Melbourne Graduate School of Education - Theses

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    The positioning of the coach and the transformative agency of teachers: The problem of constituting joint meaning in an “underperforming” secondary mathematics department
    DIMAGGIO, SOL ( 2013)
    The Victorian State Department of Education and Early Childhood Development (DEECD) instituted a coaching program (2007-2010) to improve teaching in primary and secondary schools. The DEECD policy platform of school improvement through teacher-trained coaches saw the employment of Teaching and Learning Coaches (henceforth “coach”) employed from 2007 to support mathematics and science instruction. Eleven numeracy coaches were deployed across the western metropolitan region of Melbourne in 2008 and placed in schools that were identified as “underperforming” based on student performance data. This research focuses on two school sites in which a coach worked at each on a weekly rotational basis in an onsite professional development program to improve teaching practice using a sanctioned generic mathematics lesson structure. The coaching program in this study involved the teachers of mathematics, the appointment of school-based coaches from among them, and administrators in the targeted “underperforming” secondary schools, with the intention of changing the prima facie unproductive, culturally specific, mathematics teaching practices in those schools. This thesis examines how mathematics teachers in targeted “underperforming” schools reported how they were influenced, by working with a coach. The research is founded on the theoretical belief that there is nothing else to social life but symbolic exchanges and the joint construction and management of meaning, including the meaning of bits of stuff including things we control and things that we don’t, but are expected to use to “remake” ourselves. To become relevant in the teachers’ life spaces the coaching stuff, including the coach herself, had to be interpreted to play a part in a human narrative. Interpretations require grammars that are historically and culturally local. The thesis presents fine-grained descriptive analyses of the semiotic interactions and the psychological positioning of mathematics teachers in the accounts of their experiences of the coaching program. The recommended practices put by the coach were resisted where they were seen not to serve the teachers’ personal identity formation in the local moral order of their school. The teachers’ social activity with the coach shows they live in a double social order. One component consists of the social arrangements for maintaining their teaching lives in their teaching environment, which was difficult by virtue of the educational disadvantage of the community, they served and their own poor training and professional isolation. This is the practical order and the teachers had their local proper place in that order. The other component consisted of the social arrangements for creating honour and status. This is an expressive order. The material world of privileged strategies, tactics, student test performance data and other elements of the program of improvement brought by the coach can be understood in their full human significance only if their roles in both these orders are identified. As to the teachers’ social motivation around these material things, the accounts of the teachers present a strong case for the priority of the expressive over the practical in their social action. The new lesson structure the coach introduced can become a social object only within the dynamic frame of the teachers’ storylines. It is this most ephemeral and “invisible” product of the teachers’ action that is really real, the narratives that are realized in the social orders in their school. The elaboration of a more comprehensive theory of mentoring / coaching practices based on this approach to constructing a new constitutive order involves a study of the social objects as created in and through constitutive practices. This draws on a distinction between constitutive orders of the rules of maths teaching, which are prospective doings, and sayings constructed around social objects, and institutional orders of maths teaching, which are retrospective and depend on “accounts” and justifications. It is essential that constitutive orders of practice are collaborations. Taking all this into account requires thinking of meaning making as one of communication or interaction, or as Harré argues, taking conversation as real or causal. To make sense of, or claim meaning in, the teachers’ constitutively ordered conversational sequences about their interactions with the coach, in the use of social objects, their self organising practices or language games, is to explore their orientation to a constitutive rule and their exhibition of it to others.
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    The road map to building new dreams: raising a child with developmental delay or disability
    SUKKAR, HANAN ( 2011)
    Research on early childhood education emphasises the importance of quality in early childhood intervention. This study examines the quality of Early Childhood Intervention Services based on parents’ experiences raising a child with developmental delay or disability. The study builds on the philosophy of Family-Centred Practice and professionals’ experiences with family-centred interventions. A qualitative case study approach was adopted to gain insight about families who are raising a child with additional needs. Nine in-depth parent-interviews and three focus groups with professionals were conducted in the first two terms of 2010. The case explicates the experiences of parents and professionals who were associated with Specialist Children’s Services in a metropolitan region of Victoria. The research concentrated on the first point of entry to early intervention, the referrals process and the waiting list. It also addressed parents' experiences, priorities and expectations. As a small-scale study, it examined parents’ and children’s needs as well as children’s access to therapy in early intervention. It also investigated community support and parent-professional relationships in the context of early childhood intervention services. The study found that family-centred intervention is beneficial to both parents and children with developmental delay or disability. However, to implement an effective family-centred approach, practitioner support in the form of professional development, supervision and peer mentorship is required to develop professionals’ reflexivity and self-efficacy in family-centred interventions. The study also identified strategies to promote effective practice, gaps in universal and specialised services, and implications for policy.
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    Meeting the professional development needs of online adult learners drawn from culturally and geographically diverse backgrounds
    MEYENN, ANDREW ( 2010)
    The International Baccalaureate (IB) is a worldwide education body. Computer Science, a subject offered in the pre-university Diploma Programme, has experienced declining enrolments and difficulty attracting qualified teachers. In 2006 the IB’s online Professional Development (PD) section embarked on an online programme to augment standard face-to-face workshops. Computer Science was the pilot subject and the researcher, in conjunction with a colleague, developed and conducted a number of online courses between 2006 and 2009. This research focuses on the attitudes of teachers to the online environment, in particular considering whether differences based on cultural, gender or stated learning preferences were present. Additionally, the role of the online teacher in maintaining motivation to complete the course was investigated, and the characteristics of the online environment were assessed against good practice and the aims of the IB’s online PD policy. A small voluntary sample drawn from the overall course participants completed an online survey. The survey questions enabled a mix of quantitative and qualitative responses to be collected and analysed using a mixed methodology. Given the small sample size of 41 teachers, limited use was made of non-parametric statistics to compare responses controlled for gender, cultural group or learning preference. Frequency distributions were inspected to compare these sub-groups in relation to attitudes. Qualitative responses were coded to allow cross comparison between quantitative and qualitative responses. The key findings were that for this specialist group there did not appear to be major differences in attitudes to the online environment based on gender, cultural grouping or stated learning preference. The assessment of the online environment indicated that it was flexible and met the majority of best practice principles, which enabled teachers with difference experiences of and attitudes to online learning to successfully engage with the courses. Additionally, the empathetic, flexible and encouraging nature of the online teachers was seen as an important characteristic of the online environment in terms of assisting teachers to manage the competing demands of the courses with their personal and professional time pressures, and hence maintain their motivation to successfully complete the PD.