To find our own way to achieve
better schools we must take advantage of what schools that managed to sustain
changes over time have learnt from such a process. This paper reports on findings
from an inquiry that tried to shed light on the knowledge embedded in the practices
of schools commended by external advisers as they had institutionalized a recognisable dynamic of changes. In order to meet this goal, five primary, four secondary
and one special education school—most of them in challenging contexts—from two
different regions in Spain were studied by means of ethnographic methodologies.
The results described in this paper depict the main levers for improvement shared by
these schools. Important support for change processes was found in the narratives
deployed about the disadvantaged context surrounding the schools and the high
value of teaching in these circumstances. On the other hand, the leadership that
supported the change dynamics was clearly distributed and the leaders used diverse
power sources in order to tackle changing contexts. Other key factors that apparently facilitated the sustainability of change were the priority given to supportive
school climates; organizational cultures that encouraged teachers to take risks and
essay new ways of teaching; and the practice of innovation by adopting an emergent, unplanned, free-flowing pattern. These findings are discussed in the light of
common issues of the recent school improvement literature such as: sustainability,
organizational knowledge and learning, communities of practice and building
capacity to change.
... To accomplish this aim, teachers often make use of different teaching strategies and techniques to maximize their students' performance. In an extensive review of the literature, Mahlo and Taole (2011) suggest the following strategies to improve student performance: (i) effective management and leadership (Kurian, 2008); (ii) support programs for both students and faculty (SIAS, 2008); (iii) behavioral modification with an emphasis on discipline in public schools especially (e.g., Mestry, Moloi, & Mahomed, 2007;Moloi & Mahomed, 2007;Squelch, 2001); (iv) an integrated life skills program comprising disciplined work habits, a caring attitude, and the ability to cope as well as to create ones' own opportunities (Rooth, 2000); and (v) family and/or parental involvement Kurian, 2008), and capacity building for teacher support (De Clercq, 2008;Clarke, 2001). ...
The study investigates the influence of a father and mothers education on the academic achievement of their child. The investigation is based on data sourced from the 2009 Southern African Consortium for Monitoring Education Quality survey comprising 5,148 records of sixth grade students enrolled in Ugandan primary schools. Students percentage scores in the health sciences, reading, and numeracy tests were adopted as a measure of academic achievement. The analysis was carried out using summary statistics and a multiple linear regression clustered by six geographical regions in Uganda: central, eastern, western, northern, southwestern, and northeastern. In addition to father and mothers education, students test scores in the various disciplines were analyzed by the characteristics of age, sex, rural-urban residence, grade repetition status (any grade), and length of pre-primary education. The results showed that the level of a fathers education required to predict whether the child will achieve better scores in all disciplines was primary education. However, a mother required secondary and post-secondary education to enable the child to obtain better scores in reading and numeracy, respectively. Much of the previous literature has suggested that children born to educated parents have higher academic achievement; the results of this study support this finding but also reveal a difference in the levels of a father and mothers education required to predict their childs achievement of better scores in formal education.
... We are dangerously ignorant of our own ignorance, and rarely see things as a whole. (Lovelock, 2006: xiv) Whereas earlier ideas proposed the notion of a learning school functioning as a network in a deliberate, orchestrated strategy for improving the quality of educational provision (Clarke, 2000), I now recognize that this in itself is severely limited as it implicitly accepts an educational hegemony that is now recognizably unsustainable. Over a decade of work in the field in the pursuit of creating Learning Communities has taught me that there are new and essential issues to tackle if we are to make progress in a pursuit of an educated citizen -a commitment to interconnectedness, and a willingness to develop strategic understanding of the consequences of interconnectedness take us much further into the interplay between individual and group, between one living community and another and as such, it has caused me to have to rethink the place of education within a much wider sphere of human encounters and activities. ...
In this short discussion article I develop some earlier writing on the theme of education, improvement and sustainability (see references). It builds upon my primary criticism of the school improvement movement that it is accustomed to thinking of education as good in and of itself. As David Orr suggests candidly in his essay in the early 1990s, `It is not education that will save us, but education of a certain kind (Orr, 1994/2004). My assertion is that the type of education that is being advanced through the school improvement movement is simply not the kind that we need to tackle some of the most pressing challenges we now face in the form of environmental change and the looming post-oil economy (Stern Review, 2006).
... The discussion around the professional work of teachers was once high on the education agenda, particularly in the 1990s (Hargreaves & Goodson, 1996). Nevertheless, the terms professionalism , professionals, and professional work still surface in many discussions due to the growing public interest in teaching and in improved schooling (Clarke, 2000; Goodlad & McMannon, 1997). Even though a number of definitions have been applied to professionalism , professionals, and professional work (Driscoll, 1998; Eraut, 1995; Hargreaves & Goodson, 1996), in the present article I use the definition proposed by Skrtic (1991), according to which professional work is " complex work for which the required knowledge and skills have been codified " (p. ...
Professionalism arose concurrently with coordination policies among service providers and between parents and service providers in deaf education practices. The author examines the effects of professionalism on coordination among service providers from different disciplines (deaf education, speech-language pathology, elementary education, secondary education, audiology, otolaryngology, and pediatrics), as well as coordination between parents and these service providers in multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary teams in the light of her own experience as a teacher of children who are deaf and hard of hearing in Cyprus. The author concludes that professionalism and coordination can coexist, and that the key issue in this relationship is the personal attitudes of those involved.
... Problematising knowledge claims, and foregrounding the orientation taken by different people to the work that interests them, is a way in which the position of the knowledge worker can be open to scrutiny. This is beginning to take place through debates about field purposes and boundaries in relation to both instrumental and scientific approaches (Clarke 2000, Gunter 1997, 2001, MacBeath and Mortimore 2001, Thrupp 1999). Talking about knowledge with users and producers such as headteachers and teachers means that research cannot just be 'cherry picked' in ways to support a particular policy imperative but instead is presented as contested and developmental. ...
Incl. bibl., abstract This article begins by presenting four main positions on the leadership in education territory: critical, humanistic, instrumental and scientific. It is argued that the current generic and globalised model of transformational leadership is rooted in the latter two positions and is the preferred model within government policy in England. The article then goes on to focus on the knowledge claims underpinning critical approaches by firstly, exploring the concerns raised about transformational leadership; and, secondly, examining alternative approaches to leadership theory and practice. In particular, emphasis is put on how the epistemology of research and theorising in critical work is inclusive of practice, connects practice with the processes of democratisation, and so opens up possibilities for teacher, student and community leadership as an educative relationship.
