Discussions on how best to improve the professional status of teaching are necessarily based on certain consciously or subconsciously held assumptions of what the terms "profession" and "teaching" are. As a result, disagreements regarding the best way to improve teaching may be more the result of a difference in definition of…

Addressing professional and popular concern about identifying and adequately rewarding excellent teachers, the authors describe a proposal for selecting master/mentor teachers and utilizing them in demonstration schools. There are six specific elements that should make any master teacher proposal realistic and educationally and economically…

The influence of immediate working environment upon research productivity of 1,009 academic, physical scientists was examined. Working environment was classified as being either professionally oriented and supportive of scientific productivity, or organizationally oriented and supportive of bureaucratic advancement. Liberal arts, parochial, and…

A 17-week professional experience program was undertaken to enable a college professor to: (1) attend and present a paper at the 14th World Conference of the International Council for Distance Education (ICDE) in Oslo, Norway, in December 1988; (2) gain first hand information about innovations in the use of telecommunications in the delivery of…

Black women who have gained access to higher education and higher paying positions often find themselves in less than optimal work environments, on account of racist and sexist attitudes of their colleagues. Accordingly, this study was undertaken to identify those aspects of interpersonal interaction and response among black professional women on…

Marion Sheridan, President of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) in 1949-50, questioned traditional values, defending or assaulting them as the circumstances of a rapidly changing world deemed necessary. The voice that spoke through her writing was instrumental in modifying English curriculum. She pioneered the use of film in the…

This annual report of the Carnegie Foundation sets forth the goals the foundation has established for the improvement of education: (1) an urgent call to national action in school reform; (2) a commitment to the disadvantaged; (3) a crusade to strengthen teaching; (4) state standards, with leadership at the local school; (5) a quality curriculum;…

A content analysis was performed to determine the trends and issues in educational technology for the period from October 1, 1987 through September 30, 1988. Sources for the analysis included five leading professional journals in educational technology, papers given at annual conventions of three professional associations, dissertations from five…

The Center for Excellence in Education at Northern Arizona University has learned a great deal from the past 5 years of research and evaluation of 15 pilot-test school districts, as they endeavor to restructure and make positive changes. The purpose of the reform movement is to provide adequate incentives for recruitment, retention, and motivation…

Using a critical-career events framework to describe the socialization process in academe, a model was developed which relates how the experiencing of critical-career events affects individuals' judgments of their research self-efficacy which, in turn, affects their scholarly productivity. A sample of 206 full-time associate professors from 7…

Teaching can acquire professional status through teacher preparation agencies implementing programs oriented to the hypothetical-deductive model based on existing research. Teacher preparation programs must orient both inservice and preservice teachers appropriately to educational research and its transfer to practice. Many research studies exist…

A study surveyed 163 women professors to identify errors they had made that interfered with their ability to gain tenure or promotion and to elicit advice they would offer to others who wished to advance in academia. The mistakes can be summarized as acquiescing to the traditional female role, resisting traditional socialization and internalizing…

This study was written as the Finnish contribution to a symposium convened to describe and analyze for comparative purposes the factual development of the position of women as educators, i.e., as employees in the school sytems of different countries. The study emphasizes the close connections that the position of women in the school system have…

In the past, many social scientists were content to study teaching from a distance, borrowing concepts mainly from psychology and sociology to explain what teaching was like. Increasingly, students of teaching have come to value the insider's viewpoint and to rely on teachers as informants. This paper brings together research about the meaning of…

The philosophical split between behaviorists and humanists has caused tension among education faculty on many campuses. Foundations faculty often identify themselves with a "humanist" perspective, while administrators, increasingly pressured by state mandates and public calls for accountability, adhere to behaviorist management principles and…