Vol 3, Iss 2

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Respondent Conditioning Training Effect on the Behavior of the Audience of Creativity

Maria Isabel Muñoz-Blanco, University of Guadalajara / Universidad Panamericana, Mexico  and María Antonia Padilla Vargas,  University of Guadalajara, Mexico (Pages 18 to 32)

The present study aimed to understand the way the behavior of the audience of creativity changes by presenting a respondent conditioning training in between tests. 35 undergraduate psychology students were presented with a Q-sort test in order to assess the way the participants organized artistic images from architecture, photography and furniture design. After a first test, participants were presented with a respondent training conditioning where happy faces appeared together with architecture images and sad faces appeared with images of artistic photography and furniture design. A second test was presented after training. The results showed that the participants changed their responses between tests, however, the direction of change couldn’t be predicted. These results are discussed in terms of the literature on evaluative conditioning and their implications for future studies with the audience of creativity.

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Four Pillars to Building a Positive School Culture

Jake Madden, Principal Al Yasat Private School UAE (Pages 33 to 38)

This article examines the premise of the Outstanding School. In dealing with such a premise, the paper examines what such schools have in common by detailing four key ‘pillars’. Implicated in these pillars is the concept of leadership and the development of an appropriate school staffing culture. Building on the theme of change the article provides an insight into how change can be successfully implemented in a school when leadership is focused on what matters.

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Unpacking the Strategic Teaching Improvement Agenda

David Lynch, Southern Cross University, Australia and Jake Madden, Al Yasat private School UAE (Pages 39 to 48)

At the 2017 Abu Dhabi International Education Conference a number of paper were presented on the theme of improving teaching. This paper condenses key messages from the conference to generate an insight--- an answer if you like--- into ‘how to’ engender, support and sustain ongoing teaching improvement. To that end this article explores four key and inert-related elements: embedding of a research culture; the power of collaboration; the use and role of professional dialogue and the importance of improving teaching in context. Taken together these elements represent an insight into the agenda of innovation and change in schools.

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The Effect of Virtual Learning Environments in an ESL Classroom: A case study

Alberti Strydom, Al Yasat Private School, UAE (Pages 49 to 59)

The use of technology in education has become a critical part of teaching in our ever-changing world where technology has found a way to infiltrate our everyday lives. The use of 21st century teaching methods has become a vessel to help schools strive towards moulding and shaping our children to become informed and responsible citizens in a global community. This action research project explored the use of a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) as a tool to enhance learning in my Grade 4 class. A VLE was created and used as a tool for collaborative learning, flipped teaching and as a communication network for students. Students were interviewed and asked to complete questionnaires about their learning experience while using the VLE. Assessment scores for tests in Science and Math, reading assessments and project rubrics were analysed.

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Digital Diversions in Education: Interactive Multimedia for Adolescent Motivation in Unilateral Classroom Scenarios

Tirtha Prasad Mukhopadhyay, Universidad de Guanajuato, Mexico Mark Siprut, San Diego State University, California and Baidya Nath Saha, Centro de Investigación en Matemáticas, Nuevo León, Mexico. (Pages 60 to 74)

In this paper we examine the effects of interactive diversions on adolescents, in the context of the fact that they in many cases they may be subject to stressful learning scenarios. Such scenarios may be normal classroom or workshop environments, which for some reason could produce more than average stress or anxiety on young learners

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Numeracy Across the Curriculum- A Pathway to Critical Thinking

Maura Sellars PhD, University of Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia (Pages 75 to 83)

This writing seeks to identify and explore the ways in which mathematical competencies, skills and conceptual understandings underpin all the discipline areas across the mainstream primary school curriculum as numeracy competencies. It considers how these numeracy capacities can be investigated and acknowledged in each of the major areas of disciplinary study and how these foundational, embedded numeracy components can facilitate the development of critical thinking skills that are subject dominated but generic in nature. A framework is presented to illustrate the ways in which sound logic and the development of skills in various types of reasoning supports the intuitive compulsion of students to investigate diverse perspectives, assess these in relation to problem solving and decision making and evaluate their subsequent proposals in a critical manner. 

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Mixing Methods: Creative Collaboration in Mobile Moviemaking

Daniel L. Wagner, MCT (Hons.), Senior Lecturer – Creative Industries, Unitec Institute of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand (Pages 84 to 96)

This article is a reflection on creative collaboration and synergy, using a tertiary course in mobile moviemaking to explore ways in which collaborative projects involving people from different creative disciplines can generate creative outcomes that surpass – in both innovative value and aesthetic depth – creative outcomes that might be generated by the individual disciplines on their own. The article will reflect on the processes and outcomes of a collaborative class project within this course, with specific reference to the differences in ideation and making-methods used by creators in different disciplines and media.

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Strengths-Based Approach in Social Work: A distinct ethical advantage

 Venkat Pulla  Australian Catholic University (Pages 97 to 114)

The Author believe that social work and human services professionals can see great outcomes when they work with the inherent strengths of individuals, family groups and organisations. Whenever we assist people in their recovery and their empowerment, our commitment to build on these inherent strengths goes a long way. In all humility this is about a way of asking the client three simple but pertinent questions: ‘What has worked for you before? What does not work for you? And what might work in the present situation for you?’ These three questions will allow facilitators and clients to make important changes in the processes and goals of engagement that will see through a variety of changes; as workers we are often wonderstruck as, with every change, clients seem to blossom. People pick up their bits and pieces and reconstruct hope for the future. In this paper the author will describe this approach in social work and expand on its assumptions and its core elements.

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Towards the Teaching School: Partnering to create an exciting new future in teacher education.

David Lynch and Jake Madden, Southern Cross University, Australia (Pages 115 to 128)

Improving the academic performance of schools is a global preoccupation for governments. A pre-occupation that has its roots in the emergence of a global knowledge based economy which places a premium on intellectual capacity. This premium has consequently focused governments to improving the academic performance of their schools. Given the key role played by teachers in such an agenda school heads are being called upon to improve the teaching capacities of their teachers. This teaching improvement agenda is challenging because traditional approaches to teacher professional development --- the withdraw from class to workshop model--- prove ineffective and limiting in an age of knowledge production, innovation and applied creativity and constant change). In this paper the authors revisit the Teaching School concept (as theorised by authors such as Turner and Lynch, 2006; Smith and Lynch, 2010; Lynch, 2012) to propose a fresh approach to teacher professional learning: one that is embedded in the ‘teacher as researcher’ premise, new teaching arrangements and a partnership with a university. In order to deal with such a proposition we introduce the concept of the ‘Teaching.

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Perceived Organisational Innovativeness: The difference between individual and social creativity

 Per Eisele (Pages 129 to 139)

The aim of the present study was to explore the relationships between perceived individual creativity, social creativity and organizational innovativeness. Participants (N=140) were randomized from a list of employees at one workplace and consisted of 45 men and 95women with a mean age of 41.34. The result indicates that participants perceive themselves as individually creative and participants perceiving themselves as socially creative score their workplace on innovativeness differently. People scoring high on individual creativity score high on perceived organizational innovativeness, while self-reported social creativity correlate negatively with organizational innovativeness.

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Learning is Fun, You Can Really Hear It: Teacher Training and Chopin’s Etudes

Yaron Vansover, Kibbutzim College of Education, Tel Aviv (Pages 140 to 156)

The history of education is not relevant for education students. Therefore, it has almost completely disappeared from the curriculum of teacher training institutions. One of the reasons is that historical research of education has avoided what actually took place in the classroom itself, fifty, one hundred and two hundred years ago, inter alia, because it is so very complicated a research area. This research complexity should be dealt with in a wide variety of ways. To that end, the article proposes mobilizing the sense of hearing, as well, to learn about this history, for example, by listening to Chopin’s études, revealing the didactic insights submerged in them, and trying to connect them to the world of school teaching. That is likely to make the history of education attractive to education students and to return it to their training institutions.