Anne Cockburn

Elementary teachers' needs:issues of retention and recruitment

Abstract The retention and recruitment of elementary teachers is an increasingly serious problem in many countries. This paper examines literature on work in general, and teaching in particular, in the light of data gathered from teachers who enjoy their jobs. It concludes that there is scope to improve the quality of elementary teachers’ professional lives and hence enhance recruitment and retention possibilities. A further implication would be the greater involvement of teachers in curriculum innovation and inspection.

Recruiting and Retaining Teachers:Understanding Why Teachers Teach

This book is a culmination of several research studies (Cockburn, 1993, 1994, 1996a, 1996b, 1997, 2000; Haydn, Cockburn and Oliver, 2000) and examines why people embark on teaching as a career and their reasons for remaining or leaving the profession. A range of research strategies were used with a concentration on semi-structured interviews and questionnaires. Data were accumulated from over 2000 respondents. The research provides new insight into what job seekers desire from their careers and why teachers remain in teaching despite the increasing challenges. The book is of particular value at a time when large numbers of teachers are experiencing high levels of stress and leaving the profession prematurely as it provides new insight into both what motivates teachers and what demoralizes them. The book proposal was refereed prior to acceptance for publication. Cockburn wrote half of the book and undertook 75% of the research.

“If you can count to ten you can count to infinity really”: Fostering conceptual mathematical thinking in the first year of primary school

In this paper we investigate how teachers can foster conceptual mathematical thinking in five- and six-year-old pupils in a classroom situation. In this context we define conceptual mathematical thinking as instances where pupils verbalise mathematical thinking linked to abstraction and generalisation. We focus on one case study to explore the impact of teachers’ epistemology of mathematics in introducing two sociomathematical norms in the classroom: what counts as a mathematical answer and how such an answer is incorporated in the mathematical discourse of the teacher and pupils in the classroom. We then link the introduction of these sociomathematical norms to the presence of instances of conceptual mathematical thinking as observed in the classroom. We conclude that pupils are more consistently engaged in conceptual mathematical thinking in the classrooms of teachers who view mathematics as a web of interconnected ideas, and perceive it as being about general structure and patterns.

Teachers’ experience of time: Some implications for future research

Abstract Research has demonstrated that how teachers spend their time is an important educational issue. In this paper it is argued that there is a good case for examining teachers’ personal and professional time simultaneously in order to enhance the quality of teaching, learning and teachers’ lives.

Sharing Teacher Training Methods

This chapter illustrates the value of international collaboration. The research, which originated in Israel, arose from a study aiming to enhance teachers’ awareness of their pupils’ thinking processes by exposing them to cognitive theories and to authentic Problematic Learning Situations (PLS). For that purpose, we detected and analysed PLS and used them as video clips in a yearly course for pre- and in-service junior high school teachers. The universality of these learning situations was then pilot-tested across cultures. We provided some of the material on difficulties in geometry to U.K. students training to be elementary school teachers in an effort to learn how these materials affect student teachers in a different country. We were interested in the value of using these materials, differences in Israeli and British reactions to the materials, and the feasibility of conducting such a collaboration. The findings show that viewing the Israeli video clips triggered a change in the U.K. students’ reactions to teaching episodes: it was the first time they took the pupil’s side rather than the teacher’s. However, the findings also show that the dominant influence on the responses of both groups of student teachers (from Israel and the U.K.) was the content of the course in which the video clips were presented.

Mathematics and transition to school: international perspectives

It is no accident that successful school principals assign their very best teachers to the first elementary class (Cockburn, 2013) for it is, without a doubt in our minds, one of the most challenging and important years in a child’s educational journey. It is with great pleasure, therefore, that we welcome the publication of, Mathematics and Transition to School: International Perspectives as the first in the Springer series, Early Mathematics Learning and Development (series editor Lyn English). Mathematics and Transition to School is edited by an Australian team – Bob Perry, Amy MacDonald and Ann Gervasoni – and its authors have been drawn from around the world with the exception of the continent of Africa. Their target audiences are researchers, early childhood educators, policymakers, doctoral candidates and pre-service teachers. Although not expressly written for parents, the editors hope that the book may prove to be an inspiration to them when contemplating their children’s mathematics learning during transition to school and beyond. One of the attractions of the book for us is that it very clearly states that it: