Caribbean Curriculum

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Browsing Caribbean Curriculum by Author "Barrow, Dorian A."

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    Professional Education Development in the Context of Tobago: Teachers' Concerns With Change
    (School of Education, UWI, St. Augustine, 2011) Barrow, Dorian A.
    Teacher professional development has been one of the main avenues through which Caribbean nation states have sought to reform and modernize their education systems. Several models have been adopted over the past four decades in response to the varying development trajectories and resources of the individual nation states, with varying degrees of success. This study reports on a teacher professional development innovation project in Tobago, one of the two islands making up the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, from the perspective of a small group of secondary school teachers who participated in the project. Data about the teachers' concerns with the innovation were collected using a Stages of Concerns Questionnaire, and the data were analysed using the Concerns Based Adoption Model framework. The study found that the teachers who participated had low-level Personal Stage 2 concerns with the innovation, that is, they were typical nonusers of the innovation. This suggests that the majority of the teachers who participated in the professional development innovation would not use what they had learned in their classrooms once the period of training had been completed. This has implications for school improvement reforms since the assumption of most of these reforms is that teachers will embrace the new competencies and utilize them to improve the teaching and learning processes in their classrooms. The recommendation is that every effort should be made to mitigate against teachers' personal concerns, or at least to minimize them, to ensure that in-service secondary school teachers approach these professional development innovations more objectively, and by so doing increase the likelihood of them embracing these innovations in the ways that were intended
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    Students' image of the Eleven Plus: Implications for identity, motivation, and education policy
    (School of Education, UWI, St. Augustine, 2012) Barrow, Dorian A.
    This article seeks to add students' voices to the current discourse on the usefulness of narrowly focusing national assessment results on the establishment of merit as the basis for secondary school selection, and the impact that this practice has on students' image of schooling. This is in view of the fact that this practice remains a policy in many countries, including countries of the Anglophone Caribbean. Using a qualitative case study design and a framework that integrates motivation, identity, metaphor, and world view theories, this study solicited and analysed the views of 40 primary school students from Belize on their Eleven Plus examination experience. The study revealed that the students did not feel that the examination had the type of negative psychological effects on them that some parents and educators claim, partly because they did not perceive the national assessment as a high-stakes test. Instead, students used some entailments of the metaphor of the examination as a race-with the pain of training for, the anxieties of starting, and the joys of finishing the race-to make sense of their experiences in preparing for, writing, and receiving the results of the examination. The study also found that the Eleven Plus experience does, however, play a key role in motivating students to stay in school longer, and in the formation of a type of student identity that facilitates the integration of the students' view of self with such content universals as fear of failure and learned helplessness, as well as the Protestant temporal ethic of future orientation. There was no evidence, however, to suggest that the experience helped students to have a better sense of place or of what it means to be a postcolonial citizen in an independent Belize. It is recommended that more must be done to ensure that policymakers and parents listen to what students are saying and "take more serious notice"