Jon Snyder

Authentic assessment of teaching in context

Abstract The demands of teaching more challenging content to more diverse learners suggest a need for teacher education that enables teachers to become more sophisticated in their understanding of the effects of context and learner variability on teaching and learning. Instead of implementing set routines, teachers need to become ever more skillful in their ability to evaluate teaching situations and develop teaching responses that can be effective under different circumstances. This article examines how a growing number of teacher education programs are using authentic assessments of teaching – cases, exhibitions, portfolios, and problem-based inquiries (or action research) – as tools to support teacher learning for these new challenges of practice. Using specific teacher education programs as examples, the article examines how and why these strategies appear to provide support for teacher learning and avenues for more valid assessment of teaching. The authors also discuss circumstances in which these strategies may be less effective and suggest features of the assessments and programmatic contexts that are associated with more and less successful use.

The New Haven Unified School District: A Teaching Quality System for Excellence and Equity.

This article describes a holistic, integrated approach to teacher selection, evaluation and retention, collegial teaching and professional support, resource allocation, teacher professional growth, and teacher and student opportunities to learn within a state and district standards-driven context. A descriptive case study of a recently reformed school district in California is used to describe how teacher evaluation is only one important element of a comprehensive approach to achieving school reform and improvement and excellence and equity in education.

Professional Development Schools: What? So What? Now What?

Over a decade into the rhetoric surrounding, and the work within, PDSs, the field has reached an unusual consensus as well as an unusual discord on what a PDS is. The consensus is at a definitional level: A PDS is a specific form of a district-school(s)-university partnership wherein the participants share a commitment (and a responsibility) to improve the education of students in the public schools by simultaneously renewing the lifelong education of teachers and the institutions responsible for that education. (See Teitel, this issue, for an analysis of the influences and antecedents of this consensus.) There is even agreement on the four focal areas required of such simultaneous renewal: the education of children, the professional prepara

Staging the Work of Teacher Education through Public Conversation

The value of university-based programs of teacher education in preparing high-quality teachers is currently the focus of increasingly contentious debate among researchers, policy makers, and media experts. To a large extent, public awareness and understanding of the work of teacher education is filtered through one or another of these lenses because direct public experience with programs of teacher education is limited. The authors developed a capstone event, termed the “Public Conversation,” for their graduate-level, Teacher Education Program as a means of introducing graduates to the community and engaging a variety of community members in substantive dialogue around significant and enduring issues related to teaching and learning in the public schools. This article reports on impacts of the Public Conversation on community members, public school professionals, and university faculty, who participated as critical friends in this process.

La creazione del passato: sulla modernità culturale (review)

“tradizione per estratto.” Basandosi su questa distinzione e su una recensio di tutti i manoscritti che contengono l’opera, Barbi ne dava alle stampe l’edizione critica di riferimento nel 1932. Nel 1996 Gorni, pur accogliendo lo stemma e l’apparato di Barbi, procedeva a una nuova collazione dei principali testimoni: tra le novità, il titolo in latino, Vita nova, e soprattutto la nuova divisione in trentuno capitoli anziché quarantadue. Della Commedia, diffusa in un primo tempo per cantiche o addirittura gruppi di canti, manca la prima generazione di manoscritti prodotti tra la morte di Dante e il 1336, data del più antico testimone pervenuto. Per questo motivo e per evitare le contaminazioni dipendenti dalle copie boccacciane, l’edizione Petrocchi si basa su una collazione iniziale di soli ventisette manoscritti che corrispondono alla cosiddetta vulgata. Nel 2001, Sanguineti ha fornito una nuova edizione il cui stemma isola in uno dei due rami il solo codice Urb, che, secondo la metodologia bedieriana, viene seguito da vicino come miglior manoscritto. Quanto esposto in linea teorica nelle sezioni sulla tradizione manoscritta è ripreso nella parte antologica, dove le principali edizioni critiche sono analizzate più nel dettaglio e rese intelligibili anche al lettore profano. Il volume è completato da una utilissima bibliografia selettiva che di volta in volta individua, sotto indici tematici, i contributi più rappresentativi, proponendo scelte equilibrate e ampiamente condivisibili. Si sono mostrate alcune ragioni (il lettore ne scoprirà molte le altre) che fanno di questo manuale uno strumento indispensabile all’apprendimento e alla ricerca che verta su Dante e il suo universo poetico e dottrinale. Pensato per lo studente universitario che si avvicini per la prima volta alle questioni e ai problemi della filologia e critica dantesca, si mostrerà utile anche allo studioso, per sciogliere un dubbio o avere una sinossi degli strumenti a sua disposizione, delle soluzioni con cui uno stesso problema sia stato affrontato o risolto.