Everyday Teaching Practice Research Articles

What Explains Teachers’ Trust in AI in Education Across Six Countries?

AbstractWith growing expectations to use AI-based educational technology (AI-EdTech) to improve students’ learning outcomes and enrich teaching practice, teachers play a central role in the adoption of AI-EdTech in classrooms. Teachers’ willingness to accept vulnerability by integrating technology into their everyday teaching practice, that is, their trust in AI-EdTech, will depend on how much they expect it to benefit them versus how many concerns it raises for them. In this study, we surveyed 508 K-12 teachers across six countries on four continents to understand which teacher characteristics shape teachers’ trust in AI-EdTech, and its proposed antecedents, perceived benefits and concerns about AI-EdTech. We examined a comprehensive set of characteristics including demographic and professional characteristics (age, gender, subject, years of experience, etc.), cultural values (Hofstede’s cultural dimensions), geographic locations (Brazil, Israel, Japan, Norway, Sweden, USA), and psychological factors (self-efficacy and understanding). Using multiple regression analysis, we found that teachers with higher AI-EdTech self-efficacy and AI understanding perceive more benefits, fewer concerns, and report more trust in AI-EdTech. We also found geographic and cultural differences in teachers’ trust in AI-EdTech, but no demographic differences emerged based on their age, gender, or level of education. The findings provide a comprehensive, international account of factors associated with teachers’ trust in AI-EdTech. Efforts to raise teachers’ understanding of, and trust in AI-EdTech, while considering their cultural values are encouraged to support its adoption in K-12 education.

Health in everyday teaching practice in Sweden: a social pedagogical analysis of high school teachers’ descriptions

This article aims to contribute a social pedagogical perspective of high school teachers’ descriptions of working with student health in their teaching practice in Sweden. Ten high school teachers were interviewed. The teachers considered their student health work as consisting of two main aspects: creating a good relationship and helping the students to succeed. These aspects are implicitly and explicitly described as comprising the recognition of the actors’ social and pedagogical identities. This study shows that social pedagogical recognition is significant for common success in school practice in relation to student health work. Clarifying the teachers’ responsibility and competence in student health work and strengthening teachers in their identity as health promoters could improve student health practice.

Lesson Study as a Professional Development Model for Teaching Spatial Ability in Primary STEM

This study explores the efficacy of a professional development (PD) model that employs lesson study to teach spatial ability skills in primary STEM education. The structure of the PD supported the ‘Insights’ mechanism by focusing on visualisation, mental rotation, construction and deconstruction, and spatial orientation, which are vital for nurturing students’ spatial abilities. The ‘Motivation’ mechanism was addressed through goal setting in lesson planning, motivating teachers to integrate spatial tasks into their curricula. Continuous feedback and practical support facilitated the ‘Technique’ mechanism, embedding learned skills into everyday teaching practices. Last, the ‘Embed in Practice’ mechanisms, including action planning and prompts, were effectively translated into classroom practices, evidencing the model’s operational efficacy.

Constructivism-based pathways: Revolutionizing EFL writing instruction for adult learners

In the ongoing pursuit of continuous pedagogical improvement, eclectic teachers find themselves inundated with a multitude of engaging approaches, methods, and techniques. The selection of these should ideally be based on informed pedagogy, with due consideration given to the particular needs of the learners. Through reflective self-inquiry , this paper aims to reveal how a thoughtful teacher reflects on her everyday teaching practices in order to transform them into a more constructivist model of instruction by the stages of initiation, focus on the self, data collection, taking accountability, iterative reflection, and information generation. A description is provided of how the EFL writing classes taught by the author at Universitas Negeri Yogyakarta were managed. This is then confronted with some literature about andragogy and constructivist learning, providing a proposed model for improving future constructivist-based EFL writing instruction for adult learners. The constructivist approach to EFL writing proposed involves several key steps, from conditioning, collaborative inquiry, engaging feedback, work display, to reflective exam, all of which become comprehensive stages within one semester learning in writing courses.

What’s With All This Race Talk Anyway? A Literature Review on Antiracist Education

This article reviews the developing literature on antiracist education and the emerging frameworks for recognizing racism in educational spaces. Much of the literature draws on Critical Race Theory as the underlying framework to conceptualize race and racism. Many scholars emphasize the need for antiracist practices in K-12 education. There was, however significant research evidence that suggested a gap between antiracist pedagogy and knowledge and the actual implementation into everyday teaching practices. The review also found evidence of suggested strategies and frameworks teacher education programs and school division professional development should do to help aid the implementation of antiracist education in schools and classrooms. Evidently, the review points to the importance for faculty to self-reflect on their experiences with race. I conclude with an invitation to recognize and understand how to can show up as an antiracist educator, today, tomorrow and for the future. Keywords: race, racism, antiracist education, critical race theory, racialized students

Reasoning in classroom dilemma situations: how pre-service teachers judge performance assessment

This study examines pre-service teachers’ reasoning structures based on their beliefs in the context of school performance assessment. We used reflective writing to investigate pre-service teachers’ judgment and reasoning regarding different functions of performance assessment. Forty-five undergraduate pre-service teachers participated in our study. Using a mixed-method approach, we conducted categorial and reconstructive text analyses as well as exploratory statistical analyses to describe the participants’ reasoning structures. Such cognitive structures comprise potential solutions to the performance assessment dilemmas that teachers face in their everyday teaching practice. We found varying distributions of and relationships between (individual-, objective-, social-, and ability-related) reference norms (neutral, student-, and teacher-centered) reference perspectives as well as (causal-analytic, normative, descriptive, and effect-oriented) modes of argumentation. Our discussions related to future research activities on teachers’ reasoning structures in the classroom.

Inspiring self-regulated learning in everyday classrooms: teachers’ professional competences and promotion of self-regulated learning

AbstractToday’s success metrics extend beyond traditional literacy and numeracy to encompass strategic learning with a growth mindset, equipping individuals with the attitude and skills to navigate and surmount new challenges. In a digital era, where information is readily available and knowledge constantly evolves, the value placed on learners is not merely based on their current knowledge but on their courage and capability to continually engage cognitive, metacognitive, motivational, social, and emotional resources for lifelong learning. In this dynamic landscape, self-regulated learning (SRL) skills are crucial, empowering students of all ages to take control of their learning journey. SRL, the goal-directed process of monitoring and regulating one’s learning activities, has been shown to significantly influence academic outcomes. Although teachers acknowledge SRL’s relevance, it remains underrepresented in everyday teaching practices, impacting not just student learning but also the training and experiences of preservice teachers in the classroom. This gap perpetuates misconceptions about SRL and hinders its integration into educational settings. Therefore, this special issue first introduces the INSPIRE model of teachers’ multiple roles as instructors, navigators, strategists, promoters, innovators, role models, and encouragers in supporting students to become self-regulated learners and describes teachers’ professional competences to fulfil these roles. Second, it dedicates four articles to exploring teachers’ professional competences in SRL and its promotion in everyday school. The articles address particular aspects of the INSPIRE model and highlight the importance of teachers equipped with the necessary training and competences to guide students in becoming self-regulated learners. Linking the research areas of teachers’ professional competences in SRL and teachers’ promotion of SRL in the classroom this special issue offers a comprehensive approach to SRL in everyday school and opens up perspectives for the transfer into practice.

What does data literacy means for you (as an educator)nowadays?

Despite progress in data literacy frameworks associated with a critical discussion of datafication, educators are still perplexed when it comes to working with these issues in their everyday teaching practice. In part, this is due to the complexity of the data infrastructures that permeate educational practice itself. In this context, it seems particularly appropriate to understand the discursive phenomena, the construction of professional practise and therefore the educators’ positionings around the issues of datafication in general, and the development of critical data literacy, namely, “postdigital positinings”.
 This paper proposes a collaborative autoethnographic analysis of the professional experiences of the three authors, as educators.
 As women with complex migrant identities, with roots in the Global South and at the same time, bearers of European métisages, our pathways meet at the crossover of an international project in which we develop materials and design educational activities. Our history lies on an intersectional basis that allows us to express rich positionalities, full of examples and resources that can be resounding notes for the construction of agentic educational practices in this field of post-digital forces.

The Example of Joan of Arc. How a Belgian Teacher Created a Lesson Illustrated by Means of Lantern Slides

Due to a lack of sources documenting everyday teaching practices, historians engaging with the use of the optical lantern in education have traditionally focused on the top-down implementation of the medium. This contribution presents a rare case study of how the medium was actually used by focusing on a lesson on the saint Joan of Arc that was taught by means of the optical lantern at a Catholic school for girls. This analysis is enabled by the preservation of an exceptionally rich collection of lantern slides and related materials, including a notebook with the text that was probably used during the projection of the images. These sources show that the teacher who was in charge of the lesson went to great lengths to combine various images and text fragments with each other, creating a unique narrative that corresponded to her Catholic worldview and goals.

TEACHERS RESEARCH ACTIVITY IN CONTEMPORARY EDUCATION

The topic of this paper is the attempt to show the multifaceted activity of a teacher in the current pandemic educational conditions, in which the educator expresses the unconventional approach towards the use of paradigms in planning teaching and research activities. The teachers research activity can explain the educational phenomena occurring in the current situation better than implementing only methodological solutions. It is an element of pedagogical innovation resulting from the organization of the educational process. As a result, the information obtained from the research steps can complement the information obtained during the application of the positivist and anti-positivist paradigms to everyday teaching practice. The activity revealed in these areas can be supported by both well-known and alternative cycles of organizational, didactic and research activities suggested by a teacher. The selected elements are conducive to the diverse activity and consideration of a teacher. They appear in the process of teaching and learning as well as in planned research. The size and quality of this behavior affect the individual style of thinking and tactics. The behavior inspires educational partners to make an effort so that the school routine does not become a source of acquiring theory and benefiting from the normative paradigm. The school can also take advantage of information provided by the interpretive paradigm. Personal experience obtained together with skillfully applied theory and research is the answer concerning the meaning of actions during unstable and rapidly changing conditions favoring further teacher education and development.

Measuring Behavioral Evaluation Performance Using Neural Network and Regression Analysis

Our era is characterized by information overload. Low skills are a demand in the world of work, such as salespeople in brick-and-mortar stores, customer reception, fast-food restaurant clerks, call center operators, order dispatchers, order packers, etc. The required educational background shrinks to the requirement for adaptability and few “basic skills”: text comprehension, basic communication in one or two foreign languages, some math, science and technology concepts, a good dose of familiarity with digital as well as interpersonal and social skills (OECD, 2001). Assessment in secondary education has not remained unaffected; the holistic nature, originality, and innovation are incompatible with everyday teaching practice. With the scientific tools of statistics and neural networks, the divergence between formal assessment and diagnostic and feedback assessment has been quantified. Finally, the evolution of behavioral learning at a public high school level during the academic year 2021-2022 has been studied.

Teaching and Learning Paulo Freire: South Africa’s Communities of Struggle

This article highlights both the internal educative practices of social movements and how these practices can effectively link to building Freirean pedagogies within higher education institutions. At the heart of this possibility lies the democratic transformation of relations between students and teachers on the one hand and researchers and activists on the other. I draw from two case studies of my own research on community-based organisations and workers’ movements in post-apartheid South Africa, which point to the possibilities and challenges of developing Freirean approaches within the neoliberal higher education context. The article suggests that if the goal of education is to challenge systems of oppression, then social justice and the democratisation of the knowledge project must be the guiding principles we employ to navigate our everyday teaching and learning practices both inside and outside the academy.

The affordances beyond what one does: Reconceptualizing teacher agency with Heidegger and Ecological Psychology

There has been a recent growth in interest in the concept of teacher agency. However, teacher agency remains somewhat ill-defined and is also difficult to map onto everyday teaching practice. This article attempts to outline a model of teacher agency which is rooted in what teachers perceive and do in their everyday practice. This model draws on ecological psychology and phenomenological perspectives to argue that teacher agency is a capacity to perceive affordances beyond the conventional affordances we are socialized into perceiving. Implications for teacher development are also discussed.

Authoring Selves in Language Teaching: A Dialogic Approach to Language Teacher Psychology.

The teacher self is a composite psychological construct which encompasses the cognitive, affective, emotional, and social dimensions of teaching. This qualitative study draws on Bakhtin’s concepts of dialogism, answerability, and addressivity to discuss how English language teachers negotiated the shifting and conflictive context to construct selves in relation to the promoted communicative language teaching approach. Based on narrative interviews and classroom observations with five tertiary English teachers in China, we found that these teachers were actively engaged in the dialog with their prior learning experiences and active, responsive in answering their contexts while authoring selves in everyday teaching practice. The multiple-case study data support a Bakhtinian understanding that teachers are active users and producers of theory in their own right, highlighting teachers’ agency, creativity, and autonomy. Based on Bakhtin’s dialogism and the case study findings, we bring cognition, identity and practice together and conceptualize the teacher self as having multiple facets and layers: the autobiographical self, the discursive self, and the pedagogical self. The three selves are constitutive of the consummated whole of the teacher self instead of being separate entities functioning individually. The study is concluded with implications for language teacher education and teacher development.

Critical Factors that Enhance the Effectiveness of Online Communities of Practice: EFL Coordinators’ Patterns of Involvement - The Greek EL Teachers Cops Professional Development Paradigm

The paper examines Greek EFL Coordinators’ involvement in online Communities of Practice (CoPs) in terms of its impact on participating teachers’ professional development. The study focuses on four online CoPs hosting 49 Greek EFL teachers as participants and four Greek EFL Coordinators, using an online platform named 2gather developed by the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in the context of a national in-service professional development project in Greece. The study involves investigating the Coordinators’ patterns of involvement and their trainees’ response using a mixed-methods approach which combines quantitative and qualitative research as collective case studies of the four groups. Differentiations between the four Coordinators’ reported patterns of involvement and teachers’ reported effectiveness of their CoP training experience enables us to identify critical factors that contribute to the enhancement of effectiveness. A comparison of the Coordinators’ and their trainees’ responses per online CoP highlights the factors that have supported teachers’ reported reconstruction of knowledge and practices and the reported effectiveness of the CoP training experience regarding their everyday teaching practice. The findings contribute to furthering our understanding of effective online CoPs implementation in the context of continuing professional development.

Modularity in teacher professional development – building blocks for bridging everyday teaching practices and reform ideals centered around whole tasks

ABSTRACT Many reforms in past decades have come and gone without having the desired impact on teaching practices. Two shared ideals that reforms have had are offering challenging content by using whole tasks and tailoring student guidance to what students need for effective learning. In this article, we aim to bridge the reform-practice gap by taking a practicality perspective on how reform ideals are presented by exploring the concept of modularity. In this study modularity refers to how teachers can rearrange and adapt lesson-building blocks (e.g. explanation, checking homework or using a whole task) to change their teaching practices in line with reform ideals. We performed an explorative study (school-based PD programme) in which participants designed, enacted and reflected on authentic lessons using their student learning outcomes as input for subsequent lesson designs. Data were gathered about the use of building blocks and how teaching practices were developed in terms of using whole tasks and tailoring student guidance. Results show that participants made ongoing stepwise changes by building on what they already did successfully for both using whole tasks (e.g. change a task to recall into a whole task and shifting it to the lesson start) and tailoring student guidance.

Представления учителей о креативности и ее развитии в школе

The article presents the concept of teachers’ beliefs, and particularly their issue of implicit theories, about creativity and its nurture. It aims to identify whether teachers’ beliefs are consistent with modern theories of creativity and research on creativity-fostering practices. A second aim is the evaluation of potential barriers for implementation of creativity-fostering practices in Russian schools. A survey of 115 teachers from Kaluga region and Yaroslavl region was undertaken after 2 days of specific training. The analysis of their answers shows that their beliefs are only consistent with modern theories of creativity at a basic level. However, teachers still experience a high amount of uncertainty in how to implement nurture of creativity into everyday teaching practice and the ways to combine it with delivery of disciplinary knowledge. The results of this study may inform educational policy.

From foreign language teaching methodology to comparative glottodidactics

AbstractThe article presents the results of a diachronic analysis of language education in Poland from the 1950 s to the present day. We reflect on the evolution of theoretical thinking on language teaching methodology and its influence on everyday teaching practice. The approach taken is chronological, both in terms of the description of theory which is developed and implemented as well as the language education. This is an arbitrary choice which we feel is justified by the socio-political context. The analysis starts with a presentation of the tradition of teaching foreign languages in Poland followed by a description of use of terminology. Qualitative empirical research from structured interviews with researchers who have significantly influenced contemporary Polish glottodidactics is used to complement the analysis.

Społeczne podstawy poznania i rozwoju – konstruktywizm społeczno-kulturowy Lwa S. Wygotskiego. Nowe odczytania, rekonstrukcje, tropy epistemologiczno-metodologiczne

The original concept, theory-method of Lev S. Vygotsky, the innovative nature of his views allows to adopt new theoretical and methodological tools to describe the process of development and learning of a child, reconstruct what is happening in the classroom and in the students’ minds. For many years the interest in Vygotsky’s concept has been experiencing a renaissance all over the world, also in Poland. The cognitively sophisticated concept has original terminology. Unfortunately, in the discourses, frequent borrowings and loose usage of terms have been observed, as well as the reproduction of Vygotsky’s words without discovering the meaning or giving them a deeper meaning. As a consequence, this brings the risk of distortion of the idea and the apparent change of school culture, its opening to a new quality (socio-cultural constructivism). In this article I share my reflection on: research and Research and Development (R&D) activities based on the theory-method of L.S. Vygotsky, applying his ideas to pedagogical research, and educational implications for changing everyday teaching practice.

INTEGRATING INTERCULTURAL ASPECTS IN EFL LESSONS AT SLOVAK SECONDARY SCHOOLS

Over the last decades the importance of incorporating intercultural aspects in FL education has often been emphasized, especially by intercultural communication as well as foreign language pedagogy scholars. Yet the everyday teaching practice in Slovakia does not always reflect this viewpoint, as it has been revealed due to some research in the field. 
 The aim of the paper was to summarize the results of the observations carried out at secondary schools in Slovakia in order to map which intercultural aspects were developed suitably and sufficiently in the observed EFL lessons. The investigation showed that EFL courses at Slovak secondary schools tend to disregard the must of integrating cultural aspects in FL education. One of the reasons can be the lack of further education for in-service teachers in the given field; hence, the paper also includes some proposals for teacher development in terms of developing intercultural competences in FL courses