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This article shares findings from a qualitative inquiry that explores preservice teachers' evaluation of social studies curriculum resources found on Pinterest and Teachers Pay Teachers. Both at the beginning and the end of their elementary social studies methods course at a large university in the southeastern United States, the teacher candidates were asked to identify good and bad examples of social studies resources and justify their choices. Their choices and the justification they provided were analyzed using qualitative coding. Findings indicate that while teacher candidates' choices and justifications were sometimes further developed by the end of their social studies methods course, their critical evaluation of shared online curriculum resources was incomplete or limited to near-exact examples from the class. The author poses a number of on-going considerations regarding teacher candidate equity literacy skills as they relate to evaluation and usage of online curriculum sharing sites.

This article reports on a unique collaboration between principal and teacher preparation programs within one college of education at a rural university in southeastern United States. The collaborative project worked to meet both the need of teacher candidates to receive instructional feedback and coaching on their teaching and the need of principal candidates to gain experience giving instructional coaching to novice teachers. Feedback and coaching were provided through video capture and annotation technology (VCAT) allowing the principal candidate to provide specific feedback using evidence from the teaching candidate's teaching video to support their instructional coaching. Researchers explored quantitative and qualitative data of principal candidates' coaching experience to determine the change in their self-efficacy in providing instructional coaching over the course of a semester and their perceptions of their experience using VCAT to facilitate the coaching.

The status quo is no longer an option. School leaders need to model care, courage, and open communication. Superintendent Jennifer Gallagher reflects on three important components of adaptive and effective leadership--communication, care, and courage--that she found helpful in navigating her district through the challenges of the pandemic.

Amy Yarborough, a veteran teacher and curriculum resource leader in a rural district in Virginia, facilitates a professional learning community focused on social justice and equity-oriented instructional practices. When allegations of teaching critical race theory are reported via the state's email tip line and community social media groups, Amy is asked to present her professional learning community materials to the local school board. In the midst of stakeholder protests and media scrutiny, Amy must decide how to explain her professional decisions. Current and future educational leaders interested in issues related to race and equity will consider the roles of policy and the public in influencing teachers' lessons.

The term 'upstanding' encompasses actions and behaviors grounded in one's defense of their own beliefs and others. While such broad application of the term has merit, from a critical education perspective it lacks direction. To efficaciously address injustice, upstanding action must go beyond one's beliefs. A directional application of upstanding behavior, or the notion of 'upstanding for justice,' frames upstanding as action to address chronic social victimization via systems of oppression. In this article, we describe the development of a new heuristic to support students' understanding of upstanding and detail the university honors course in which we used the heuristic to explore the phenomena of 'bullying' and historical injustice to expand ideas of 'upstanding'. Results indicate that students in the course broadened their conceptions of justice and the use of historical cases aided in their understanding of the interplay between individual agency and social structure in social justice efforts. [For the corresponding grantee submission, see ED605878.]

Critical inquiries--those seeking to disrupt and alleviate injustice--amplify the stakes and challenges of designing effective compelling questions. Teachers must navigate decisions about what constitutes an injustice, which perspectives are legitimate, and how to maintain a focus on justice and equity while neither indoctrinating students nor legitimizing oppressive ideologies. Crowley and King's critical inquiry framework offers guidance using three Inquiry Design Model (IDM) components: (1) Ask compelling and supporting questions that explicitly critique systems of oppression and power; (2) Expose students to sources that include the perspectives of marginalized and oppressed groups; (3) Develop tasks and a Taking Informed Action activity that push students to take tangible steps toward alleviating the injustice explored in the inquiry. Given the central role of compelling questions in framing the direction, quality, and criticality of inquiries, this article aims to support educators in developing principled and robust questions. Based on our experiences as teacher educators, the authors illustrate an iterative process called "Getting Critical with Inquiry Questions," which supports this goal. They guide readers through this process, offering examples from their teacher candidates' work. They also clarify how this approach avoids indoctrination and deepens criticality.

This paper presents a multi-case study of teacher candidates in a pre-service middle grades social studies methods course. The study aimed to understand how middle grades teacher candidates viewed their future as upstanders with agency in middle grades settings. The focus of the research was on heuristic representations that the teacher candidates created to illustrate how they understood their role in supporting the democratic aims of middle grades social studies. Qualitative data was collected and analyzed through chordal triad of agency theory (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998). The findings indicate that pre-service teachers best understand their future as change agents through their role of curriculum and instruction and their impact on students, additionally their conceptualizations of their intended agency were influenced by their past and present experiences as well as their projected goals for the future. This research also suggests that heuristics may be a powerful tool in the preparation of teacher candidates, helping them to think through their role in supporting the democratic aims of social studies, middle grades education and social justice education. Important constraints about teacher candidates' perceptions (or lack thereof) of oppressive structures within middle school settings are considered.

Background Surgical drains are a key component for recovery in breast reconstruction procedures. However, they are often cumbersome and carry a risk of infection with prolonged use. We aimed to develop a more thorough understanding of patient and health care provider perspectives on surgical drains, to inform future efforts in improving the breast reconstruction patient experience. Methods Twenty-nine breast reconstruction patients and eight plastic surgery providers were recruited to complete surveys focused on surgical drains. Likert scales ranging from 1 to 5 were developed to gauge how bothersome drains felt, as well as concern for infection. Ordinal variable and categorical multiple-choice analyses were applied as appropriate. Results Fifteen (51.7%) patients underwent implant-based breast reconstruction, and 14 (48.3%) patients underwent autologous breast reconstruction. The most common duration of drain placement was 2 weeks (N = 13). The surgical site infection (SSI) rate requiring antibiotics was 28% (N = 8). On a scale of 1 to 5, both patients (median = 3) and providers (median = 2.5) viewed drains as bothersome. Patients were "frequently" concerned about infection risk (median = 3). Other high-frequency patient concerns included general pain and discomfort. Conclusion Surgical drains are a common component of breast reconstruction procedures and are viewed as cumbersome by both patients and providers. Patients expressed concerns about drain site pain, discomfort, and tugging on clothing. Patients and providers both believed that drains could contribute to SSI. Overall, these data provide insight to drive future improvements in the patient drain experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Millions of teachers regularly turn to Internet sharing sites such as Pinterest and Teachers Pay Teachers for curriculum resources and ideas. While this innovative technology poses a number of advantages for teachers who are almost never given an appropriate amount of time to engage in curriculum planning, and who can supplement their frustratingly low salaries by selling their ideas, it also presents serious disadvantages. In this article, the authors argue that seeking out curricular resources through these sites without critical literacy habits can deter the kind of active and critical reflection that is vital to meaningfully planned lessons. If teachers care about engaging students in curriculum and pedagogy that is multicultural and justice-oriented, then they must adopt a filter to help assess what resources, activities, and ideas they bring into the classroom from sharing sites. What the authors call "pinning with pause" is especially important as it relates to elementary social studies. Elementary classrooms are often the first places where children begin to construct concepts about the social world--a process they are engaged in throughout the school day whether or not their teacher is explicit about it. If teachers are not careful, they can inadvertently send problematic and mixed messages about the social world through curriculum from all different disciplines.

While recognized as a foundational practice, social studies educators struggle with enacting inquiry-based instruction. With critical inquiries that examine sociopolitical and other injustices, developing aligned compelling questions represents a challenge, particularly for elementary teachers. Informed by four lenses of criticality from social studies scholarship, this design-based mixed methods research follows 28 elementary teacher candidates from two universities and regions as they formulated compelling questions for critical inquiry units together. Data sources included audio transcriptions of group discussions, course assignments, curriculum planning documents, and reflections. Qualitative and quantitative findings show that candidates created more critical questions with the intervention scaffold, suggesting a new criterion for determining open questions: identifying ongoing issues of empirical injustice. Most still struggled with identifying implicated social groups and clarifying relationships of interdependence. Group members' positional awareness of sociopolitical identities appeared to support more critical collective question design trajectories through understandings of structure, agency, and place relative to the content. Results suggest the importance of scaffolding critical inquiry question development—with special care to support teacher candidates' sociopolitical consciousness, and consider their and K-12 students' implicated identities in power systems, situated in specific teaching contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim: To study to model future clinical dental workforce scenarios in Malaysia, in relation to population need-demand, to inform future change. Materials and Methods: A system dynamics (SD) model was developed in Vensim-software to model the need/demand and supply for dental care across public-private sectors over 3 decades (2010-2040). This model included two sub-models relating to "need/demand" and "supply," drawing on national evidence from two previous studies (student career surveys and interviews of key stakeholders nationally), together with relevant available data. This SD model provided the baseline model (S1) for Malaysia and four-distinctive-scenarios (S2-5), involving enhancing generalists-specialists across public-private sectors. An additional scenario (S6) was run to optimize workforce utilization, informed by career expectations of emerging graduates drawing on earlier scenarios (S2-5). Results: Modeling future five-scenarios highlighted the gap in dental workforce nationally across both sectors could range from a surplus of a total of 3739 dentists and 817 therapists in the baseline scenario to a total shortfall of 1249 dentists and surplus of 817 therapists by the year 2040, influenced by dentist working patterns, specialization, and privatization. Increasing the potential for specialist training and permitting emerging graduates' to working part-time, while optimizing public sector primary care, and responding to the career expectations of emerging graduates, has the potential to absorb potential oversupply, and, thus, utilize the entire clinician dental workforce in Malaysia in the medium term. Conclusion: The findings of this model demonstrate the short-term requirement to expand the Malaysian dental workforce to meet dental needs of the population, highlighting that continued production at the current rate will result in oversupply, unless action is taken to maximize primary care, enhance specialization, and embrace flexible working to meet career expectations of graduates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]