Inspiring Teaching: Learning From Exemplary Practitioners

Purpose An investigation of the concept of ' inspiring teaching' based on case studies of exemplary practitioners in England to inform professional development and collaborative learning and support school improvement. Design /methodology/approach The study adopted a mixed methods design involving multiple perspectives. Data sources included interviews with teachers, two systematic classroom observation schedules and qualitative field notes from classroom observations. Quantitative and qualitative findings were integrated to allow for triangulation and synthesis. Findings The ‘inspiring’ sample of teachers exhibited many strengths in terms of the characteristics of more effective teaching identified in previous literature. However, the integration and synthesis of evidence also reveals core features of inspiring practice and highlighted the strong emotional and reflective components that distinguish inspiring practice: • positive relationships • good classroom/behaviour management • positive and supportive climate • formative feedback • high quality learning experiences • enjoyment • high levels of student engagement and motivation. Research limitations/implications This small-scale study was based on a purposive sample of 17 teachers in England therefore results cannot necessarily be generalised to other contexts. Practical implications The research findings and approaches can be used to support teachers' professional development and provide resources to promote collaboration in developing professional learning communities. Originality/value The investigation provides new evidence on the characteristics, practices and views of inspiring teachers. The use of multiple perspectives and integration of findings provides new evidence to inform and support the development of professional learning communities

Teacher and Student Voices: Perspectives from 'Inspiring' Classrooms

This paper presents selected findings from a small-scale mixed methods study of ‘inspiring’ teaching, commissioned and funded by CfBT. The overall aims of the study were to explore what inspiring teachers say about their practice, what they do in their classrooms, and the views of their students. The present paper focuses specifically on teacher and student voices in the project, with the aim of understanding how the perspectives and understandings of these groups align, what they prioritize about teachers and lessons, and in what ways their opinions and experiences might differ with respect to their classroom relationships, activities and interactions. Sources of data relevant to teachers’ voices include face-to-face individual teacher interviews and an exercise in which teachers ranked 17 teacher attributes in perceived order of importance. Students’ views were accessed through questionnaire surveys with a combination of Likert-scale items and one open response question. The sample included 17 teachers from English primary and secondary schools. 203 students, from classes corresponding to 11 of the teachers, were surveyed. Findings showed that both teachers and students prioritized positive relationships and enthusiasm or enjoyment as key teacher and lesson characteristics; this was supported by both qualitative and quantitative data. Qualitative data elaborated upon some more specific relationship dynamics and lesson activities connected to these dominant themes. These results contribute to a previously unclear definition of ‘inspirational’ teaching, and also have the potential to guide practice and development for teachers

Children’s transition to school: Relationships between preschool attendance, cortisol patterns, and effortful control

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from CUP via the DOI in this record.Aims: To determine whether distinct trends can exist in children’s diurnal cortisol slopes as they transition to school, and the extent to which these trends relate to preschool attendance and/or exerted effortful control. Method: A secondary analysis of the anonymized data gathered for the UK Transition to School Study was carried out. 105 children were studied over a twelve-month period during transition to school at mean age 55 months. Children’s diurnal cortisol slopes were measured as the difference between average Salivary Cortisol Concentrations (SCC) sampled at waking and early evening over two days at each of three measurement time points: 4 months before, 2 weeks after, and 6 months after school entry. Children’s effortful control was measured at 2 weeks after school entry using the parent-administered Child Behavior Questionnaire. Parental questionnaires recorded the duration children spent in preschool (months; days p/w; hours p/w), and four background characteristics: child gender, parental co-habitation, responding parent’s age, and responding parent’s level of education. Findings: Latent Class Growth Analysis suggested two distinct trends in diurnal cortisol slopes during children’s transition to school: Thirty-nine percent of children demonstrated flatter diurnal cortisol slopes. These children were likely to have spent fewer hours per week in preschool, and were likely to exert less effortful control two weeks after transitioning to school. These associations underscore the importance of continuity in children’s daily routines as they transition to school. Implications are discussed concerning school readiness and the effectiveness of early interventions

Phi-values in protein folding kinetics have energetic and structural components

Phi-values are experimental measures of how the kinetics of protein folding is changed by single-site mutations. Phi-values measure energetic quantities, but are often interpreted in terms of the structures of the transition state ensemble. Here we describe a simple analytical model of the folding kinetics in terms of the formation of protein substructures. The model shows that Phi-values have both structural and energetic components. In addition, it provides a natural and general interpretation of "nonclassical" Phi-values (i.e., less than zero, or greater than one). The model reproduces the Phi-values for 20 single-residue mutations in the alpha-helix of the protein CI2, including several nonclassical Phi-values, in good agreement with experiments.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures, 1 tabl

Fitting Corrections to an RNA Force Field Using Experimental Data

Empirical force fields for biomolecular systems are usually derived from quantum chemistry calculations and validated against experimental data. We here show how it is possible to refine the full dihedral-angle potential of the Amber RNA force field by using solution NMR data as well as stability of known structural motifs. The procedure can be used to mix multiple systems and heterogeneous experimental information and crucially depends on a regularization term chosen with a cross-validation procedure. By fitting corrections to the dihedral angles on the order of less than 1 kJ/mol per angle, it is possible to increase the stability of difficult-to-fold RNA tetraloops by more than 1 order of magnitude

Combining Experiments and Simulations Using the Maximum Entropy Principle

A key component of computational biology is to compare the results of computer modelling with experimental measurements. Despite substantial progress in the models and algorithms used in many areas of computational biology, such comparisons sometimes reveal that the computations are not in quantitative agreement with experimental data. The principle of maximum entropy is a general procedure for constructing probability distributions in the light of new data, making it a natural tool in cases when an initial model provides results that are at odds with experiments. The number of maximum entropy applications in our field has grown steadily in recent years, in areas as diverse as sequence analysis, structural modelling, and neurobiology. In this Perspectives article, we give a broad introduction to the method, in an attempt to encourage its further adoption. The general procedure is explained in the context of a simple example, after which we proceed with a real-world application in the field of molecular simulations, where the maximum entropy procedure has recently provided new insight. Given the limited accuracy of force fields, macromolecular simulations sometimes produce results that are at not in complete and quantitative accordance with experiments. A common solution to this problem is to explicitly ensure agreement between the two by perturbing the potential energy function towards the experimental data. So far, a general consensus for how such perturbations should be implemented has been lacking. Three very recent papers have explored this problem using the maximum entropy approach, providing both new theoretical and practical insights to the problem. We highlight each of these contributions in turn and conclude with a discussion on remaining challenges

Inspiring Teaching: What We Can Learn from Exemplary Practitioners

This paper discusses findings from a small-scale, mixed methods study of ‘inspiring’ teaching. The study, commissioned and funded by CfBT, included case studies of a purposive sample of 17 primary and secondary teachers in England who were nominated by their head teachers as exemplary practitioners whose practice could be viewed as inspirational for their colleagues and pupils. The entire project was comprised of two phases. In the first phase, experienced inspectors visited schools to observe and interview teachers and speak with their pupils. The second phase, on which this paper focuses, was conducted by a research team from two major UK universities. The mixed methods design for this phase of the project included integration of qualitative and quantitative approaches across the data collection, analysis, and interpretation stages. Quantitative data collection methods included two research-based structured classroom observation schedules, specifically the International System of Teacher Observation and Feedback (ISTOF) and the Lesson Observation Form for Evaluating the Quality of Teaching (QoT), ranking grids listing a variety of teacher characteristics, and pupil surveys. Qualitative data sources included semi-structured teacher interviews, qualitative notes from classroom observations, and one open-response pupil survey item. Several common themes emerged across the teacher perspectives, pupil responses, and researcher observations, indicating that inspiring practice may relate to the following: positive relationships, good classroom management, positive and supportive classroom climate, formative feedback, enjoyment, and a high quality learning experience overall. Additionally, evidence from this study suggests that inspiring and effective practice are complementary; effective practices may facilitate inspiring teaching, though inspiring practice is linked to additional features beyond those associated with effective teaching. These findings have both theoretical and practical significance. Besides informing understandings about what ‘inspiring’ teaching means, the results of the project will also be disseminated among CfBT schools and teachers

Optimization and evaluation of a coarse-grained model of protein motion using X-ray crystal data

Simple coarse-grained models, such as the Gaussian Network Model, have been shown to capture some of the features of equilibrium protein dynamics. We extend this model by using atomic contacts to define residue interactions and introducing more than one interaction parameter between residues. We use B-factors from 98 ultra-high resolution X-ray crystal structures to optimize the interaction parameters. The average correlation between GNM fluctuation predictions and the B-factors is 0.64 for the data set, consistent with a previous large-scale study. By separating residue interactions into covalent and noncovalent, we achieve an average correlation of 0.74, and addition of ligands and cofactors further improves the correlation to 0.75. However, further separating the noncovalent interactions into nonpolar, polar, and mixed yields no significant improvement. The addition of simple chemical information results in better prediction quality without increasing the size of the coarse-grained model.Comment: 18 pages, 4 figures, 1 supplemental file (cnm_si.tex

Evaluating the Effects of Cutoffs and Treatment of Long-range Electrostatics in Protein Folding Simulations

The use of molecular dynamics simulations to provide atomic-level descriptions of biological processes tends to be computationally demanding, and a number of approximations are thus commonly employed to improve computational efficiency. In the past, the effect of these approximations on macromolecular structure and stability has been evaluated mostly through quantitative studies of small-molecule systems or qualitative observations of short-timescale simulations of biological macromolecules. Here we present a quantitative evaluation of two commonly employed approximations, using a test system that has been the subject of a number of previous protein folding studies–the villin headpiece. In particular, we examined the effect of (i) the use of a cutoff-based force-shifting technique rather than an Ewald summation for the treatment of electrostatic interactions, and (ii) the length of the cutoff used to determine how many pairwise interactions are included in the calculation of both electrostatic and van der Waals forces. Our results show that the free energy of folding is relatively insensitive to the choice of cutoff beyond 9 Å, and to whether an Ewald method is used to account for long-range electrostatic interactions. In contrast, we find that the structural properties of the unfolded state depend more strongly on the two approximations examined here

Water and molecular chaperones act as weak links of protein folding networks: energy landscape and punctuated equilibrium changes point towards a game theory of proteins

Water molecules and molecular chaperones efficiently help the protein folding process. Here we describe their action in the context of the energy and topological networks of proteins. In energy terms water and chaperones were suggested to decrease the activation energy between various local energy minima smoothing the energy landscape, rescuing misfolded proteins from conformational traps and stabilizing their native structure. In kinetic terms water and chaperones may make the punctuated equilibrium of conformational changes less punctuated and help protein relaxation. Finally, water and chaperones may help the convergence of multiple energy landscapes during protein-macromolecule interactions. We also discuss the possibility of the introduction of protein games to narrow the multitude of the energy landscapes when a protein binds to another macromolecule. Both water and chaperones provide a diffuse set of rapidly fluctuating weak links (low affinity and low probability interactions), which allow the generalization of all these statements to a multitude of networks.Comment: 9 pages, 1 figur