Recognising emotional intelligence in professional standards for teaching

A project conducted in a primary school explored the hypothesis that student teachers could reflect upon feedback to improve their use of emotional intelligence in the classroom, thereby making consequent improvements to their teaching as defined by the required professional teaching standards. The small body of literature on the emotional intelligence of teaching is reviewed, informing a defi nition of the term ‘emotional intelligence’ and the project’s research methodology. Four student teachers and their teacher mentors participated with a teacher educator to provide two data sets – joint lesson observations records and semi-structured interviews. The joint observations were conducted with the teacher educator, using an observational checklist based on an emotional intelligence competencies framework, and the mentor, assessing demonstration of the required professional standards. Two lessons per student were observed with a four week interval. Shortly after the second observation, student teachers and mentors were interviewed in peer pairs. The outcomes show linked improvements in terms of emotional intelligence and the professional standards, with the mentor and student teacher participants confirming the value and relevance of assessment through an emotional intelligence filter. The findings have implications for emergent and established teachers in school and higher education settings. They call for a learning community to share good practice and support each other’s development through observation, discussion and modelling of emotionally-intelligent teaching and conduct. The study concludes that higher education programmes and partner schools would benefit from time, curriculum provision and government agency support to recognise, reflect upon and develop emotional intelligence in teaching

Neuro-interventions as Criminal Rehabilitation: An Ethical Review

According to a number of influential views in penal theory, 1 one of the primary goals of the criminal justice system is to rehabilitate offenders. Rehabilitativemeasures are commonly included as a part of a criminal sentence. For example, in some jurisdictions judges may order violent offenders to attend anger management classes or to undergo cognitive behavioural therapy as a part of their sentences. In a limited number of cases, neurointerventions — interventions that exert a direct biological effect on the brain — have been used as aids to rehabilitation, typically being imposed as part of criminal sentences, separate treatment orders, or conditions of parole. Examples of such interventions include medications intended to attenuate addictive desires in substance-abusing offenders and agents intended to suppress libido in sex offenders.This chapter reviews some of the ethical issues raised by the use of neurointerventions as aids to rehabilitation

Jordan curves and funnel sections

We study the case when solution of an ODE at a given initial condition fail to be unique and investigate what are the possible time-1 sections of the `solution funnel'. Along the way we give construction of a natural complete metric on the space of Jordan curves and prove that the generic Jordan curve is nowhere pierceable by arcs of finite length.Comment: 22 pages, 16 figure

Justifications for Non-­Consensual Medical Intervention: From Infectious Disease Control to Criminal Rehabilitation

A central tenet of medical ethics holds that it is permissible to perform a medical intervention on a competent individual only if that individual has given informed consent to the intervention. However, in some circumstances it is tempting to say that the moral reason to obtain informed consent prior to administering a medical intervention is outweighed. For example, if an individual’s refusal to undergo a medical intervention would lead to the transmission of a dangerous infectious disease to other members of the community, one might claim that it would be morally permissible to administer the intervention even in the absence of consent. Indeed, as we shall discuss below, there are a number of examples of public health authorities implementing compulsory or coercive measures for the purposes of infectious disease control (IDC). The plausibility of the thought that non-consensual medical interventions might be justified when performed for the purpose of IDC raises the question of whether such interventions might permissibly be used to realize other public goods. In this article we focus on one possibility: whether it could be permissible to non-consensually impose certain interventions that alter brain states or processes through chemical or physical means on serious criminal offenders. We shall suggest that some such interventions might be permissible if they safely and effectively serve to facilitate the offender’s rehabilitation and thereby prevent criminal recidivism