Dr 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.

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. 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.

© Emerald Group Publishing Limited. 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.

© 2017, EQUINOX PUBLISHING. 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.

© 2009 National Institute of Education, Singapore. 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.