An Innovative Design for Peer Mentoring: Tiered Cognitive Coaching

Preparing Coaches to support teachers’ literacy instruction is a critical role for faculty in Literacy programs. The curricula design of the method used to enhance the preparation of literacy coaches I describe in this article presents an innovative model to incorporate the authentic experiences of doctoral candidates to support master’s candidates participating in a practicum. While supporting the master’s degree candidates, the doctoral candidates also met the new standards from the International Literacy Association for the preparation of Literacy Coaches

Moving to a Virtual Literacy Practicum: Challenges and Solutions

When the university took the unprecedented move to virtual teaching at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, my challenge, as a teacher educator, was to plan a virtual literacy practicum for master candidates. All aspects of curriculum design were considered, from establishing relationships with schools, parents, and students, considering technology platforms, appropriate technology applications, to considering everyone’s emotional state. In this article, I share the many challenging aspects and the solutions that lead to successful experiences for all participants

Content and Methods of Teaching Literacy: The Effect of One-on-One Tutoring in Preservice Clinical Education in Two Low-Performing, Diverse School Settings on the Effectiveness of Preservice Teachers’ Reading Instruction

This is a study of preservice teachers’ ability to teach reading to struggling, diverse students, after participating in a school-embedded course incorporating a one-on-one tutorial directly supervised by reading experts. Changes in reading performance as well as plans to analyze changes in the preservice teachers will be discussed

Secondary Teachers’ Knowledge, Beliefs, and Self-Efficacy to Teach Reading in the Content Areas: Voices Following Professional Development

This study explored 24 content area teachers’ knowledge, beliefs, and self-efficacy about teaching reading in the content areas at the end of a state-wide professional development experience. The findings suggest that the participating teachers held positive beliefs, gained valuable knowledge, and were confident about teaching reading in their content areas

Toric anti-self-dual 4-manifolds via complex geometry

Using the twistor correspondence, this article gives a one-to-one correspondence between germs of toric anti-self-dual conformal classes and certain holomorphic data determined by the induced action on twistor space. Recovering the metric from the holomorphic data leads to the classical problem of prescribing the Cech coboundary of 0-cochains on an elliptic curve covered by two annuli. The classes admitting Kahler representatives are described; each such class contains a circle of Kahler metrics. This gives new local examples of scalar-flat Kahler surfaces and generalises work of Joyce who considered the case where the distribution orthogonal to the torus action is integrable.Comment: 25 pages, 2 figures, v2 corrected some misprints, v3 corrected more misprints, published version (minus one typo

Toric anti-self-dual Einstein metrics via complex geometry

Using the twistor correspondence, we give a classification of toric anti-self-dual Einstein metrics: each such metric is essentially determined by an odd holomorphic function. This explains how the Einstein metrics fit into the classification of general toric anti-self-dual metrics given in an earlier paper (math.DG/0602423). The results complement the work of Calderbank-Pedersen (math.DG/0105263), who describe where the Einstein metrics appear amongst the Joyce spaces, leading to a different classification. Taking the twistor transform of our result gives a new proof of their theorem.Comment: v2. Published version. Additional references. 14 page

Kinetic theory of Onsager's vortices in two-dimensional hydrodynamics

Starting from the Liouville equation, and using a BBGKY-like hierarchy, we derive a kinetic equation for the point vortex gas in two-dimensional (2D) hydrodynamics, taking two-body correlations and collective effects into account. This equation is valid at the order 1/N where N>>1 is the number of point vortices in the system (we assume that their individual circulation scales like \gamma ~ 1/N). It gives the first correction, due to graininess and correlation effects, to the 2D Euler equation that is obtained for $N\rightarrow +\infty$. For axisymmetric distributions, this kinetic equation does not relax towards the Boltzmann distribution of statistical equilibrium. This implies either that (i) the "collisional" (correlational) relaxation time is larger than Nt_D, where t_D is the dynamical time, so that three-body, four-body... correlations must be taken into account in the kinetic theory, or (ii) that the point vortex gas is non-ergodic (or does not mix well) and will never attain statistical equilibrium. Non-axisymmetric distributions may relax towards the Boltzmann distribution on a timescale of the order Nt_D due to the existence of additional resonances, but this is hard to prove from the kinetic theory. On the other hand, 2D Euler unstable vortex distributions can experience a process of "collisionless" (correlationless) violent relaxation towards a non-Boltzmannian quasistationary state (QSS) on a very short timescale of the order of a few dynamical times. This QSS is possibly described by the Miller-Robert-Sommeria (MRS) statistical theory which is the counterpart, in the context of two-dimensional hydrodynamics, of the Lynden-Bell statistical theory of violent relaxation in stellar dynamics

Quasi-stationary States of Two-Dimensional Electron Plasma Trapped in Magnetic Field

We have performed numerical simulations on a pure electron plasma system under a strong magnetic field, in order to examine quasi-stationary states that the system eventually evolves into. We use ring states as the initial states, changing the width, and find that the system evolves into a vortex crystal state from a thinner-ring state while a state with a single-peaked density distribution is obtained from a thicker-ring initial state. For those quasi-stationary states, density distribution and macroscopic observables are defined on the basis of a coarse-grained density field. We compare our results with experiments and some statistical theories, which include the Gibbs-Boltzmann statistics, Tsallis statistics, the fluid entropy theory, and the minimum enstrophy state. From some of those initial states, we obtain the quasi-stationary states which are close to the minimum enstrophy state, but we also find that the quasi-stationary states depend upon initial states, even if the initial states have the same energy and angular momentum, which means the ergodicity does not hold.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figure

Recent changes in the Labrador Sea Water within the Deep Western Boundary Current southeast of Cape Cod

Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2011. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Elsevier B.V. for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Deep Sea Research Part I: Oceanographic Research Papers 58 (2011): 1019-1030, doi:10.1016/j.dsr.2011.07.006.Water properties measured by the central mooring in the Line W mooring array southeast of Cape Cod document a large character shift during the period of November 2001 to April 2008. The observed temperature, salinity and planetary potential vorticity (PPV) anomalies manifest changes in the formation region of the water masses present at Station W, specifically upper Labrador Sea Water (uLSW), deep Labrador Sea Water (dLSW) and Overflow Water (OW). During the observation period, the minimum in the PPV anomaly field relative to the record mean PPV profile migrated from 1500m, where it was originally found, to 700m. Temporal changes in the vertical distribution of temperature and salinity were correlated with the PPV changes. This suggests a dLSW-dominated first half of the record, versus an uLSW-dominated second half. The structure of these anomalies is consistent with observations within the Labrador Sea, and their transit time to Line W agrees well with tracer-derived times for signals spreading along the western boundary. In that context, the observed water properties at Line W in the early 2000s reflected the intense deep convection in the Labrador Sea in the mid 1990s, with less intense convection subsequently affecting lighter isopycnals. The observed velocity field is dominated by high-frequency (periods of days to months) fluctuations, however, a fraction of the velocity variability is correlated with changes in water mass properties, and indicate a gradual acceleration of the southwestward flow, with a corresponding increase in Deep Western Boundary Current transport.Financial support for the early observations (2001-2004) was provided by the G. Unger Vetlesen Foundation. Observations collected as part of the Line Wprogram (2004-2008) were funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (grants number OCE-0241354 and OCE-0726720) as well as funding from WHOI’s Ocean and Climate Change Institute