Duncan Waite

Teachers in Conference: A Qualitative Study of Teacher-Supervisor Face-to-Face Interactions

Ethnographic methods and conversation analysis were used to examine five teacher-supervisor conferences and their contexts. Related to the literature of supervision, teacher socialization, and mentoring, this report details how three teacher conference roles—passive, collaborative, and adversarial—were constructed, face-to-face and moment-by-moment. Teachers’ interactional resources are illuminated as supervisors’ presumed hegemony is reconsidered. Implications derived from this study include those for: supervision, educational leadership, school reform, teacher recruitment and placement, beginning teacher development, and action research.

Teaching the Unteachable Some Issues of Qualitative Research Pedagogy

In this essay I broach some of the issues surrounding the teaching of qualitative research methods, not in an effort to necessarily resolve them, but so that we might wrestle with them. Some of the issues concerning the teaching (and learning) of qualitative research include, but are not limited to: the schooling trends of pedagogicization; the politics—global, national, regional, and local—affecting teaching; interpersonal and intrapersonal structures, processes, and relations; the status and hierarchies of knowledge and of curricular subjects; the status accorded research in general and qualitative research in particular; the individual qualities of the instructor and his/her pedagogy; and the nature of the various environments within which teaching occurs. Fieldwork, thinking, and writing—as constitutive elements of qualitative research, are considered in light of the issues raised.

On the shortcomings of our organisational forms: with implications for educational change and school improvement

This article informs school improvement and educational change from a radically different perspective. Building upon work done recently in neural psychology, primatology and ethology, the article examines four common and general types of organisational form: the cell, the silo, the pyramidal, and the network types of organisational structures. Status and dominance hierarchies are discussed, as are the dynamics of collaboration/competition and collectivism/individualism. Final consideration is given to the concepts of culture and community, especially as they manifest in the school improvement literature.

Negotiating school-university partnerships: Participants' voices in co-reform

Although many educators recognize the importance of voice, fostering voice in those who have traditionally been voiceless has been difficult. This article, like the program that it describes, tackles that challenge by having participants speak for themselves. Specifically, the participants speak about their involvement in the first year of an alternative teacher education project. In describing their involvement, the participants focus on their roles and relationships as well as the type of partnership and collaboration that emerged from this project.

A Simple Card Trick: Teaching Qualitative Data Analysis Using a Deck of Playing Cards

Yet today, despite recent welcome additions, relatively little is written about teaching qualitative research. Why is that? This article reports out a relatively simple, yet appealing, pedagogical move, a lesson the author uses to teach qualitative data analysis. Data sorting and categorization, the use of tacit and explicit theory in data analysis, and discrepant case analysis can all be illustrated though use of a standard deck of playing cards. Use of playing cards appeals to those who learn best kinesthetically and is a welcome break from lecture-oriented, didactic teaching. It mirrors data sorting by hand and allows the instructor to highlight the importance of play in qualitative research.

The new principal preparation program model in Israel: Ponderings about practice-oriented principal training

In September 2009, a special committee of the Israeli Institute of School Leadership has published its final report in which new perspectives, contents, and teaching strategies are suggested to replace old, traditional forms of principal preparation programs in this country. The purpose of this chapter is to describe, first, the new construction of leadership development programs in Israel and its underlying principles and historical background, and, second, to raise some ponderings into its applicability and its quality in terms of practical suggestions and expected teaching strategies. The chapter includes the following elements: a brief introduction of the current principal preparation programs in Israel (briefly), the special committee, the aims of this chapter, importance, and organization of the chapter; the theoretical background based on the research on principal preparation programs worldwide, its shortcomings, and impediments; a historical debate of principal training in Israel – the current state, American influences, weaknesses, rational, basic principles, the new model, purpose, contents, and instructional methods; and critical and future considerations including the weaknesses of the new model, the “chances” to apply this report into the Israeli (or any) educational system, and the potential facilitating versus impeding factors.

Globalisation and its Effects on Educational Leadership, Higher Education and Educational Policy

Almost twenty years ago, as the first author of this chapter was driving from Guadalajara, Mexico to Mexico City, he stopped outside a small Mexican town to stretch his legs at a scenic overlook on some backcountry highway that ran through the forested hills of Michoacan state. There he saw a man, a vendor, who happened to be wearing a playera, a t-shirt, bearing the logo of the author’s alma mater, The University of Michigan. Amazed and a bit homesick, he asked the man how he had come by the shirt, explaining in Spanish that he had gone to school there, hoping to make some small human connection. But the man was ignorant of the significance of what he was wearing, especially for our author. To him, it was simply a shirt. Much has changed in the past twenty years, though much remains the same. As through history, people still engage in commerce, among themselves and their kind, and between different peoples. However, the rapidity of transactions (e.g., ‘ecommerce’); the depth of penetration of non-indigenous goods, cultural artefacts, and life ways into far flung locales; and, indeed, the rate of change itself stand in stark contrast to the ways these goods and ideas were exchanged previously, and the contexts, conditions and meanings of those exchanges. In this chapter, we examine the effects of globalisation on higher education and educational leadership, and policy changes associated with these domains. By necessity, portions of our discussion will be more general, more global in nature – especially those portions having to do with large-scale trends and theoretical applications. Other portions of our discussion will be much more focused – when considering particular phenomena or institutions – and, hence, more local and specialised.

The Instructional Supervisor as a Cultural Guide.

An ethnographic view of supervision would extend knowledge of the process.

Writing in/of/and educational leadership: reflections of a journal editor

ABSTRACT In this article, I deal with a journal’s relation to its field and issues involved in writing and publishing, especially in educational administration and educational leadership. Some issues discussed include: the social construction of the field; the conservatism of educational administration and, later, educational leadership; status hierarchies in the field; the false dichotomy of theory/practice; and the hegemony of the quantitative.

Schools for Capitalism, Corporativism, and Corruption: Examples from Turkey and the USA

Our contribution to the dialogue on leadership and social (in)justice lays out how it has come to pass that bureaucratization, managerialism, and capitalism, and our organizational, institutional, and associative forms—or how we organize and govern ourselves or permit ourselves to be governed—have moved past neoliberalism to include what we term corporativism. Corporativism might be thought of as a stronger form of corporatism: whereas corporativism gets at how corporations operate and how they have come to dominate market economies and other financial arrangements, corporativism is ontological, the theory of a corporativist ontology—of corporate values and principles working their way into the human psyche at the ontological, lived level, in commonsensical, and taken-for-granted ways.