Aishling Flaherty

School leaders have faced significant challenges since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Distributed leadership has become the default leadership response implemented by schools to manage increased pressure. While Irish schools have traditionally operated behind a ‘closed-door’, there has recently been a movement towards a shared model of leadership, and Irish school leadership policy currently endorses the adoption of a distributed leadership model. Increased interest and policy endorsement notwithstanding, distributed leadership remains an elusive concept. The aim of this study was to explore Irish post-primary school personnel’s interpretations of distributed leadership and analyse these interpretations through a teacher empowerment lens with respect to Irish school leadership policy. This study reports the results of a thematic analysis of 363 survey responses provided by post-primary school personnel. Short’s six dimensions of teacher empowerment were utilised to inform a framework for thematically analysing the participants’ interpretations. An initial framework for enacting distributed leadership through an empowerment lens was outlined. Interpretations were found to diverge regarding (i) what is shared, (ii) who it is shared with, and (iii) how it is shared. This paper adds to the corpus of knowledge concerning how distributed leadership is understood in practice and will aid in informing future school leadership policy documents.

Within chemistry education, there are various curricular and pedagogical approaches that aim to improve teaching and learning in chemistry. Efforts to characterize these transformations have primarily focused on student reasoning and performance, and little work has been done to explore student perceptions of curricular and pedagogical transformations and whether these perceptions align with the transformational intent. To complement our previous work on the Organic Chemistry, Life, the Universe, and Everything (OCLUE) curriculum, we developed this exploratory study to determine if students had perceived the goals of the transformation. As in our previous research on OCLUE, we compared perceptions between OCLUE and a more traditional organic chemistry course. Using inductive and deductive qualitative methodologies, we analyzed student responses to three open-eneded questions focused on how students perceived they were expected to think, what they found most difficult, and how they perceived they were assessed. The findings were classified into three superodinate themes: one where students perceived they were expected to learn things as rote knowledge, such as memorization (“Rote Knowledge”), another where students perceived they were expected to use their knowledge (“Use of Knowledge”), and responses that used vague, generalized language, were uninformative, or did not address the questions asked (“Other”). Students in these two courses responded very differently to the open-ended questions with students in OCLUE being more likely to perceive they were expected to use their knowledge, while students in the traditional course reported rote learning or memorization more frequently. As the findings evolved, our interpretations and discussions were influenced by sociocultural perspectives and other cultural frameworks. We believe this approach can provide meaningful insights into transformational intent and certain features of classroom cultures.

Distributed leadership has enjoyed increased popularity, becoming a prevalent model of school leadership. The focus of distributed leadership is to foster shared leadership practices thereby enhancing school culture and practice. Despite multiple literature reviews that sought to yield greater understanding of the theoretical underpinnings of distributed leadership, there is little focus on empirical research on distributed leadership in post-primary schools. Therefore, this article reports on a scoping review of 39 empirical studies on distributed leadership in post-primary schools. The studies were analysed to identify the main trends of this body of research and to offer implications for future research. The main trends of this research corpus include the typical methodologies used, the common theoretical constructs which distributed leadership is studied in respect of, the most common distributed leadership theoretical framework subscribed to by research, and variances in understanding of distributed leadership. The authors offer future research implications for distributed leadership in post-primary schools. The results of this review lead us to conclude that there is a need for greater rigor in distributed leadership research. Future research is suggested regarding perceptions of distributed leadership, its relationship with policy, wellbeing, and female leadership, and the culture required for distributed leadership to flourish.

Online conferences are a means of replacing the absence of physical meetings canceled due to COVID-19. In this communication we outline ten tips for those looking to host online meetings, based on our recent experience of running the conference “Methods in Chemistry Education Research (MICER)” online to 320 participants over 3 days in May and June 2020, so that other chemistry educators looking to host online conferences have some of the insight we learned in our experience.

In the past twenty years there has been a surge of research on chemistry students’ attitudes, self-efficacy, self-concept, expectations, values, interest, motivation, effort beliefs and achievement emotions. This research has sought to understand how students feel when learning chemistry and how this may be influencing how they perform. However the wealth of this research has yet to be reviewed as a whole to identify its major themes and findings. This article reports on a review of 91 affective chemistry education research studies published since the year 2000. A focus of this review is to survey the methodological approaches used throughout research. The main finding of this review is that quantitative research regimes overwhelmingly dominant the landscape of affective chemistry education research. Of the studies reviewed, 85% (n = 77) are quantitative, 10% (n = 9) are mixed-methods while just 5% (n = 5) are qualitative research studies. Five overarching themes of affective chemistry education research are revealed. These themes manifest as the purposes behind these research studies which include; (i) to measure and compare affective states across various student demographics and contexts (32%, n = 29), (ii) to assess the influence of a learning intervention on student affect (30%, n = 28), (iii) to correlate measured affective states to performance in exams (24%, n = 22), (iv) to develop and validate scales for chemistry education research (10%, n = 9) and (v) to quantitatively model affective theoretical frameworks (3%, n = 3). The dominance of quantitative research regimes to investigate student affect may be challenged given the highly subjective and unstable nature of measured affective states. The findings of this review offer a series of implications for affective chemistry education which will be later discussed with a view to indicating potential directions for future affective chemistry education research.

Organic Chemistry, Life, the Universe and Everything (OCLUE) is an undergraduate lecture-based organic chemistry course that has been transformed in line with the vision for science education set out by the ‘Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts and Core Ideas’ (National Research Council, 2012). OCLUE is designed to progress students understanding of core ideas in organic chemistry through the use of scientific practices such as constructing explanations, predictions and models. The purpose of this study is to generate theory on how OCLUE students conceptualise the structure and development of scientific knowledge. Eleven students with diverse experiences and exam performances were interviewed. The data was collected and analysed in accordance with the tenants of constructivist grounded theory (Charmaz, 2000). OCLUE students conceptualised a hierarchical structure of scientific knowledge whereby behind claims and answers in science is important information that determines the validity of the claim or answer. Being adept in utilising this information was important to students in OCLUE as it provided them with the opportunity to account for why phenomena occur in organic chemistry. Students explained that the process of developing scientific knowledge is rarely straight-forward or pre-determined. Instead it was believed that scientists needed to piece together what they know in seemingly random ways in order to solve science puzzles. In the context of OCLUE, students explained that memorising information ahead of OCLUE exams was insufficient. Instead they had to synthesise and interrogate their prior understanding to figure out new problems encountered in OCLUE exams. Students attributed the efficacy of OCLUE's pedagogy to helping them engage in constructivist thinking processes that involved interrogating and applying their prior knowledge. This contributes to the understanding that OCLUE has set out a precedent organic chemistry course that can foster a more scientific way of learning science that contrasts students’ engagement in considerably arduous memorisation techniques.

This chapter sets out to discuss the tenants of power and empowerment as features of teachers' professional knowledge. At the root of empowerment is power and this power works to shape the experiences of every individual within the school institution. While teachers may not have the ability to control some aspects of how power is operationalized within the school institution, teachers do have control over how they perceive and operationalize power in the classroom. As such, it is argued that the effective and conscious operationalization of this power is a key aspect of the professional development of teachers. This chapter explores the concepts of power and empowerment, their various conceptualizations and their implications on classroom teaching and learning processes. Through embracing empowerment as an educational philosophy, an account of how teachers can generate empowering learning environments for their students will be provided.

Teaching assistants (TAs) are crucial components of laboratory teaching and learning processes and much research has been devoted to developing their teaching capabilities. However, much of this research has involved transmitting information about what good teaching is to TAs. This research study sought to employ an alternative way of catalysing laboratory TAs in their teaching roles. The Transforming Laboratory Leadership, Learning and Teaching programme (TLLLT) aimed to place emphasis on the development of TAs as leaders in line with the construct of transformational teaching. Here, a narrative inquiry approach was used to generate a space for TAs to reflect and discuss how their experiences, perceived capabilities, self-efficacy beliefs and attitudes towards teaching could implicate and inform their adoption of transformational teaching methods. Twenty-seven TAs with diverse levels of teaching experience participated in the TLLLT programme. Records of brainstorm discussions during the TLLLT programme provided the narrative to analyse how TAs envisioned their development as transformational teachers. Focus group interviews explored how TAs perceived their participation in the TLLLT programme to have influenced the learning environment in the laboratory. The findings of this research support TA teacher development to nurture TAs’ development as leaders towards catalysing them in their teaching roles.