Nathalie J. Gehrke

The Socialization of Beginning Teachers Through Mentor-Protege Relationships

With all the current talk of mentors and proteges in the business world, we thought it strange that no one had explored in the professional literature whether teachers ever have mentors. Although few beginning teachers have been given much guidance by anyone during their first three years of teaching, we assumed that there must be a fortunate few who had established a close relationship during the induction period with a person who could be called a mentor. We also agreed that an exploration of this ideal student-teacher relationship might provide some direction to the development of teacher education programs that would, by their example, lead aspiring teachers toward a teaching personality that emphasized warmth, personal commitment, and professional excellence. So we set out to find, first of all, whether teachers believed themselves to have had mentors. They did. Then we examined what those relationships were like. Finally we looked for insights that might be useful for encouraging the positive aspects of mentoring in teacher socialization. What follows is a result of those efforts.

On Preserving The Essence of Mentoring As One Form of Teacher Leadership

The mentor-protégé role relationship is a powerful one that offers unique oppor tunities for personal development. Gehrke uses Martin Bubers notions of I-Thou and I-It to describe how mentors and protégés might relate to each other in more profound and less nominal ways.

A look at curriculum integration from the bridge

This article looks at the popularity of curriculum integration in the 1990s in the United States. It offers evidence from national curriculum standards documents, books in print, journal articles, national coalitions and organizations, and curriculum in use to suggest that curriculum integration is experiencing a peak in interest, much like the early era of progressive education, and the open education movement of the 1960s. It further traces the intellectual roots of the current movement and looks at the conceptual differences in the two factions in the curriculum integration movement: the correlated/fused and the core. Different assumptions about the primary source of the curriculum lie at the heart of the split. An extensive reference section offers a sample of the writings on curriculum integration in the 1990s.

Learning Activities and Teachers’ Decisionmaking: Some Grounded Hypotheses

Stimulated-recall data were gathered in interviews with 12 elementary school teachers describing the decisions they made during lessons conducted shortly before. Ideational units were identified in the protocols, and a grounded theory analysis was conducted. Categories and terminology were generated and, using the constant comparative technique, hypotheses grounded in the data were developed. The first hypothesis embeds these teachers’ interactive decisionmaking (IDM) in the structure of the lessons they were conducting, and subordinates IDM to teachers’ cognitive representations of the activity at hand. The second hypothesis identifies the central intention of IDM: to move a learning activity to completion according to the cognitive representation; and the third hypothesis specifies the role of decision rules and routines.

Collaboration in Staff Development--Variations on the Concept.

Two forms of col laborative planning for inservice edu cation have been identified: egalitar ian and dialectical. The local setting may render one form more appro priate than the other. A project di rector who is knowledgeable of both forms is better equipped to guide staff development. efforts.

Old-Time Teaching in the 21st Century

Abstract This is the story of three professors who found collective success in certain old-time approaches to teaching. Using three different first-person perspectives from Professors Burg, Piedmont, and Kamke, we examine some of the key components of such teaching orientation that may be helpful for professors navigating increased enrollments, while trying to engage students to learn not only the subject matter, but also, perhaps more importantly, about themselves as human beings. The relevance of this classic approach is reflected in the fact that all of us, typically unawares, continue to apply, and expand on, the way of education to which we were introduced a long time ago. In essence, that old-time teaching showed us how to be, in the words of Angyal, simultaneously autonomous (i.e., being oneself, standing alone) and homonomous (belonging/surrendering to something greater than oneself).

School teacher: New Roles beyond the Classroom

Abstract Studying teachers is in. Historians will probably say that interest in teachers and schools waxes and wanes in some predictable cycles tied to the economy, or politics, or maybe to sunspots or global warming patterns. Whatever the case, interest in teachers and teaching is higher than it has been for quite some years. Several books have even become best sellers by describing the everyday lives of classroom teachers working in the most challenging of situations. Such books must be welcomed for their candor; such classic teachers must be celebrated for their courageous efforts.

Making Ninth Grade Orientation Work

that result from living in a home where chemical abuse is a problem, and learn how to reach out and help family members or friends whose lives have been harmed by chemical abuse. Referrals are made to a contact person on each school campus. This person sets up groups and plans inservice activities for the faculty. A cadre of four or five faculty members volunteer one period each week to run a group. Both teachers and counselors participate as group leaders.