Title: Teacher Job Satisfaction in a Year-Round School
Summary: This article is about Timber Lane Elementary in Virginia and how it switched to a year-round schedule and the benefits it has provided, including teacher retention and job satisfaction, to student success and overall academic success.
Topic: http://msaraceno.wordpress.com/question/
Category: Journalistic source.
What is it? This is a periodical I found on EBSCO Host.
Publication Information: Educational Leadership. May 2003. Vol. 60 Issue 8 Pg.65
Author: Shelly Gismondi Haser and Ilham Nasser
Accessed: January 29, 2009
Support: There are a lot of teachers making comments in the article; however, the main qualifying sources come at the very end of the article and is the research that supports the year-round school system. These include, Ballinger and Barber who found that student attendance and academic achievement improved at year-round schools, Nasser and Gismondi Hasser, as well as, Shields and Oberg, all found that teachers were highly satisfied with the year-round schedules, and Shields and Oberg research also shows “Teachers in these studies found that the breaks allowed personal and professional renewal, opportunity to reflect on their practice, and time to plan for the coming instructional period. Teachers also felt that the year-round schedule benefited their students because it eliminated the need to spend time reviewing chunks of learning lost over the summer months.” The sources in the document provide additional resources and studies showing the benefits of year-round school systems. They work to provide a more elaborate network that has long-term researchers confirming the conclusion that the people who published this article found.
Source Analysis: The publication is aimed at people involved in the education system and who are interested in concepts regarding the curriculum structure. The audience is a very specific target in that sense. The funding is through membership based payments for ASCD. Thus, funding is made by people who are educators or are serving the educational fields in some way by connecting and sharing information through this website. They are the publishers of this monthly magazine and believe they are the funding source for it.
Usefulness: This article was created for sharing a method of curriculum and spreading the idea because of the success it held at this school. The article seems to provide a strictly positive light on this idea and holds no controversial aspects within it. It is missing the problems this school may have faced as the implementation of this system took place and the interest of the parents who may have disagreed with such a system perhaps could have intrigued the mind and put some doubts to rest. Since I am taking in a lot of ideas about teacher retention, this article was useful in providing a current method that has proven successful and is well supported with other sources to look into. I plan on branching off from this article into the researchers this article provided to get a more in depth idea of how other researchers came to their conclusion and effectiveness of other schools who may have implemented the year-round schedule.
Works Cited: I found this article searching around on the journalistic source search engine for the library.
Filed under: Uncategorized
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