Discourse appropriation and category boundary work: casual teachers in the market
With the increasing casualisation of the teacher labour force, there is little written on the experiences of casual teachers and the challenges they face in brokering professional identities within constantly shifting and uncertain work contexts. Being a category bound casual teacher (a product of category boundary work) is a complex subject position. The aim of this article is to advance our understandings of the identity work inherent in casual relief teachers (CRTs) performativity. Anti-essentialist theories support this exploration of CRT subjectivities and processes of discourse appropriation. Using collective biography methodology as restoried memory work, this article speaks back to neoliberal politics of casualisation. The stories draw attention to how both experienced practitioners and newly graduated teachers might 'do' category boundary work within the complexity of school politics as they navigate the uncertainty of gaining and maintaining employment in the Education market.
Planning for Teaching
Planning for learning is essential for creating environments conducive to deep learning and to developing student understandings. Standard 3 of the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (APST) (Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership [AITSL]. 2014) specifies the need for all graduate teachers to be able to 'plan for and implement effective teaching and learning'. Quality planning involves the systematic use of feedback data to design activities that encourage the assimilation and synthesis of information, leading to the creation of new understandings. Student learning should always be the goal.
Emotions and Casual Teachers: Implications of the Precariat for Initial Teacher Education
It is the norm for the casual teaching precariat to experience insecure labour conditions requiring an additional skill set to teachers with stable employment. As more beginning teachers than ever before commence work in casual employment-often a tenuous and unsupported transition into the profession-it is beholden on teacher educators to re-think aspects of their preparation. Four teacher educators undertook 'memory work' based on their previous experiences as casual teachers. Content analysis of follow up focus group discussions stressed the emotional and challenging nature of casual teaching, for both novice and experienced teachers. Findings from this small study, as well as previous research on casual beginning teachers and casual teachers, provide significant insights that have ramifications for initial teacher education, highlighting the importance of the emotional practices of teachers.
Taming a 'Many-Headed Monster': Tarricone's Taxonomy of Metacognition
The research field of metacognition sees a community lacking in rigour, continuity and shared understandings (Schraw, 2009; Shaughnessy, Veenman & Kleyn-Kennedy, 2008). The publication in 2011 of Pina Tarricone's conceptual framework and taxonomy of metacognition offered a 'comprehensive and systematic overview of the literature on metacognition' (Moshman, 2010, cited in Tarricone, 2011, p. xv), finally giving some necessary synthesis to the field. In this paper we briefly introduce some of the difficulties that continue to attribute to the inconsistency of metacognition as a concept and give an overview of Tarricone's taxonomy of metacognition. We also describe how the taxonomy contributes to deeper understandings of one popular model in gifted education. Current research is making strong links between metacognition and giftedness (Veenman, 2008), but importantly there is growing evidence that metacognition is an 'aspect of intelligence that can be more easily promoted by education' (Cornoldi, 2010, p. 257). Due to the complexity and detail of Tarricone's work and the actual taxonomy itself, it is acknowledged that this paper presents only a brief review and discussion of some of the aspects of the taxonomy, such as the supercategories of declarative, procedural and conditional knowledge. The importance of the interconnectedness of these aspects of Tarricone's framework is discussed in relation to how they underlie the metacognition and epistemic beliefs of a student to facilitate or inhibit learning.
Opening the doors of possibility for gifted/high-ability children with learning difficulties: Preliminary assessment strategies for primary school teachers
The traits linked to gifted children with learning disabilities (twice-exceptional) are diverse and complex. Identification of these children can be hindered by a combination of factors, including variations in teacher knowledge and experience, inconsistencies in the visibility of high abilities coexisting simultaneously with one or more learning disabilities, and also the lack of a practical assessment tool. This mixed-methods study addresses the need for such a tool and other assessment strategies that primary school teachers can implement in the preliminary exploratory stage of identifying possible twice-exceptional children. In this process, the focus centres on learning strengths and difficulties. The first phase of the Study focused on procedures leading to the development and trialling of a comprehensive and useful teacher checklist questionnaire (TCQ). Its comprehensiveness was developed through reviewing research-based characteristics, anecdotal lists and teacher perceptions. Section A of the TCQ is based on the six natural-ability Domains found in Françoys Gagné's Differentiated Model of Giftedness and Talent (DMGT 2.0; 2008) or, more recently, his Expanded Model of Talent Development (EMTD, 2013). Section B has three familiar categories of learning difficulties known within the context of the primary school. In the trialling phase, ten teacher participants trialled the TCQ and ranked the selected children in their classes on every item in the nine categories. Overall, qualitative and quantitative analyses suggest promising trends in the preliminary investigation into the TCQ's internal reliability, validity and practical usefulness. In the second phase, six child participants were selected for case studies to determine whether other assessment strategies supported the findings of the TCQ. The results from Interviews with each child, a Parent/Teacher Questionnaire, a non-verbal intelligence test (Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices), and a Think-aloud protocol, affirm the worthiness of the TCQ, but variations in results suggest the importance of its inclusion as part of a comprehensive assessment protocol.