Associate Professor Jess Harris

Reforms to the basic education system in China have reflected an increasing awareness of and openness to new ideas from the global education sphere. Many of the concepts involved in the development and implementation of these reforms, including adopting holistic perspectives of student development; decentralising school governance to facilitate local decision-making to address local needs; and, an increased focus on practical, lifelong learning for all involved in schools, have been promoted in research and policies throughout the world. While working within this global context, the system of schooling in China has retained a unique character that is quite different from education in the West. Drawing on an international project on school transformation, this chapter aims to examine how five secondary schools in Chongqing, a municipality in Southwestern China, have harnessed and aligned their resources to provide effective school governance following the curriculum reforms. Furthermore, the chapter will examine the similarities and differences between the organisational structures and cultures of these schools in China and successful schools in Australia, England, Finland, Wales and the United States. © 2012 by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.

The central theme of this chapter is that much of the work in school improvement has used a traditional approach with a short-to medium-term time frame and a constrained view of the resources required. The purpose of this chapter is to report the findings of two large-scale projects which hold the promise of a breakthrough in research, policy and practice in school improvement. There are two strands in this breakthrough. The first derives from the fact that much of the traditional work on school improvement has occurred within an existing more-or-less traditional approach to schooling and with a relatively short time frame to planning which rarely extends beyond three to five years. The breakthrough is to understand that school improvement should also involve longterm planning and this may lead schools and school systems into new territory, even a new paradigm of schooling. The second reflects assumptions in policy and practice that efforts to achieve improvement are largely restricted to the school itself and with resources that are delivered to it from a systemic authority. It is a 'closed box' view of school improvement. The breakthrough is a much broader view of resources, or forms of capital, and that strengthening and aligning four forms of capital - intellectual, social, spiritual and financial - should lie at the heart of the school improvement endeavour in the years ahead. Evidence was gathered in two major research and development projects conducted by Melbourne- based Educational Transformations. A summary of the methodology and findings is presented in the pages that follow. The case that the knowledge that has been acquired constitutes a 'breakthrough' is presented in the final section where attention is also given to implications for leadership. It is proposed that strategies based on a combination of the findings will add significant value to efforts to achieve improvement at the school site and across a system. There are implications for current efforts to personalise learning.

It is commonly assumed that experienced teachers are more proficient than beginners. However, evidence supporting this premise is complicated by diverging research traditions and mixed results. We explore the fundamental relationship between years of experience and teaching quality using a comprehensive pedagogical model. Our analysis of 990 lessons, taught by 512 primary teachers in New South Wales during 2014¿15 and 2019¿21, found no significant differences in pedagogy across the experience range (< 1¿24 + years). We canvass two possible explanations: that initial teacher education (ITE) performs better than is typically assumed; and/or that experience, including ongoing participation in many forms of professional development (PD), has minimal impact on pedagogical quality. The important lesson from this study, however, is that the continual positioning of beginning teachers and ITE as deficient is unwarranted and, instead, we should focus on providing teachers with access to high-impact PD throughout their careers.

Delivering effective professional development (PD) at scale necessitates a careful balance between program integrity and local adaptation. Drawing on qualitative case study data, this paper explores tensions in the implementation of a successful PD program, Quality Teaching Rounds, within two contrasting school communities in New South Wales, Australia. Using the theoretical distinction between ostensive and performative aspects of implementation, we demonstrate how even slight surface-level adaptations to the program can have profound consequences for teacher learning. We argue that scaling efforts must attend to the underlying mechanisms of effective PD, not just its design, if benefits are to be realised.

Neoliberal reform of the university sector has resulted in increasing numbers of academics employed on casual or fixed-term contracts. While there is an emergent body of literature on issues of precarity in the academy, relatively little attention has been paid to the roles and responsibilities of those tenured academics who employ and manage non-tenured researchers. The work involved in hiring and managing a contract researcher is rarely acknowledged or supported, and managers receive little to no training. In this paper, we draw on Dorothy Smith's feminist sociological approach to analyse interviews with 22 non-tenured researchers to examine how managerial relationships shape the employment experiences of those working precariously. We argue that tenured academics have ethical responsibilities to provide a working environment that is fair, supports the ongoing development and wellbeing of non-tenured staff, and challenges dominant discourses of precarious academics as 'other'.

The COVID-19 pandemic produced widespread disruption to schooling, impacting 90% of the world's students and moving entire school systems to remote and online learning. In the state of New South Wales, Australia, most students engaged in learning from home for at least eight weeks, with subsequent individual and intermittent school closures. However, while numerous claims have circulated in the popular media and in think tank reports, internationally, about the negative impacts on learning, there is limited empirical evidence of decreased student achievement. Drawing on data from more than 4800 Year 3 and 4 students from 113 NSW government schools, this paper compares student achievement during 2019 and 2020 in a sample of matched schools to examine the effects of the system-wide disruption. Somewhat surprisingly, our analysis found no significant differences between 2019 and 2020 in student achievement growth as measured by progressive achievement tests in mathematics or reading. A more nuanced picture emerges when the sample is examined by dis/advantage (ICSEA) and Year level. The Year 3 cohort in the least advantaged schools (ICSEA < 950) achieved 2¿months less growth in mathematics, while the Year 3 students in mid-ICSEA schools (950¿1050) achieved 2¿months' additional growth. No significant differences were identified for Indigenous students or students located in regional locations. These results provide an important counter-narrative to widespread speculation about alarming levels of 'learning loss' for all students. While the lower achievement growth in mathematics for Year 3 students in lower ICSEA schools must be addressed as a matter of urgency to avoid further inequities, most students are, academically, where they are expected to be. Our findings are a testament to the dedicated work of teachers during the 2020 pandemic to ensure that learning for most students was not compromised, despite unusually trying circumstances.

While always an interdisciplinary endeavour, rapid growth in the fields of Ethnomethodology (hereafter EM) and Conversation Analysis (hereafter CA) has led to the broader application of EM/CA methodologies and the engagement of researchers from beyond the more traditional fields of sociology and linguistics. EM/CA methodologies are being used to both understand the orderliness of social interaction and also to address specific institutional issues, in this instance in higher education settings. This paper explores the challenges inherent in using these approaches to researching institutional relationships, particularly when a primary aim of the research is to inform practitioners of practices used within institutional settings. We argue the need to draw on a variety of analytical tools to understand in situ practices alongside other lenses to translate these understandings of institutional practice to practitioners. Drawing on data from a study of audio-recorded conversations between supervisory and preservice teachers during the school-based professional experience component of initial teacher education, our analysis illustrates how the tools of conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis reveal the intricacies of how supervising and preservice teachers negotiate issues of asymmetry and position themselves through references to specific institutional documents. We then use the work of Dorothy Smith to support the translatability of descriptive findings to support interventions in the field. We use this example to demonstrate the affordances of using various analytic tools in complementary ways to overcome methodological challenges and provide new insights into institutional relationships and inform future practice.

Global contexts of accountability have placed unprecedented pressure on school leaders to improve the performance of their schools. Despite recognition that leaders' influence is mediated by school culture, few studies offer systematic examinations of culture-in-action in schools. The concept of culture remains nebulous and is frequently glossed over as being 'messy' in studies of school change. This paper uses tools from membership categorisation analysis to demonstrate how culture is produced at a micro-level in and through the actions of leaders in one school. My analysis shows a disjuncture between the purported values and policies of the school and the ways that school leaders through their talk construct and implement school practices, and thus the culture-in-action at their school. I argue that implementing effective change is impossible without understanding and disrupting the micro-level production and reproduction of culture in schools.

Purpose ¿ The central argument in this paper is that ethical school leadership is imperative in a context of increasing performance-driven accountability. The purpose of this paper is to focus on school principals' perceptions of how they understand ethical leadership and how they lead the ethical use of data. Design/methodology/approach ¿ This study utilises semi-structured interviews with six state school principals (one primary and six secondary) to explore their perceptions of ethical leadership practices; and how they balance current competing accountabilities in a context of performance-driven accountability. Findings ¿ There were four key findings. First, principals used data to inform and direct their practices and their conversations with teachers. Second, while ethics was a central consideration in how principals' led, practising in an ethical manner was identified as complex and challenging in the current context. Third, Starratt's (1996) ethical framework proved to be relevant for interpreting principals' practices. Finally, all of the principals referred to dilemmas they faced as a result of competing priorities and all used a variety of strategies to deal with these dilemmas. Originality/value ¿ While there is a small body of research that explores school leaders' understandings of ethical tensions and dilemmas, there is little research that has focused on school leaders' understandings of the ethical use of data. This study, then, contributes to this area as it provides a discussion on school principals' leadership practices in the current climate driven by data use.

This paper contributes to critical policy research by theorising one aspect of policy enactment, the meaning making work of a cohort of mid-level policy actors. Specifically, we propose that Basil Bernstein's work on the structuring of pedagogic discourse, in particular, the concept of recontextualisation, may add to understandings of the policy work of interpretation and translation. Recontextualisation refers to the relational processes of selecting and moving knowledge from one context to another, as well as to the distinctive re-organisation of knowledge as an instructional and regulative or moral discourse. Processes of recontextualisation necessitate an analysis of power and control relations, and therefore add to the Foucauldian theorisations of power that currently dominate the critical policy literature. A process of code elaboration (decoding and recoding) takes place in various recontextualising agencies, responsible for the production of professional development materials, teaching guidelines and curriculum resources. We propose that mid-level policy actors are crucial to the work of policy interpretation and translation because they are engaged in elaborating the condensed codes of policy texts to an imagined logic of teachers' practical work. To illustrate our theoretical points we draw on data; collected for an Australian research project on the accounts of mid-level policy actors responsible for the interpretation of child protection and safety policies for staff in Queensland schools. © 2013 Taylor & Francis.

As part of the school practicum experience, supervising and pre-service teachers have regular professional conversations. Supervising teachers are expected to model, assess and evaluate their pre-service teachers' classroom skills, and a key component of this is feedback about pre-service teachers' teaching techniques. This paper uses conversation analysis and membership categorisation analysis to unpack the initial three turns of such feedback to show how they have procedural consequence for the speakers' professional relationships and for the talk that follows. Analysis of seven audio-recordings reveals some of the conversational ways the participants constitute their institutional roles and relationships within a particular moral relational order: the speakers talking as supervising, or pre-service teachers with and for each other about teaching practices. Pre-service teachers are seen for the most part to align with their supervising teachers' versions of events. These speakers collaboratively co-construct asymmetrical institutional relationships, interactively normalising their shared understandings of attributes associated with 'good' teachers and effective teaching. We suggest that the development of such asymmetric relationships and understandings may well inhibit pre-service teacher learning, limiting possibilities for extended understandings of alternative classroom practices.

The availability and use of online counseling approaches has increased rapidly over the last decade. While research has suggested a range of potential affordances and limitations of online counseling modalities, very few studies have offered detailed examinations of how counselors and clients manage asynchronous e-mail counseling exchanges. In this paper we examine e-mail exchanges involving clients and counselors through Kids Helpline, a national Australian counseling service that offers free online, e-mail, and telephone counseling for young people up to the age of 25. We employ tools from the traditions of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis to analyze the ways in which counselors from Kids Helpline request that their clients call them, and hence change the modality of their counseling relationship, from e- mail to telephone counseling. This paper shows the counselors' three multilayered approaches in these e-mails as they negotiate the potentially delicate task of requesting and persuading a client to change the trajectory of their counseling relationship from text to talk without placing that relationship in jeopardy. © Walter de Gruyter.

In many ways, China's education system is quite different from systems of education in the West. Rich descriptions of school transformation, however, have revealed that the factors that fuelled transformation in schools in China are also evident in schools in Australia, England, Finland, Wales and the United States. This paper draws on an international project that examined how secondary schools from six countries achieved success by developing and drawing on their resources, referred to as four forms of capital: financial, intellectual, social and spiritual. It describes how five secondary schools in Chongqing, Western China, viewed each form of capital and how the four forms of capital were strengthened and aligned through outstanding governance to support the success of all students. The case is made that, although some aspects of the forms of capital found in schools in China may be viewed differently, the approaches adopted by these schools share a number of common elements with approaches to school transformation identified in Western schools. It is argued that these common elements from a range of international settings constitute a rich evidence base for understanding school transformation and for new insights in governance and leadership.

Background: There are barriers to doctors detecting depression in general practice. We wondered what questions patients thought the doctor should ask to explore it appropriately. Methods: One hundred and thirty-six teacher trainees, teachers, and students in the community, most of whom had experienced depression, were studied qualitatively in interviews and focus groups. They were asked to suggest what questions they would find helpful from doctors to elicit their experience of depression. Transcripts were grouped by gender and content analysed. RESULTS Subjects suggested starting with open questions that act as signals for moving into emotional areas followed by specific questions about specific somatic expressions of depression. Men preferred questions about shorter fuse and anger toward others, while women were happy with questions about increased crying. Discussion: If confirmed in other sectors of the community, these data may allow doctors to increase patients ' comfort with their exploration of possible emotional problems such as depression.