Through the Eyes of Novice Teachers: Experiences with Professional Cultures Within and Outside of Neoliberal “No-Excuses” Charter Schools

As neoliberal education reforms spread globally, including the development of school choice pathways that create different types of schools, a reexamination of teacher professionalism may be in order. Current literature about teacher experiences with neoliberal reforms often focuses on negative aspects of organizational professionalism and managerialism, describing shifts in professionalism as stifling teacher autonomy and diminishing satisfaction through increased accountability, standardization, and supervision. However, studies often only examine single school sites and the views and experiences of veteran teachers. This study considers two novice teachers' experiences as they transition between schools, one with more traditional professional cultures and the other within the hyper-neoliberal professional contexts of 'no-excuses’ charter schools, contrasting how they interpreted aspects of professionalism, development, and satisfaction in different environments. Compared to more traditionally professional school environments, novices’ experiences with managerial approaches to teacher professionalism served to accelerate their development while having drawbacks in terms of workload and turnover. The collaboration and collegiality, bounded autonomy, and shared accountability to mutual goals at these “no-excuses” charter schools seemed to create occupational professional subcultures where novice teachers feel simultaneously challenged and supported. The paper discusses implications for reexamining neoliberal approaches to teacher professionalism, mobility, and school organization.&nbsp

Where Teachers Thrive: A Book Review

This article reviews the book Where Teachers Thrive: Organizing Schools for Success written by Dr. Susan Moore Johnson and published in 2019. By describing the content of each chapter as well as the overall contributions of this recent book to knowledge about the interaction between school contexts, policy environments, and teacher experience, this review provides readers with a taste of this groundbreaking work while also offering analysis and minor critiques.&nbsp

High-pressure synthesis of rock salt LiMeO2-ZnO (Me = Fe3+, Ti3+) solid solutions

Metastable LiMeO2-ZnO (Me = Fe3+, Ti3+) solid solutions with rock salt crystal structure have been synthesized by solid state reaction of ZnO with LiMeO2 complex oxides at 7.7 GPa and 1350-1450 K. Structure, phase composition, thermal stability and thermal expansion of the recovered samples have been studied by X-ray diffraction with synchrotron radiation. At ambient pressure rock salt LiMeO2-ZnO solid solutions are kinetically stable up to 670-800 K depending on the composition.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures, 1 tabl

Characterization of nanoparticle formation and aggregation on mineral surfaces

The research effort in the Waychunas group is focused on the characterization and measurement of processes at the mineral-water interfaces specifically related to the onset of precipitation. This effort maps into one of the main project groups with the Penn State University EMSI (CEKA) known as PIG (Precipitation Interest Group), and involves collaborations with several members of that group. Both synchrotron experimentation and technique development are objectives, with the goals of allowing precipitation from single molecule attachment to sub-monolayer coverage to be detected and analyzed. The problem being addressed is the change in reactivity of mineral interfaces due to passivation or activation by precipitates or sorbates. In the case of passivation, fewer active sites may be involved in reactions with environmental fluids, while in the activated case the precipitate may be much more reactive than the substrate, or result in the creation of a higher density of active sites. We approach this problem by making direct measurements of several types of precipitation reactions: iron-aluminum oxide formation on quartz and other substrates from both homogeneous (in solution) nucleation, and heterogeneous (on the surface) nucleation; precipitation and sorption of silicate monomers and polymers on Fe oxide surfaces; and development of grazing-incidence small angle x-ray scattering (GISAXS) as a tool for in-situ measurement of precipitate growth, morphology and aggregation. We expect that these projects will produce new fundamental information on reactive interface growth, passivation and activation, and be applicable to a wide range of environmental interfaces

Molecular-Level Investigations of Nucleation Mechanisms and Kinetics of Formation of Environmental Nanoparticles

Environmental nanoparticles are often poorly-crystalline or metastable structures, whose kinetics of formation and growth are poorly understood. Further, the sorption or growth of nanoparticles on mineral surfaces may control the mineral surface's reactivity and modify its ability to influence contaminant transport. Due to the characteristic length scale, a holistic understanding of the nucleation mechanisms and kinetics of nanoparticle formation on mineral surfaces is difficult to achieve with traditional methodology. In this work, our intent is to determine the molecular nature of nucleation on surfaces, the kinetics of surface nucleation and growth, and the effect of crystal surface topology using new synchrotron-based techniques. We have approached these objectives by: (1) combining state-of-the-art crystal-truncation rod diffraction (CTR) and grazing incidence x-ray absorption fine structure spectroscopy (GIXAS) techniques to investigate the three-dimensional molecular-scale geometry of silicate monomer sorption on the r-plane of hematite; and (2) developing a new grazing-incidence small angle x-ray scattering (GISAXS) setup at SSRL (0.08 nm{sup -1} < q < 8 nm{sup -1}) to explore the initial development of environmental nanoparticles on various mineral surfaces. This study also includes complementary techniques such as atomic force microscopy (AFM), bulk SAXS, dynamic light scattering (DLS), XRD, and TEM

Associations between iron oxyhydroxide nanoparticle growth and metal adsorption/structural incorporation

The interaction of metal ions and oxyanions with nanoscale mineral phases has not yet been extensively studied despite the increased recognition of their prevalence in natural systems as a significant component of geomedia. A combination of macroscopic uptake studies to investigate the adsorption behavior of As(V), Cu(II), Hg(II), and Zn(II) onto nanoparticulate goethite ({alpha}-FeOOH) as a function of aging time at elevated temperature (75 C) and synchrotron-based X-ray studies to track changes in both the sorption mode and the rate of nanoparticle growth reveal the effects that uptake has on particle growth. Metal(loid) species which sorb quickly to the iron oxyhydroxide particles (As(V), Cu(II)) appear to passivate the particle surface, impeding the growth of the nanoparticles with progressive aging; in contrast, species that sorb more slowly (Hg(II), Zn(II)) have considerably less impact on particle growth. Progressive changes in the speciation of these particular metals with time suggest shifts in the mode of metal uptake with time, possibly indicating structural incorporation of the metal(loid) into the nanoparticle; this is supported by the continued increase in uptake concomitant with particle growth, implying that metal species may transform from surface-sorbed species to more structurally incorporated forms. This type of incorporation would have implications for the long-term fate and mobility of metals in contaminated regions, and affect the strategy for potential remediation/modeling efforts

Precipitation pathways for ferrihydrite formation in acidic solutions

Iron oxides and oxyhydroxides form via Fe hydrolysis and polymerization in many aqueous environments, but the pathway from Fe monomers to oligomers and then to solid phase nuclei is unknown. In this work, using combined X-ray, UV-vis, and Mössbauer spectroscopic approaches, we were able to identify and quantify the long-time sought ferric speciation over time during ferric oxyhydroxide formation in partially-neutralized ferric nitrate solutions ([Fe ]=0.2M, 1.

Towards high performance computing for molecular structure prediction using IBM Cell Broadband Engine - an implementation perspective

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>RNA structure prediction problem is a computationally complex task, especially with pseudo-knots. The problem is well-studied in existing literature and predominantly uses highly coupled Dynamic Programming (DP) solutions. The problem scale and complexity become embarrassingly humungous to handle as sequence size increases. This makes the case for parallelization. Parallelization can be achieved by way of networked platforms (clusters, grids, etc) as well as using modern day multi-core chips.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>In this paper, we exploit the parallelism capabilities of the IBM Cell Broadband Engine to parallelize an existing Dynamic Programming (DP) algorithm for RNA secondary structure prediction. We design three different implementation strategies that exploit the inherent data, code and/or hybrid parallelism, referred to as C-Par, D-Par and H-Par, and analyze their performances. Our approach attempts to introduce parallelism in critical sections of the algorithm. We ran our experiments on SONY Play Station 3 (PS3), which is based on the IBM Cell chip.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Our results suggest that introducing parallelism in DP algorithm allows it to easily handle longer sequences which otherwise would consume a large amount of time in single core computers. The results further demonstrate the speed-up gain achieved in exploiting the inherent parallelism in the problem and also elicits the advantages of using multi-core platforms towards designing more sophisticated methodologies for handling a fairly long sequence of RNA.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The speed-up performance reported here is promising, especially when sequence length is long. To the best of our literature survey, the work reported in this paper is probably the first-of-its-kind to utilize the IBM Cell Broadband Engine (a heterogeneous multi-core chip) to implement a DP. The results also encourage using multi-core platforms towards designing more sophisticated methodologies for handling a fairly long sequence of RNA to predict its secondary structure.</p