Search

This study examines how, if at all, multiple subjects and administrative services credential preparation programs are changing in response to California's newest grade, Transitional Kindergarten (TK). We analyzed interviews from university faculty in early childhood education and credential programs in five institutions of higher education and collected survey data from early childhood professionals across 16 counties in the state. We describe gaps in knowledge about early childhood and developmental science needed to work with children in effective and developmentally responsive and appropriate ways. The study informs a much needed conversation about the consequences of implementing TK as a stand alone change rather than part of a comprehensive coordinated systems level reform.

School reform policies and school administrators are increasingly positioning teacher leaders (TLs) with the responsibility to facilitate professional learning for their colleagues. Although ample evidence exists to suggest the need for facilitators to be highly skilled for teachers' learning to be optimized, there is a dearth of research describing how TLs act as effective instructional leaders with their colleagues in professional learning communities. The have been no empirical studies describing effective models for supporting the leadership development of the TLs who are charged with learning to take on the role of instructional leader at their school sites. The research presented in this article intends to address this gap in the literature by documenting a teacher leader network (TLN) that is part of the Mills Teacher Scholars (MTS), a professional development program that supports teachers to develop as TLs. In this study, the authors describe one TLN meeting at which 21 teachers convened to learn how to develop as teacher instructional leaders responsible for facilitating substantive data conversations with their colleagues. They analyze the affordances this learning community provides for TLs, with a goal of making visible how the TLs were supported in strengthening the skills and dispositions required to be effective facilitators of evidence-informed conversations that would move their colleagues' thinking and learning forward.

The authors discuss an urban public school district's efforts to reinsert play after its mandated disappearance for fourteen years under a scripted curriculum imposed to meet the goals of the No Child Left Behind law. The authors analyze field notes, teacher and administrator interviews, coaching records, and surveys to chart the impact on teachers of the efforts to revive play in their classrooms. The study suggests that these attempts increased the teachers' understandings of child development and the connections between play and social-emotional development. The authors note the role of teachers in arranging play-friendly classrooms and the problems teachers faced including the lack of any district curriculum; the complexities of public-private partnerships; the lack of understanding about play by parents, principals, and administrators; and children's challenging behavior and volent play themes. Finally, the authors consider the sociopolitical factors influencing the sustainability of play in large urban classrooms.

With the increasing acknowledgement of the benefits of early childhood education, there is a need to ask critical questions about whether ample leadership exists for guiding ambitious systemic change in the field. This review of leadership in early childhood educational contexts between 1995 and 2015 examines the epistemological assumptions embedded in the literature (and those advantaged and marginalized as a result), the expressed "purposes" of leadership work and specifically, whether, and to what extent, considerations of social justice and equity have been included in leadership theorizing. Eighty-one publications were identified through a search of major electronic databases and analysed using an analytic review template that includes definitions of leadership, modern and postmodern epistemologies underlying these texts, and considerations of social justice. Findings suggest that while traditional hierarchical conceptions are common, there is a shift towards more distributed and relational understandings of leadership. More recently, leadership is being described as a socially constructed, situated, culturally informed and dynamic process. There has also been an increase in the number of scholars emphasizing postmodern thinking in discussions of leadership over modernist conceptions. Still, there is less explicit discussion of postmodern intersectional identities in leadership. In addition, most literature does not include explicit discussion of social justice in theorizing about leadership, or the expressed purposes of leadership. This suggests the importance of critically examining the epistemological assumptions represented in leadership discourse and of more intentional links between leadership and goals that address social injustices for children, families and the early childhood workforce.

Every child has the right to express their authentic self and to have those expressions validated by the adults responsible for their care. However, young transgender and gender-expansive children's attempts to communicate about their genders are too often dismissed and discredited. In this conceptual paper, the authors draw on the concept of epistemic injustice – and, specifically, testimonial and hermeneutical injustice – as central to understanding the harms young trans and gender-expansive children face and their negative impact on children's learning and development. To build empathy, respect and belonging for TGE children, the authors recommend that early educators practice emergent listening to strengthen testimonial justice. To strengthen hermeneutical justice in early childhood, the authors introduce a new hermeneutical tool that centers child agency, the intersectional gender constellation. They describe what liberating early childhood programs can look like where educators are committed to epistemic justice for young children of all genders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this self-study is to expand the emerging scholarship on meaningful integration and scaffolding of SNSs and the new literacies requisite for their effective use in higher education environments. As a teacher educator, the first author describes the successes and challenges she experienced introducing Twitter into her college classroom. By outlining students' diverse reactions and the range of discoveries they made in learning to use Twitter for professional purposes, this study highlights the potential benefits and complexities associated with successful integration of social networking and new literacies in higher education environments. (Contains 1 note.)

We examine how teacher leaders (TLs), working in a low-income urban elementary school, supported their colleagues to learn how to collect quality formative data and to discuss it in collaborative conversations in order to make their students' learning visible. The TLs faced challenges reflecting consequences resulting from the district's high stakes accountability policies restricting teachers' agency with instructional decision-making and limiting their definitions of data as summative test scores. We document how the TLs worked to reframe teachers' understanding of data to include evidence of student thinking and supported their colleagues to reclaim teaching as professional versus technical work.