When Difficult Topics Bubble Up: How K-12 Teachers Understand Unplanned Difficult-Topics Moments

Abstract

ABSTRACT Teachers across grade levels and content areas increasingly address difficult topics that can arise at a moment’s notice, whether such topics are within or outside the scope of their planned instruction. At this time, however, little is known about how teachers experience these “unplanned difficult-topics moments.” Hence, teacher educators have been hampered in their efforts to address calls to prepare preservice teacher candidates and inservice teachers for more informed professional decision making about difficult topics. In response, this article reports a case analysis of semi-structured interviews with 26 inservice teachers from three different school districts. The interviews explored how the teachers understood unplanned difficult-topics moments, and the analysis revealed that the essence of a difficult-topics moment involves feeling simultaneously unprepared and unsure of what to say or do. The analysis further indicated that the origins of difficult-topics moments are predictable because these moments routinely arise from five sources: student issues, professional issues, curriculum issues, community issues, and issues stemming from teachers’ socially defined identities. The article examines these findings’ implications for teacher educators, for professional learning designs, and for future scholarship.