This article analyzes a programmatic effort in teacher education, “The Community Teaching Strand” (CTS), to engage local community members as mentors of teacher candidates (TCs) in two postgraduate ...teacher preparation programs in a large research university. Three different conceptions of the nature and purpose of teacher–family–community relations frame the analysis: involving families and communities, engaging families and communities, and working in solidarity with families and communities. Three primary research questions are explored in this article: What do TCs learn through their participation in the CTS? To what extent and how do TCs bring community teaching into their classrooms during the program and as first-year teachers? What programmatic features encouraged and/or constrained TC learning from the community mentors? After describing Mountain City’s “Community Teaching Strand,” the article identifies a set of TC learning and practice outcomes as well as a number of tensions that arose in the programs in the attempt to implement engagement and solidarity approaches to working with families and communities. Finally, the implications of this work for teacher education are discussed.
Internet resources abound for preservice teacher (PST) use today, but we do not know how they choose and describe their implementation of them. This study investigates 158 elementary PSTs’ lesson ...plans across eight courses to describe plan inspiration and justification. PSTs reported being inspired by cooperating teachers (CTs), friends and family members, university courses, and Internet resources. In some cases, these PSTs simply followed lesson plans given to them. In other cases, they collected, curated, synthesized, and applied ideas based on inspirations, showing dispositions of New Literacies Theory. This study provides evidence that teacher educators need to engage PSTs in intentionally developing the skills of curation by acknowledging and modeling the depth and breadth of resources, including those that are not necessarily sanctioned. Implications include ways that teacher educators can frame PSTs’ understandings as they critically consume online resources through Critical Curation Theory.
This 1-year qualitative study examined the ways in which nine social justice–oriented teachers in racially segregated schools defined and fostered sympathy with low-income students of color. These ...teachers reportedly defined sympathy on the basis of caring and high expectations, which challenged traditional notions of sympathy as a teacher cue for low ability and lowered expectations for learning. Building upon W. E. B. Du Bois’s concept of sympathetic touch, the findings of this study revealed that the teachers fostered sympathy through perceptions of fairness in educational opportunities, education as a method to challenge class oppression, the use of curriculum to communicate caring, and high expectations to promote students’ histories, self-respect, and preparation for a more just future. The results of these findings have implications for how society currently views teacher effectiveness, and future discussions regarding teacher education, school accountability, and teacher evaluation.
The authors voice teachers' perceptions of their interpersonal experiences with students in both positive and problematic relationships. Interview data from 28 teachers were examined by coding ...utterances on teacher and student interactions. Results indicate that teachers defined the quality of the relationship mostly by the level of communion (friendly vs. hostile), instead of by the level of agency (in control vs. powerless). Analyses of mentioned teacher and student behavior show a friendly interactional pattern for positive relationships and a hostile pattern for problematic ones. In teachers' perceptions, positive and problematic relationships also differed in context where encounters take place and topic of talk. Contrary to interactions in problematic relationships, encounters in positive relationships were mostly situated outside the classroom context and conversations during these encounters covered a wide range of topics. Implications for teacher education programs are discussed.
Concerns are mounting about the attraction and retention of teachers in Australian schools. This study draws upon a questionnaire of 2444 Australian primary and secondary school teachers, which ...revealed that only 41% of respondents intended to remain in the profession. Through a thematic analysis of the qualitative data within the questionnaire, we use employee turnover theory to enable an understanding of the reasons 1446 of the respondents described as influencing their intentions to leave the profession. These reasons included heavy workloads, health and wellbeing concerns for teachers and the status of the profession. We also use turnover theory to analyse responses from all 2444 respondents and explore possible mitigating strategies or practices that might reduce turnover intention, including meaningful reductions in workload and raising the status of the teaching profession. In doing so, we contribute nuanced qualitative empirical insights which can inform policy and practice.
This edited volume is about diversifying the teaching profession. It is unique in its inclusion of multiple dimensions of diversity; its chapters focus on a wide range of under-represented groups, ...including those from lower socio-economic groups, Black and minority ethnic groups, migrants, the Travelling community, the Deaf community, the LGBTQI+ community and those of mature age. The book includes contributions from Australia, England, Iceland, Portugal and Scotland, as well as a number of chapters from the Irish context, mostly emanating from projects funded under Ireland’s Higher Education Authority’s Programme for Access to Higher Education (PATH): Strand 1—Equity of Access to Initial Teacher Education. The book also critically engages the rationale for diversifying the profession, arguing not only that representation still matters, but also that ultimately teacher diversity work needs to encompass system transformation to achieve a diverse, equitable and inclusive teaching profession.
We analyzed how teacher perception of job demands and job resources in the school environment were related to teacher well-being, engagement and motivation to leave the teaching profession. ...Participants were 760 Norwegian teachers in grade 1–10. Data were analyzed by means of confirmatory factor analysis and SEM analysis. A second order job demand variable strongly predicted lower teacher well-being, whereas job resources more moderately predicted higher well-being. Teacher well-being was in turn predictive of higher engagement and lower motivation to leave the profession. Analysis of primary factors showed that time pressure was the strongest predictor of teacher well-being.
Teaching as Assemblage Strom, Kathryn J.
Journal of teacher education,
09/2015, Letnik:
66, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Recent accountability policies seek to “grade” teacher preparation programs by the teaching evaluations of their graduates. This article addresses the problematic nature of the linear thinking ...underlying such reforms by examining the construction of teaching practices of Mauro, a first-year secondary science teacher who taught environmental and earth sciences. Drawn from a larger data set, the study uses concepts from rhizomatics, a non-linear theory of thought and social activity, and elements of postmodern grounded theory. Despite holding key factors constant across the two subject area settings, differences in the ways the teacher, students, and contextual conditions worked together helped produce strikingly different teaching practices in each set of classes. This study provides evidence that enacting pre-professional learning is a complex undertaking shaped by the ways the elements present in the school setting work together, and, thus, teaching is a collectively negotiated activity. The author offers implications for teacher preparation practice and policy, advocating for an ontological turn in teacher education research that focuses on processes of teaching rather than outcomes alone.
This study extends previous research on teachers' self-efficacy by exploring reciprocal effects of teachers' self-efficacy and instructional quality in a longitudinal panel study. The study design ...combined a self-report measure of teacher self-efficacy with teacher and student ratings of instructional quality (assessing cognitive activation, classroom management, and individual learning support for students), and 2-level cross-lagged structural equation analyses were conducted. Data were collected from 155 German secondary mathematics teachers and 3,483 Grade 9 students at 2 measurement points. Although cross-sectional correlations between self-efficacy beliefs and characteristics of instruction were substantiated, the analyses only partially confirmed a causal effect of teachers' self-efficacy on later instructional quality. Instead, the analyses revealed a reverse effect of instructional quality on teachers' self-efficacy, with students' experience of cognitive activation and teachers' ratings of classroom management predicting teachers' subsequent self-efficacy. Our findings emphasize the importance of examining teachers' self-efficacy not only as a cause but also as a consequence of educational processes. Future research on teachers' self-efficacy should take a longitudinal perspective with varying time lags, identify possible mediator variables, and consider other aspects of teacher competence beyond self-efficacy when examining the effects of instructional quality.
Despite the growing popularity of corpus linguistics among researchers in recent decades, a corpus-based approach remains largely unknown to most teachers in primary and secondary schools. Drawing on ...Shulman's concept of pedagogical content knowledge, this study differentiated between two key terms - corpus literacy and corpus-based language pedagogy - and investigated how a group of TESOL teacher trainees developed their corpus literacy and corpus-based language pedagogy in a two-step training scheme. The first step, focussing on using corpus data as a learning tool, was conducted in a physical classroom; the second step, focussing on using corpus data as a teaching tool, took place in a virtual online classroom. A mixed methods design, including surveys, interviews and analyses of lesson plans, was used to collect and analyse the data. The findings revealed that most participants gained a good level of corpus literacy as measured by the self-designed survey. They also obtained a good level of initial competence in using corpus-based language pedagogy, as revealed by the rating of their lesson design and the content analyses of the lessons and interview data. The results support a differentiation between corpus literacy and corpus-based language pedagogy, attesting to the effectiveness of the two-step corpus-based teacher training. The study provides several insights regarding how to scaffold teachers in corpus-based training and teach students with corpus resources to address their vocabulary needs and difficulties. Finally, a few issues are raised regarding what teachers may consider when implementing effective corpus-based teaching in school settings.
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