This article describes the author's journey into the world of teaching. The author begins with his transition into academia and his goal to become an antiracist educator. He reflects on teaching (and ...observation) moments in the classroom and moves to descriptions and insights of specific lessons teaching Eve Ewing's "1919" poetry collection and Octavia Butler's "Parable of the Sower." He concludes that there is no closure in the journey to becoming an antiracist educator.
The program team operating an NSF Noyce Master Teacher program has been building a conceptual framework for developing teacher leaders. The program has focused its efforts on a group of 16 chemistry ...and physics teachers in Southeast high‐needs schools. The conceptual framework is based on the view that teacher leaders are those individuals who retain a classroom presence, while simultaneously innovating practice and empowering others. A core principle of the framework is that embodying these attributes requires an ability to see oneself and the teaching practice in a way that goes beyond the expertise associated with content and pedagogical knowledge. Evidence drawn from years three and four of the NSF Noyce Master Teacher program are presented to demonstrate the participating teachers’ understanding of the framework's components. These data also indicate the potential of the teachers to use the framework's principles to engage in leadership activity. Characterizing such understanding and the changes in it are foundational to determining the way such a framework influences teachers’ approaches to leadership. This paper has implications for the growing number of teacher leader initiatives across the United States, and for the question of whether science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) teacher leadership should be considered separately from a general notion of teacher leadership.
Supporting students' mathematical proficiency requires teachers to continuously adapt their instruction in response to their students' instructional needs. To explore what it means to be an adaptive ...teacher, we conducted a literature review spanning from 1975-2014 of adaptive teaching in mathematics. Using 24 search terms in three databases, we identified 19 articles that met our inclusion criteria. Findings reiterated findings of a previous literature review regarding the importance of: (a) a stimulus, or something to which the teacher must attend; (b) teacher metacognition and reflection, or interpretation and analysis; and (c) teacher action, or response. Additional findings highlighted the importance in mathematics education research to look closely at: (a) how curricula can serve as stimuli aiding adaptive teaching practices; (b) the idea that the teacher reflects directly on the student stimuli, the learning trajectory, or her own actions; and (c) additional teacher responses, including orchestrating classroom discourse, modifying curricular materials, or selecting teaching aids.
Studies over the years emphasize the need to foster critical cultural awareness among teachers in U.S. classrooms. Using a critical theoretical approach, we examined the critical cultural awareness ...of practicing teachers and educators' experiences with English Learners (ELs) and their preparedness to meet the needs of ELs through actionable plans from a professional development (PD) module. We argue that PD courses on critical theoretical perspectives on ELs are essential not just for EL professionals but for all educators who work with ELs in one way or the other. Sixty-eight educators (teachers and school directors) in a midwestern community participated in the PD modular course, where they were exposed to various critical theories. The data include discussion responses and educators' critical theoretical reflections on ELs. In this article, we iterate the need to include critical theoretical EL education in teacher training preparation and professional development programs to support pre-service teachers, in-service teachers, and principals. The findings show that the impact of such critical awareness transforms teachers' and educators' perceptions about their respective roles in effectively educating ELs.
Direct experience with nature is a primary component of environmental education and especially beneficial for young children. The present study examined the outdoor play preferences of toddlers and ...investigated the role teachers play in the outdoor space. Toddlers' outdoor play was video recorded by GoPro cameras and coded for preferred play locations and initiator of the play. Results showed that the three most preferred spaces for toddlers in the outdoor classroom were the sandbox, swing area, and play structures; least frequently visited were open areas close to the classrooms, the garden, and the tree area. In addition, toddlers initiated play 71% of the time whereas teachers initiated approximately 11% of the time and mostly in the swing area. Findings indicate that teachers may play a role in where toddlers prefer to play. Implications for teacher preparation regarding environmental education are discussed.
By and large, teachers approach their work with the utmost care for students' intellectual, social, and emotional well-being. But even those who hold themselves to high moral standards can sometimes ...act in ways that harm others when they disengage self-sanctions like guilt or self-criticism. These mechanisms of moral disengagement include (1) portraying harmful acts as beneficial, (2) obscuring one's own role in harm, (3) minimizing the harmful effects of one's actions, and (4) viewing victims as less-than-human or deserving of blame. Because moral self-sanctions can be both disengaged and reengaged, we examine how these mechanisms operate in educators' social systems and point to practices that may promote their moral engagement. We end our piece with a call for interventions that disrupt disengagement and promote moral self-efficacy.
In this article, F. Tony Carusi considers the politics of instrumentalism performed between educational policy and research that figures the teacher as the primary means to raise student achievement. ...By reducing teachers to a means toward an end, policy and research work together to collapse what teachers are into what teachers are for, and in doing so, they enable discourses that privilege the instrumental specifically as ontological. In contrast to this collapse, Carusi highlights here the resistance of the ontological to the instrumental by considering what teachers are apart from what they are for. Thinking the ontological apart from the instrumental leads to a dark pedagogy in which the refusals and negations performed by teachers occur where the politics of instrumentalism that renders them as an “in‐school factor” do not see.
Despite the wealth of literature on academic work, roles and identities, the meaning of being an academic often does not go beyond such pre-defined and separate roles of teacher, researcher, ...academic, professional and manager. Consequently, our understanding of academic work is limited. This article explores the holistic meaning of being an academic and considers how this relates to gender. Based on interviews with 35 academics from a single United Kingdom (UK) institution, we argue that what it means to be an academic, goes beyond these pre-defined and separate roles; and that other aspects, such as academic freedom, intellectual stimulation, and a sense of a calling play different roles in different constructions of being an academic. Gender is also found to be an important factor in the different ways of defining academic work. These findings have implications for our understanding of career trajectories of male and female academics.
Previous research on participation in mathematics classrooms has focused on adults' perspectives, which overemphasize the role of talk. Drawing on sociocultural theory, I define participation as a ...complex and situated phenomenon. I describe a participatory research collaboration where a Spanish immersion third-grade teacher, and I brought the students' and the teacher's perspectives on participation into dialogue. A social semiotics analytical framework informed the exploration of multimethods focus groups with the students and an interview with the teacher. Teacher-researcher collaborative data analysis supported the emergence of three main participation-related aspects: (1) beginning to consider multiple characteristics of participation; (2) relocating participation in a dynamic between the social and the individual; and (3) rethinking the teacher's role in participation. I argue that an initial step toward developing inclusive classrooms is for teachers and researchers to unlearn simplistic perspectives on participation, becoming learners of what it means to participate in particular contexts.
Background
The integration of science and engineering practices in K‐12 science education provides a platform for students to engage in productive classroom discourse supporting deep student ...understanding and reasoning in a real‐world context. However, the engineering design discourse in K‐12 science classrooms has not yet been fully examined.
Purpose
This article aims to explore the decision‐making processes and verbal interactions of eighth grade students as they engage in a 12‐day engineering design‐based science unit. The following research questions guided the study: (a) How do student discourse patterns and interactions affect design decisions? (b) How do the instructor's discursive interactions in design groups influence student design?
Method
In this exploratory case study, discursive patterns and interaction patterns between four student groups and their instructor were captured through audio and video recordings.
Results
The design discourse structure and patterns differed among groups, affecting their design decisions. There was also a difference in both the number of new ideas generated and, most notably, the level of student engagement in those groups. In addition, the complexity of design decisions varied, with most groups focusing on financial feasibility rather than scientific reasoning. Finally, it was observed that the instructor discourse influenced student engagement in design discourse and the use of scientific reasoning and justifications in small group discussions.
Conclusions
This discourse study offers insight into students’ scientific reasoning in an effort to help educators more effectively structure instruction discourse and practices in engineering design in K‐12 science education.
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