On Making Determinations of Quality in Teaching

Fenstermacher, Gary D.; Richardson, Virginia

doi:10.1111/j.1467-9620.2005.00462.x

Cited by 298 publications

(267 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…Fullan and Stiegelbauer (1991) argued that successful change at the individual teacher level reflects three components: provision of materials, strategies (student, class, whole school, community) and beliefs, with teacher beliefs driving the actual change or initiative. The development of productive strategies and beliefs that are amenable to change are arguably built upon access to opportunities to develop good quality knowledge for teaching, such as subject-matter knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, and knowledge of students and their characteristics, as canvassed in a large corpus of literature about teachers' knowledge (e.g., Feiman-Nemser, 2001;Fenstermacher & Richardson, 2005;Grossman, 1995;Grossman & Stodolsky, 1995;Munby, Russell, & Martin, 2001;Shulman, 1986bShulman, , 1987. With the development of good quality knowledge for teaching, teachers are well-placed to have successful experiences, and in-turn, to develop good self-efficacy and agency for teaching.…”

Section: Teachers Are At the Core Of Promoting Mental Health In Schoolsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Australian and Maltese teachers' perspectives about their capabilities for mental health promotion in school settings

Askell–Williams

Cefai

2014

Teaching and Teacher Education

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There is international concern about the prevalence and severity of mental health difficulties and the impact such difficulties have upon individuals, families, communities and societies. Policy makers identify schools as strategic settings for promoting students' positive mental health, such as through the explicit teaching of social and emotional skills. Promoting students' mental health requires teachers to possess particular types of subject-matter knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, and knowledge of learners and their characteristics. However, mental health promotion is not typically addressed in pre-or in-service teacher education, thus raising questions about teachers' capabilities to enact policy directives for mental health promotion in schools. This paper reports a questionnaire study of 1029 Australian and Maltese teachers' perspectives about their capabilities for mental health promotion. Multilevel modelling showed significant response variations between teachers and between schools on 11 outcome factors. Maltese teachers' responses were significantly lower than Australian teachers on three outcome factors, namely, Knowledge, Teaching Resources and providing Parenting Support. Differences were also apparent between teachers of secondary and primary students, and between male and female teachers. Years of teaching experience did not show significant effects, highlighting that mental health promotion is a new area of professional learning for teachers. This study indicates that policy directives that situate mental health promotion initiatives in educational settings must be accompanied by opportunities for teachers and schools to build their capabilities in this relatively new domain of school and teacher responsibility. Our participating teachers have reported on issues of international concern, indicating that further attention to the capabilities of teachers and schools for mental health promotion in diverse cultural settings is warranted.

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Section: Teachers Are At the Core Of Promoting Mental Health In Schoolsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Australian and Maltese teachers' perspectives about their capabilities for mental health promotion in school settings

Askell–Williams

Cefai

2014

Teaching and Teacher Education

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“…When Fenstermacher and Richardson (2005) addressed the issue of quality in teaching they argued that it was useful to consider the nature of quality by working back from the specific features of examples generally recognised as indicating good quality teaching practice. We have taken such an approach here.…”

Section: Arguedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Framing the Features of Good-Quality Knowledge for Teachers and Students

Lawson¹,

Askell–Williams²

2012

Enhancing the Quality of Learning

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In this paper we have two concerns. First we consider the features used to describe good quality learning actions and knowledge representations. Our second concern is the need to develop students' knowledge of how to act, during teachinglearning transactions, in order to generate good quality knowledge representations.There is a convergence of views, at a broad level, about the character of good quality knowledge. Although there are frequent specifications of the features of good quality learning these discussions mostly do not build on one another so that a coherent representation of such learning is built up. There is therefore a need to consider further the characteristics of learning that are regarded as being of good quality. For this purpose we set out a framework based around six dimensions of good quality knowledge, namely, extent, well-foundedness, structure, complexity, generativity, and variety of representational format. In the final section of the chapter we advance arguments that point to the need to attend to the state of students' and teachers' knowledge about how to act, in strategic cognitive and metacognitive ways, in order to generate good quality knowledge representations.

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“…This also applies to how teacher agency is understood with regard to teachers working with students in creative and dynamic ways (Fenstermacher & Richardson 2005). Currently, policy texts tend to reduce teacher agency into a variety of audit trails that underplay their ability to enact generative learning in classrooms with their students (Robertson 2012).…”

Section: Realising Socially Just Social Cohesionmentioning

confidence: 99%