Research as a Catalyst for Change

Abstract

Throughout our editorship, we have emphasized the goal of bringing together the three dimensions of teacher education-practice, policy, and research--to address issues or challenges faced by stakeholders in the field (see Editorials 63:1 and 63:2). The theme of the upcoming 2014 American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) Annual Meeting, Taking Charge of Change, provides an opportunity to highlight the role of research to impact policy and practice within five strands: Owning School Performance; Creating Innovative and Culturally Relevant Pedagogy; Evidence of Impact--State of the Art; and Implementing Change that Works. Journal of Teacher Education (JTE) has published a number of articles that advance our understanding in these strands and welcomes additional studies that contribute to our ability to describe, implement, and assess innovative practices that lead to change in preservice and inservice teacher education. The current issue reflects our emphasis on the integration of research, practice, and policy in teacher education with several studies that contribute to knowledge about innovative practices and have the potential to provide the evidence for change in teacher preservice and inservice professional development. Highlights of the Current Issue The articles that comprise this issue represent the diversity that characterizes the JTE readership. Topics include video-case analysis, mentoring of novice teachers, preservice teachers' responses to cyber bullying, preparation of teachers for urban settings, recruitment of special education teachers, and professional development in online settings. All have well-developed implications for policy, practice, and research. The contexts are varied with focus on international, national, and local settings. Both quantitative and qualitative methodologies are represented, including studies using mixed methods. In the first article--Formal and Informal Mentoring: Complementary, Compensatory, or Consistent?--Desimone, Hochberg, Porter, Polikoff, Schwartz, and Johnson investigate the roles of mentors in the learning of 57 novice middle school math teachers in 11 school districts. They extend the study of mentoring of novice teachers to include informal as well as formal mentors. The authors explore differences between the characteristics of the two types and their respective interactions with mentees, discussing how manipulable policy variables shape these interactions. Findings indicate that being in the same school with time set aside to meet was related to more time being spent with both types of mentors. Beginning teachers reported spending more time with their formal mentors if they were experiencing challenging classes or if their mentors had math teaching experience. The two types of mentors serve complementary roles, with informal mentors addressing more personal needs and formal mentors addressing professional needs. Arya, Christ, and Chiu, Facilitation and Teacher Behaviors: An Analysis of Literacy Teachers' Video-Case Discussions, investigate the relationship between peer and professor facilitation and teacher behavior during video-case discussions. The researchers extended research in this area through their use of Statistical Discourse Analysis, an approach that addresses many of the problems inherent in other methodological approaches to analyzing discourse. Findings depict multistep facilitation processes that occurred in professor-teacher and teacher-teacher discussions and provide implications for facilitating teachers' critical thinking, connection-making, and determination of instructional challenges during discussions. The third article, Unpacking the 'Urban' in Urban Teacher Education, by Kavita Matsko and Karen Hammerness, provides an argument for context-specific teacher preparation rather than preparation for generic settings as is typically the case. The authors conducted a descriptive, theory-building study of the University of Chicago Urban Teacher Education Program to examine how features of the urban context were addressed at this site. …