The Caring Teacher: A Multiple Case Study That Looks at What Teachers Do and Believe about Their Work With At-Risk Students

Caring teachers have been identified as a critical component of successful interventions with at-risk students, however just what constitutes a caring teacher is less well understood. Specifically, what are the behaviors, characteristics, and beliefs of caring teachers, and how are they impacted by the contexts within which they work? The purpose of this multiple case study was to understand more about caring teachers who work with at-risk students in secondary schools located in a Midwestern city and thereby to add complexity to the literature. Two middle school teachers and two high school teachers were recruited to participate. They were observed on multiple occasions and interviewed twice. The data from these observations and interviews were initially analyzed case by case; the cross case analysis based on the results from the individual case resulted in 6 themes that were present across the four cases. The following themes were identified: the role of relationships, perspective on at-risk students, providing opportunities for students to develop a positive sense of themselves, the value of a positive classroom experience for both students and teacher, negotiating power, and flexibility. Implications of this research for psychologists, educators, and policy makers, as well as future research are also discussed.

Perturbative analysis of the triply differential cross section and circular dichroism in photo-double-ionization of He

We extend application of our lowest-order perturbative approach (in electron-electron correlation) for analysis of photo-double-ionization (PDI) of He [A.Y. Istomin et al., J. Phys. B 35, L543 (2002)] to excess energies up to 450 eV and to analysis of circular dichroism. We find that account of electron correlation in the final state to first order provides predictions for the triply differential cross section and circular dichroism that are in reasonable agreement with absolute data for excess energies up to 80 eV. For an excess energy of 450 eV, account of electron correlation in both initial and final states is necessary and the predicted triply differential cross sections are in agreement with absolute data only for large mutual ejection angles. We find that at excess energies of a few tens of eV, the PDI is dominated by the "virtual" knock-out mechanism, while the "direct" (on-shell) knock-out process gives only small contributions for large mutual ejection angles. As a result, we conclude that the circular dichroism effect at these energies originates from the nonzero electron Coulomb phase shifts.