Effects of a Computerized Professional Development Program on Teacher and Student Outcomes
Effects of a computerized professional development (PD) program for a concept teaching routine were investigated in two studies. For each, teachers were randomly assigned to either a virtual workshop group that used a multimedia software program for PD or an actual workshop group that participated in a live PD session. In Study 1, the teachers’ knowledge about the routine and planning for the routine significantly improved after completing either workshop; no significant differences were found between the groups. Both teacher groups were satisfied with the PD. In Study 2, the teachers’ performance of the routine in their classrooms improved, as did student performance on tests of concept knowledge. Students were satisfied with the instruction provided by both groups of teachers. No differences were found between the posttest scores earned by the teacher groups or by students of the teachers. Implications regarding computerized PD for teachers are discussed.
Learning from Young Adolescents: The Use of Structured Teacher Education Coursework to Help Beginning Teachers Investigate Middle School Students’ Intellectual Capabilities
In this article, the authors discuss a case study in which beginning teachers interviewed young adolescents as part of structured teacher education coursework designed to challenge teachers’ low expectations for young adolescents. Based on pre- and postsurveys, pre— and post—focus group interviews, classroom field notes, and teachers’ written analysis papers, the authors’ data suggest that the coursework helped to shape changes in beginning teachers’ views of young adolescents’ analytical capabilities and social studies knowledge. However, these shifts in teachers’ thinking about young adolescents’ capabilities did not translate into shifts in the teachers’ ideas about middle school social studies instruction. The authors argue that carefully structured coursework like this interview project holds promise for helping beginning teachers develop new understandings about learners, but attention to students’ abilities must also be accompanied by attention to teachers’ purposes and pedagogical understandings.
Who Will Stay and Who Will Leave? Predicting Secondary English Teacher Attrition Risk
Although there are considerable large-scale data on teacher attrition, few researchers have culled information specifically related to English teachers’ risk for attrition. This study examines the effects of teacher characteristics, teaching conditions, student variables, self-efficacy, external support, and salary on secondary English language arts teachers’ attrition risk. Data from the 2003-2004 Schools and Staffing Survey, a comprehensive nationally representative survey of teachers, principals, and schools conducted by the National Center for Educational Statistics, were examined. Based on logistic regression analysis, the three most significant predictors for teacher attrition risk were (a) being a minority teacher, (b) years of teaching experience, and (c) teacher apathy. Implications for future investigations of English teacher retention and attrition are discussed.
Studying the Impact of the Lesson Analysis Framework on Preservice Teachers’ Abilities to Reflect on Videos of Classroom Teaching
This study investigates the impact of an observation framework on preservice teachers’ abilities to engage in productive video-based reflections on mathematics teaching. The Lesson Analysis Framework draws from research on expert—novice teacher differences. Its central element is the analysis of the impact of teachers’ instructional decisions on students’ learning of mathematics. Through an experimental design, the effects of this framework on preservice teachers’ abilities to reflect on teaching are compared to the effects of an alternative framework focused on the evaluation of separate elements of instruction. Findings suggest that the Lesson Analysis Framework facilitates preservice teachers’ learning to elaborate on what they observe and to propose alternative teaching strategies. In addition, the framework provides a structure for evidence-based evaluation of observed instruction.
Understanding Teacher Candidate Dispositions: Reflecting to Build Self-Awareness
Dispositions have become an important part of the conversation about effective teaching. The purpose of this article is to analyze the disposition domains teacher candidates draw from as they think about their early teaching experiences. A framework of three disposition domains—intellectual, cultural, and moral—was used as a heuristic to analyze 35 teacher candidates’ journals. The candidates reflected on a range of topics, yet few possessed the self-knowledge to identify their assumptions and evaluate how these assumptions influenced their teaching decisions. Candidates with the greatest capacity to unpack their assumptions and who therefore possessed the greatest awareness of their dispositions demonstrated (a) a propensity for questioning the how and why of their thinking and actions, (b) a balance between focusing on students and the self, and (c) an adoption of multiple perspectives. These baseline data provide essential information for teacher educators working to develop candidates’ dispositions.
Cultural Contexts and Situated Possibilities in the Teaching of Second Language Writing
Premised on the conception of teacher knowledge as situated and the agency of the teacher in perceiving and exploiting "situated possibilities" in the classroom, this article argues that it is important for teachers to construct local understanding of their work embedded in the local cultural traditions and to explore possibilities for student learning in the context of constraints. The authors report on an investigation of the pedagogical strategies developed by two L2 writing teachers in Hong Kong, which showed that these strategies emerged as the teachers perceived and responded to situated possibilities for learning and that the strategies were rooted in the cultural traditions of the learners as well as the micro-cultures of the classroom. The authors suggest that teacher education programs should provide ample opportunities for teachers to gain a deep understanding of local cultures and to explore opportunities for student learning that build on such cultural traditions.
“Where Else Would We Teach?”: Portraits of Two Teachers in the Rural South
In this article, the authors draw on narrative portraiture to inquire into the family, school, community, and teacher education experiences of two novice teachers who teach in schools located in two rural communities in the southeastern United States. The authors show how their university teacher education classes and field experiences neither addressed nor supported these teachers’ identities as rural teachers. In doing so, the authors highlight how these teachers desired to be connected personally and professionally to the communities in which they teach. From these narrative portraits, the authors argue that identity and relationship exist synergistically within these teachers’ lives and experiences. Drawing on such synergy is critical to attracting preservice teachers to and retaining novice teachers in schools within rural communities. Based on their interpretations, the authors offer suggestions for how teacher educators can better prepare preservice teachers who intend to teach within such schools.
Understanding Teacher Education Reform
(No abstract is available for this citation)Knowing How to Know: Building Meaningful Relationships Through Instruction That Meets the Needs of Students Learning English
A growing body of literature highlights the need for teachers to know their students better, especially students from linguistically diverse backgrounds. The authors argue that teachers need to build healthy relationships with students and find ways to provide them with more effective instruction. Accordingly, they present a synopsis of what scholars know about helping preservice teachers learn about their students and what the literature reveals concerning what teachers need to be able to do to teach these young people more effectively. Finally, the authors provide some specific exercises that they have employed to help preservice teachers move in the direction of learning about and developing more meaningful relationships with students. They conclude with some challenges and directions for future research that targets ways to provide future teachers with the necessary tools, resources, and skills needed to access the cultural and linguistic strengths of their English-learning students.
The Limits of Teacher Education Reforms: School Subjects, Alchemies, and an Alternative Possibility
Contemporary U.S. schools and professional reforms call for teachers to have greater disciplinary and pedagogical knowledge for teaching school subjects. Reform efforts leave unexamined the rules and standards of "reason" that historically order school subjects. The notion of alchemy provides an analytic "tool" to consider the processes of translation from disciplinary knowledge to teaching practices. It is argued that the intellectual tools of school pedagogies have little to do with the disciplinary fields. The psychological strategies for defining school subjects historically are strategies of governing who the child is and should be. There is an ironic quality to this alchemy of schooling subjects. Efforts to increase student participation may narrow the possibilities of reflection and action. An alternative style for thinking about the translation of disciplinary fields into the curriculum and "methods" of school subjects is discussed, drawing on studies of science, technology, and mathematics.
Preparing Globally Competent Teachers: A New Imperative for Teacher Education
Globalization is one of the most powerful forces that will shape the future world in which our children will live. How to prepare our children to live successfully in this world has become a challenging question for education. This article discusses the challenges globalization presents to education and the implications for teacher education.
Transforming Teacher Education to Reform America’s P-20 Education System
Moving beyond reform, teacher education programs need to be transformed to better prepare teachers, school counselors, and administrators to teach, guide, and lead in this complex society. Educators must have the skills, knowledge, and commitment to be part of the leadership team that assumes the responsibility for carrying the mantra of the transformational process. This mantra will require faculty to remove the silos within schools and across university campuses and collaborate with one another and key community members to prepare prospective educators who will inherit the responsibility for redesigning America’s schools for the realities of more interactive, interdisciplinary learning environments. This article briefly reviews the history of reform and describes several potentially transformative initiatives currently under way to redefine and strengthen teacher education programs.
It Is Complicated: Unpacking the Flow of Teacher Education’s Impact on Student Learning
Knowing that a teacher education program’s graduates affected P—12 student learning may be important, but knowing how the program prepared their graduates to affect learning is critical for ongoing reform efforts. In this essay, the author argues for the utility of looking at three sets of relationships involved in gauging the impact of teacher education programs on P—12 student learning—teacher education program impact on teacher candidate learning, teacher graduate practice of teacher education program outcomes in P—12 settings, and teacher graduate impact on P—12 pupil learning. The author also addresses three issues affecting the efficacy of reform efforts—a focus on proving versus improving, an absence of assessment literacy, and the need for teaching to support learning.
Negotiating Implementation of High-Stakes Performance Assessment Policies in Teacher Education: From Compliance to Inquiry
Teacher education programs in the United States face a variety of new accountability policies at both the federal and the state level. Many of these policies carry high-stakes implications for students and programs and involve some of the same challenges for implementation as they have in the P-12 arena. Serious dilemmas for teacher educators arise in these contexts, as compliance with prescriptive state mandates is often interpreted by faculty to signify a demoralizing loss of program autonomy and integrity, whereas noncompliance may result in loss of program accreditation. The authors describe how one teacher education program negotiated these dilemmas in a fashion responsive to local values and concerns while also meeting state requirements. Results are discussed in terms of tensions between (a) policy goals seeking alignment and coherence across institutions of higher education and (b) motivational conditions likely to engage faculty in the difficult work of programmatic renewal and change in teacher education.
Teacher Education: Its Problems and Some Prospects
Based on an analysis of occupational competence in teaching and teacher education, this article draws together a set of dilemmas that face the field, arguing that an occupational analysis is needed to complement the more common institutional analysis of teacher education. Then, this analysis is used to evaluate the prospects of the reforms that currently are dominant in the policy discourse of teacher education. The article concludes with thoughts on some promising directions for the improvement of the field of teacher education.
Children of Reform: The Impact of High-Stakes Education Reform on Preservice Teachers
High-stakes standards-based accountability reforms are changing teacher education. A key set of participants in this process who have been affected by these reforms are the teacher candidates. Many were educated almost entirely in high-stakes education systems. Yet, little is known about how their experiences as students affect their conceptions of teaching and learning or how their teacher education programs alter these perceptions. This article presents findings from a case study that explored these critical issues. It reveals that these candidates entered their teacher education program with a complex understanding of the impact of these reforms on teaching and learning. These findings also illuminate how these prospective teachers’ coursework and field experiences affected their conceptions of these constructs. This article ends by offering suggestions to teacher educators on how to incorporate these candidates’ skills and knowledge into their programs so that they can assist their candidates in becoming effective teachers.
2009-2010 Board of Reviewers
(No abstract is available for this citation)Learning to Teach in the Figured World of Reform Mathematics: Negotiating New Models of Identity
Starting from the assertion that traditional and reform mathematics pedagogy constitute two distinct figured worlds of teaching and learning, the authors explore the initiation of prospective teachers into the figured world of reform mathematics pedagogy. To become successful teachers in reform-oriented classrooms, prospective teachers must learn more than pedagogical tools and moves: They must understand what it is to participate in the figured world of reform pedagogy, develop models of identities for participants in this world, and negotiate new constructions of mathematics. In this article the authors present three episodes from an elementary mathematics teacher education class where positions of "teacher" and "child" were offered by instructors in activities designed to approximate practice in the reform figured world. Students negotiated new models of identity and conceptions of mathematics as they took up these positions in varying ways.
“Urban, but Not Too Urban”: Unpacking Teachers’ Desires to Teach Urban Students
This study explores 16 novice, urban-trained teachers’ evaluations of their current schools. Findings suggest that teachers used the perceived behaviors, values, and beliefs of students to measure how urban a student was and, therefore, to guide their expectations and satisfaction of their placements. The less urban the students were perceived to be, the more likely these teachers were to have positive expectations about their students and their schools. Conversely, the more urban the students were perceived to be, the more likely these teachers were to have negative expectations. Importantly, these terms, urban and suburban, were tied to beliefs about race and, to a lesser degree, class.
Please Mind the Culture Gap: Intercultural Development During a Teacher Education Study Abroad Program
Seeking to deepen our understandings of the ways international study abroad programs may enhance efforts to prepare culturally responsive teachers, the purpose of this case study was to explore a preservice teacher’s intercultural development during a semester-long teacher education program in London, England. Such study abroad teacher education programs are offered as an innovative means to promote preservice teachers’ intercultural development, providing unique opportunities for these students to confront their ethnocentric worldviews and begin to consider the ways culture influences teaching and learning. Findings from this study reveal that participation in the program positively influenced intercultural development. Themes that illuminate aspects of the participant’s study abroad experience that both challenged and supported intercultural development included immersion within both a culture and school along with the essential role of an intercultural guide who promoted reflective practices around issues of culture and self. Implications for preservice teacher education program design are addressed.
Knowledge Expectations in Mathematics Teacher Preparation Programs in South Korea and the United States: Towards International Dialogue
As a comparative analysis of teacher preparation in its sociohistorical contexts, this study examines the official educational aims and curricula of 49 mathematics teacher preparation programs in South Korea and the United States, where substantial differences have been observed in both student achievement and teacher knowledge. Overall, the findings from this study suggest that transnational commonalities and national differences exist simultaneously in social expectations for teacher knowledge. The authors argue that attending to both culturally contextualized and semantically decontextualized dimensions helps us have a more balanced comparative perspective from which we can better assess current conditions of teacher education. Constructive international dialogue can be facilitated by such a balanced perspective that may further enrich teacher education without ignoring either profound differences in sociohistorical contexts or important commonalities in epistemic models of teacher education across countries.
Using Wenger’s Communities of Practice to Explore a New Teacher Cohort
This qualitative study explores a cohort professional development experience that brought new teachers together every few weeks from across an urban school district. Observation data were analyzed through Wenger’s (1998) Communities of Practice social learning framework. The purpose was to examine how a cohort can be a valuable resource of new teacher support, particularly in areas where novices, who are being prepared largely through alternative routes, start their careers in some of the most challenging teaching assignments. Key theoretical insights resulting from the analysis include (a) the importance of interactivity of the Wenger elements, (b) the centrality of the community component, and (c) the implications of what legitimate peripheral participation looks like for a solely novice community of practice. Implications of these theoretical considerations are discussed and then linked to possibilities for practice and research to supplement current, traditional induction and mentoring practices.
Teacher Learning in a Context of Educational Change: Informal Learning Versus Systematically Supported Learning
After certification, teachers do not often receive systematic support in their learning and hence mainly depend on informal learning opportunities at work. The present study addresses the question of if and how supervision makes a difference to teacher learning. In a longitudinal mixed-method study, the learning of one teacher is documented in a year in which she had no systematic support but had to adjust herself to an educational innovation. The authors also studied this teacher in a consecutive year in which she did receive individual supervision. During supervision, the teacher became aware of beliefs and patterns that had previously inhibited her from change. This awareness precipitated significant changes in her beliefs and classroom behavior as well as the way she learned. The findings suggest that professional learning will take place only if a teacher is supported in learning how to deal effectively with personal factors involved in the learning process.
Add this blog to: 
BackFlip, 
BlinkBits, 
BlinkList, 
BlogMarks, 
del.icio.us, 
Digg, 
Diigo, 
Fantacular, 
Fark, 
FeedMarker, 
FeedMeLinks, 
Furl, 
Google, 
Gravee, 
igooi, 
Jookster, 
Jots, 
Linkagogo, 
LinkRoll, 
LookMarks, 
ma.gnolia, 
Markabboo, 
Ning, 
RawSugar, 
reddit, 
Riffs, 
Rojo, 
Scuttle, 
Shadows, 
Simpy, 
SiteJot, 
Smarking, 
Spurl, 
Squidoo, 
Taggly, 
tagtooga, 
TailRank, 
Wink, 
Wists
