Active Facilitation: What Do Specialists Need to Know and How Might They Learn It?

Sustained, innovative professional development is now widely acknowledged as essential to the improvement of mathematics instruction in the nation’s schools. In recent years, this recognition has prompted the production of a variety of materials designed to support new teacher development programs. However, with the availability of such materials, serious concerns arise as to the kinds of knowledge required of professional development providers, often teachers who have been assigned Mathematics Specialist roles, and the means by which this knowledge is to be acquired. The authors of this paper address such questions in the context of one professional development seminar, Developing Mathematical Ideas [1]. Our paper builds on the research of Remillard and Geist who identify the potential for learning in those moments of discontinuity—“openings in the curriculum —in which the beliefs, knowledge, and commitments of seminar participants diverge from those of facilitators or materials developers [2]. By looking closely at several such moments. we establish how successful facilitation entails deep content knowledge, awareness of seminar goals, and appreciation of the beliefs and understandings of seminar participants. We then describe the kinds of supports available to DMI facilitators to help them cultivate the skills and knowledge needed to exploit these openings productively. While the paper focuses particularly on professional development seminars. we suggest that our conclusions apply to Mathematics Specialists‘ tasks more generally

Mawwage is What Bwings Us Togetha Today

Prose by Megan Ulrich

Acconci’s Pied-à-terre: Taking the archive for a walk

To kick the habit of conventional scholarship this article appeals to the affective draw of the archive via an imaginative pedestrian peregrination. It takes a walk through the uneasy spaces of Vito Acconci's 1972 work Anchors and listens to the dialogue of conflicting voices which still demand to be heard, forty years after their construction. It becomes unclear who is initiating the dialogue; the text is hard to read and perverse. The resulting disorientation of Anchors is matched by a later, larger, exhibition in Paris: Les Immatériaux, co-organised by French Philosopher Jean-François Lyotard. Here the labyrinthine confusion of spaces, sounds, smells and sights acts out an excess of information, echoing the affective intensity of Acconci's Anchors. However, the parallel between Acconci and Lyotard comes through a stumbling manner: eager to avoid the foot-fall that forms a well-trodden path the aim is to keep moving. We cannot dust off these archives whilst reclining in a recumbent posture; we must leap to our feet and become participants in their performance. Neither must we aim to decode the unarticulated voices which grunt and girn their way into our reading. Such bodily emissions were termed the ‘affect-phrase’ by Lyotard, not in order to decipher their meaning, but to acknowledge their effect in leaving conventions of communication provocatively unfulfilled. Let us proceed on foot

Ministry and stress : listening to Anglican clergy in Wales

This study set out to examine the experiences of stress in ministry among a sample of Anglican clergy serving in Wales. Building on recent quantitative studies of work-related psychological health among Anglican clergy in England, the study employed mainly qualitative methods to illustrate eight issues: the clergy's overall assessment of their present health, their understanding of the characteristics of stress, their assessment of the levels of symptoms of stress within their own lives, their identification of the causes of stress within their experience of ministry, the people on whom they call for support in times of stress, their strategy for and styles of recreation, their assessment of the pastoral care provision available to clergy, and their views on enhancing initial clergy training to equip clergy to cope with stress. Data provided by 73 clergy (10 female and 63 male) portray a group of professionally engaged men and women who are well aware of the stress-related dynamics of their vocation, who are displaying classic signs of work-overload, and who are critical of and resistant to strategies that may confuse the pastoral care of stressed clergy with the accepted management role of the Church's hierarchy of bishops and archdeacons

Spartan Daily September 28, 2010

Volume 135, Issue 16https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/1179/thumbnail.jp