How do teachers’ articulate ‘effective’ with regard to leadership? An exploration of how contextual factors function and shape leadership within a primary school

This paper centres on exploring how do contextual factors function and shape leadership of Primary Schools. Methodologically the research is best described as ‘involved’ research and is informed by interpretavist principles, seeking to gain a deeper professional understanding. Social reality for the author is meaningfully understood by perceiving individuals as social actors, actors who are not always fully aware of the impact of the social stage on their actions. The social stage consists of the often implicit expectations of ‘communities of practice’. This research is interested in how individual actors’ interpretations of their actions are situated in such communities and where is their understanding about processes at play in the leadership they are experiencing

Discourses of leadership: the changing context of primary education and the implications for the public sector

This paper explores how contextual factors function and shape leadership within a Primary School. The development of leaders and managers continues to be of interest to Human Resource Development (HRD) academics and practitioners. In recent years leadership has been viewed as a practice which can sustain growth. Within the field of education, government policies of school improvement use leadership and management to explain differing outcomes and measures of success. Since 1988 it has been regularly debated by both academics and policy-makers what the priorities of school leaders should be. Mainly over the last three decades owing to Educational reforms the role of headteachers and principals has changed dramatically. How a school is led and managed is regarded by both policy-makers and practitioners as a key factor in ensuring a school’s success. According to a systematic review conducted by Bell et al (2003:1), “there is a widespread, strongly held belief that school leadership makes a difference and that headteachers should be supported and trained to raise educational standards.” In addition, “the school as an organisational context for the work of leaders is complex” (Southworth 2004). Leaders in a school have to deal with multiple variables that change constantly in a variety of ways and as a result have to be conscious of the contextual factors impinging on their behaviour

The Sea\u27s Missing Salt: A Dilemma for Evolutionists

The known and conjectured processes which deliver and remove dissolved sodium (Na+) to and from the ocean are inventoried . On 1y 27% of the present Na+ deli vered to the ocean can be accounted for by known removal processes. This indicates that the Na+ concentration of the ocean is not today in steady state as supposed by evolutionists, but is increasing with time . The present rate of increase (about 3 x 1011 kg/yr) cannot be accomodated into evolutionary models assuming cyclic or episodic removal of input Na+ and a 3-billion-year-old ocean. The enormous imbalance shows that the sea should contain much more salt than it does today if the evolutionary model were true. A differential equation containing minimum input rates and maximum output rates allows a maximum age of the ocean of 62 million years to be calculated. The data can be accomodated well into a creationist model

Age and growth of swordfish (Xiphias gladius) caught by the Hawaii-based pelagic longline fishery

We verified the age and growth of swordfish (Xiphias gla-dius) by comparing ages determined from annuli in fin ray sections with daily growth increments in otoliths. Growth of swordfish of exploitable sizes is described on the basis of annuli present in cross sections of the second ray of the first anal fins of 1292 specimens (60−260 cm eye-to-fork length, EFL) caught in the region of the Hawaii-based pelagic longline fishery. The position of the initial fin ray annulus of swordfish was verified for the first time with the use of scanning electron micrographs of presumed daily growth increments present in the otoliths of juveniles. Fish growth through age 7 was validated by marginal increment analysis. Faster growth of females was confirmed, and the standard von Bertalanffy growth model was identified as the most parsimonious for describing growth in length for fish greater than 60 cm EFL. The observed growth of three fish, a year-old in size when first caught and then recaptured from 364 to1490 days later, is consistent with modeled growth for fish of this size range. Our novel approach to verifying age and growth should increase confidence in conducting an age-structured stock assessment for swordfish in the North Pacific Ocean

PT-symmetric deformations of Calogero models

We demonstrate that Coxeter groups allow for complex PT-symmetric deformations across the boundaries of all Weyl chambers. We compute the explicit deformations for the A2 and G2-Coxeter group and apply these constructions to Calogero–Moser–Sutherland models invariant under the extended Coxeter groups. The eigenspectra for the deformed models are real and contain the spectra of the undeformed case as subsystems

Tales From Academia: The MAD Set

This chapter is co-produced to share the lived experience of ‘becoming’ an experienced academic and to share our passion for action learning and insider-research. We have each been employed as Higher Education (HE) lecturers for approximately 15 years and remain passionate about the potential of insider-research to positively impact on individuals and their lives. It is this passion and interest which brought us together as colleagues and co-researchers. We are Michelle (health), Aileen (business) and Deborah (education), co-founders of MAD, an action learning set with a stated aim to raise the profile of insider-research through Mutual Action and Development. Insider-research is a common feature of many postgraduate and doctoral programmes and is undertaken by members of organizational systems and communities in and on their own organizations. This form of research can also be undertaken as collaboration between insiders and outsiders. A key challenge for insider-researchers is to undertake academic research in their own organizations while retaining the choice of remaining employed and employable. It is not unusual for insider-researchers to uncover the darker aspects of organizational life, surfacing ideological dilemmas. We argue that it is the surfacing of ideological dilemmas which opens a discursive space and provides the foundations for emancipatory learning. In co-producing this chapter, we have provided three autoethnography tales of ‘becoming’ experienced academics and analyse our ‘tales’ from a discursive and community of practice perspective. In doing so, we illuminate how the surfacing of ideological dilemmas, within the relatively safe space of our MAD set, has enabled us to cope with the barriers and constraints faced by experienced academics within the current HE system

On the multiplicity of ALMA Compact Array counterparts of far-infrared bright quasars

We present ALMA Atacama Compact Array (ACA) 870 micron continuum maps of 28 infrared-bright SDSS quasars with Herschel/SPIRE detections at redshifts 2-4, the largest such sample ever observed with ALMA. The ACA detections are centred on the SDSS coordinates to within 1 arcsec for about 80 per cent of the sample. Larger offsets indicate that the far-infrared (FIR) emission detected by Herschel might come from a companion source. The majority of the objects (about 70 per cent) have unique ACA counterparts within the SPIRE beam down to 3-4 arcsec resolution. Only 30 per cent of the sample shows clear evidence for multiple sources with secondary counterparts contributing to the total 870 micron flux within the SPIRE beam to at least 25 per cent. We discuss the limitations of the data based on simulated pairs of point-like sources at the resolution of the ACA and present an extensive comparison of our findings with recent works on the multiplicities of sub-millimetre galaxies. We conclude that, despite the coarse resolution of the ACA, our data support the idea that, for a large fraction of FIR-bright quasars, the sub-mm emission comes from single sources. Our results suggest that, on average, optically bright quasars with strong FIR emission are not triggered by early-stage mergers but are, instead, together with their associated star formation rates, the outcome of either late-stage mergers or secular processes.Comment: 16 pages, 10 figure