Developing great teachers through professional development: a comparative international case study in England, Israel, South Korea, and Turkey

This comparative international case study explores teacher quality, that is, how teachers, who are regarded as great, train and develop. In particular, the thesis investigates ways in which participation in professional development programmes contributes to teachers’ professional knowledge and the personal virtues involved in teaching chemistry at secondary school level in England, Israel, South Korea, and Turkey as case study nations. The study employs a comparative case study approach. Empirical data collection was preceded by a document analysis and a comprehensive literature review which revealed three themes, namely community of practice, pedagogical content knowledge, and professional beliefs and virtues as impacting teachers in becoming great teachers. These themes were explored in practice utilising qualitative data collection methods, namely semi structured interviews with science teachers (mainly chemistry) who participated in professional development programmes and through observing lessons and professional development activities of teachers teaching science to 14-18-year-olds. Data was collected in South Korea, Israel, Turkey, and the United Kingdom (England) over a 1-year period. A volunteer sample of 40 science teachers (10 teachers for each country) were interviewed. Ten professional development activities were observed. The total length of observed PD activities was 1500 minutes. Nine science teachers were observed in four countries. The total length of observed lessons was 525 minutes. Four focus group interviews with the participation of 18 teachers were conducted. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the data. The data shows that great teacher appears differently in the four nations. A great teacher is identified variously as an amalgamation of a lifelong learner (South Korea), a moral exemplar (Turkey), a reflective practitioner (England), and an educator (Israel). Great teachers as lifelong learners promote students’ practical wisdom and wise decision-making ability, skills which are required to live a good life. Moral exemplars transmit their personal moral values to their students. Reflective practitioner teachers demonstrate intellectual and performance virtues in practice. As educators, great teachers motivate their students to be good human beings. The results of the study reveal that practical wisdom is an essential lens for making teachers educationally wise people. Great teacher is perceived to empower practical wisdom, which helps teachers establish mutual understanding and let them have more space to draw ii upon intellectual, social, moral and performance virtues through collaboration, mutual engagement and sharing in community of practice. The teachers in the study who participated in community-based professional development programmes enhanced the intellectual, moral, performance, and social virtues, pedagogical content knowledge associated with being a great teacher. The study finds that nations whose educational systems build strong connections between teachers through development and application of learning communities tend to generate a higher proportion of great teachers and that those teachers have positive and extensive influences on each other’s intellectual and personal development. This research also found that one of the most important dispositions that enable teachers to become responsible for students' learning is passion in science teaching. The teachers' passion, motivation, and love for teaching helped them to expand their professional knowledge and techniques of instruction in distinctive manners. The character traits that a great teacher must possess should receive a lot of consideration. Emphasise also should be on developing character strengths in the professional development. Community of practice has potential to achieve this through mutual engagement, shared repertoire and joint enterprise. The research emphasizes the vital role of teachers' passion for science teaching in enabling them to take responsibility for their students' learning. It advocates for the development of character strengths in teacher professional development, particularly through the cultivation of community of practice, characterized by mutual engagement, shared repertoire, and joint enterprise. This comparative study offers valuable insights into the dynamic interplay of teacher development, enhancing the quality of education across diverse contexts

Turkey’s war against the Kurds threatens to create turmoil both inside and outside the country

Turkey has carried out military operations against Islamic State (IS) and the Kurdish PKK following a suicide bombing in the Turkish town of Suruc in July. Esra Özyürek writes that by targeting Kurdish guerrillas, the Turkish government is essentially undermining the only effective force that can combat IS. She argues that Turkey’s decision to attack Kurdish forces is directly linked to internal political developments within the country, and that the conflict threatens to damage the interests of both Kurds and Turks

Treating Employees Respectfully: The Role of Transparency in Improving the Corporate Behaviour

It is, or ought to be, uncontroversial to assert that corporations have an enormous impact upon the lives of employees. Countless incidents over the last decades have demonstrated that some corporations behave in unacceptable ways towards their employees. This thesis analyses the role of transparency may have in ensuring corporations behave better towards their employees. It presents four main arguments: First, it asserts that companies must take the interests of their employees seriously, by treating them with genuine respect. This assertion is theoretically built upon deontological ethics. The thesis claims that employees should be treated as ends in themselves, rather than as a means in others’ ends. Second, in order to ensure that corporations treat employees with respect, the thesis claims that corporations must be, or be made to be, transparent. Two points are developed in favour of this emphasis. The first focuses on the intrinsic value of transparency. Being open and honest is good in and of itself, and this applies forcefully to corporations in their treatment of their employees. The second point focuses on the strategic value of transparency. It is conceded that there is often a choice of means as to how corporations behave better, however, the thesis argues that transparency is often a better choice, or a better strategy, for delivering good corporate behaviour, compare to the alternatives available. The third argument addresses the best avenues for ensuring companies exhibit a sufficient degree of transparency. It is conceded that companies will often have, purely from self-interest, reasons for being transparent. Nevertheless, this prudent incentive is insufficient. As a result, the work argues some degree of compulsion is necessary to ensure that companies act in a transparent manner. Lastly, the thesis claims that although national/regional initiatives can achieve meaningful improvements in compelling the use of transparency, they may fall short of achieving the level of transparency this thesis advocates. Therefore, it is argued a sufficient degree of transparency can only be achieved through regulatory initiatives on an international level

Airline Pilot Risk Profiling by Using Unstable Approach Management Case

Risk and human decision-making cannot be separated from each other. Many of theories and studies have tried to analyze pilots’ decision-making processes, risk factors, and preference behavior in the aviation domain. Unstable approaches are fairly infrequent, but an unstable approach is a major risk factor for landing accidents (Smith & Curtis, 2013; Smith, Jamieson, & Curtis, 2012). Therefore, the decision to execute a go-around if an approach is not sufficiently stable is encouraged in the interest of safety (Airbus Customer Services, 2012; Flight Safety Foundation, 2013), but in practice less than 5% of the unstable approaches actually results in a go-around (FSF, 2009; Flight Safety Foundation, 2013). The purpose of this study is to investigate the predictors of pilots’ opinions to complete a landing or to go around after an unstable approach. The findings show that age, gender, nationality, marital status, number of children, commuting time, flight training background, experience in years, total flight hour, flight hour at current aircraft type, and cockpit rank were not predictors for executing a go-around. The findings indicated that as A330 and B777 pilots’ flight scheduling perception increases so do their probability of executing a go-around. Additionally, self-confidence was a significant predictor for B737 pilots while job satisfaction was also a predictor for A320 pilots

A Review of Lewis R. Rambo and Charles E. Farhadian’sThe Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion

This is a review of the Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion. Drawing upon research on Germans converting to Islam and Turks converting to Christianity, converting is understood as complex fusion of individual choice and cultural/political conflict

Being German, becoming Muslim: how German converts to Islam balance their national identity and their faith

Studies on the growth of Muslim populations in western Europe often focus on the role of immigration, but every year an increasing number of citizens in western European countries also make the decision to convert to Islam. Esra Özyürek writes on the challenges faced by German converts, noting that Germany’s Muslim communities have adopted a variety of different approaches aimed at integrating into German society without giving up their religious beliefs

Rethinking empathy: emotions triggered by the Holocaust among Muslim-minority in Germany

In the last decade there has been widely shared discomfort about the way Muslim minority Germans engage with the Holocaust. They are accused of not showing empathy towards its Jewish victims and, as a result, of not being able to learn the necessary lessons from this massive crime. By focusing on instances in which the emotional reactions of Muslim minority Germans towards the Holocaust are judged as not empathetic enough and morally wrong, this article explores how Holocaust education and contemporary understandings of empathy, in teaching about the worst manifestation of racism in history, can also at times be a mechanism to exclude minorities from the German/European moral makeup and the fold of national belonging. Expanding from Edmund Husserl’s embodied approach to empathy to a socially situated approach, via the process of paarung, allows us to reinterpret expressions of fear and envy, currently seen as failed empathy, as instances of intersubjective connections at work. In my reinterpretation of Husserl’s ideas, the process of paarung that enables empathy to happen is not abstract, but pairs particular experiences happening at particular times and places under particular circumstances to individuals of certain social standing and cultural influences. An analogy can be made to shoes. Anyone has the capacity to imagine themselves in someone else’s shoes. Nevertheless, the emotional reactions the experience triggers in each person will be shaped by individual past experiences and social positioning. Hence grandchildren of workers who arrived Germany after the World War II to rebuild the country resist an ethnicized Holocaust memory and engage with it keenly through their own subject positions

Considering the nature of multimodal language from a crosslinguistic perspective

Language in its primary face-to-face context is multimodal (e.g., Holler and Levinson, 2019; Perniss, 2018). Thus, understanding how expressions in the vocal and visual modalities together contribute to our notions of language structure, use, processing, and transmission (i.e., acquisition, evolution, emergence) in different languages and cultures should be a fundamental goal of language sciences. This requires a new framework of language that brings together how arbitrary and non-arbitrary and motivated semiotic resources of language relate to each other. Current commentary evaluates such a proposal by Murgiano et al (2021) from a crosslinguistic perspective taking variation as well as systematicity in multimodal utterances into account

Turkey’s war against peace: why the EU should rethink its support for Erdoğan

On 10 October a bomb attack on a rally in Ankara killed almost 100 people. Esra Ozyurek and Bilgin Ayata write that against the backdrop of renewed hostilities between Kurdish groups and Turkish security forces, the bombing may prove to be a lasting blow for hope of a permanent reconciliation in the country. They argue that the EU should hold the Turkish state accountable for the increasing violence and provide greater support to those campaigning for greater democracy in the country

Learning to use demonstratives in conversation: What do language specific strategies in Turkish reveal?

Pragmatic development requires the ability to use linguistic forms, along with non-verbal cues, to focus an interlocutor's attention on a referent during conversation. We investigate the development of this ability by examining how the use of demonstratives is learned in Turkish, where a three-way demonstrative system (bu, su, o) obligatorily encodes both distance contrasts (i.e. proximal and distal) and absence or presence of the addressee's visual attention on the referent. A comparison of the demonstrative use by Turkish children (6 four- and 6 six-year-olds) and 6 adults during conversation shows that adultlike use of attention directing demonstrative, su, is not mastered even at the age of six, while the distance contrasts are learned earlier. This language specific development reveals that designing referential forms in consideration of recipient's attentional status during conversation is a pragmatic feat that takes more than six years to develop