Support Teacher Learning Research Articles

Reflecting on the past and looking ahead: An exploration of coach–teacher talk during reflection meetings

AbstractThe coaching cycle has been identified as a productive activity in which coaches can engage teachers to support teacher learning. Previous research has primarily focused on exploring teachers' learning opportunities during the planning meetings and enacted lessons, while reflection meetings have been left relatively unexplored. In the current study, I partnered with two coach‐teacher dyads to explore teachers' learning opportunities during six reflection meetings. In particular, I explore the substance, or topic, of coach‐teacher conversations, as well as the depth of reasoning that was achieved for these dyads. Overall, results indicate that dyads toggled back and forth between reflecting on previous instruction and discussing future instruction, while maintaining a focus on discussing students, pedagogy, and content. Furthermore, most of the coach‐teacher reflection talk was categorized at the high‐depth level as the dyads consistently provided evidence and reasoning to support claims made, which points to the generative nature of coach‐teacher reflection conversations. Implications for practice as well as future research are provided.

TESOL Teachers’ Writing to Support Developing Understandings of Translanguaging Theory and Praxis in Neoliberal Times

AbstractThis study highlights Masters‐level TESOL students’ meaning‐making about translanguaging theory and pedagogy through writing in response to course readings and conversations. To gain deeper insight into shifting understandings of languaging that seek to move from monoglossic orientations to heteroglossic framing of language learning as connected to dynamic bilingualism, we drew on both translanguaging (García & Li, 2014) and reflective writing as a mechanism for supporting teacher learning (Hoover, 1994; Kelley 2006; Zeichner, 1987). Our inductive and deductive approach to analyze 12 students’ 132 journal entries during a TESOL methods class showed developing understandings of translanguaging theory and pedagogy influenced by (a) experience with theories of bilingualism grounded in language separation as historically understood in TESOL, (b) tensions regarding the application of translanguaging theory to praxis (Li, 2017), and (c) tensions between language and testing within the context of neoliberalism (Zeichner, 2014) guiding language teaching and learning in the K‐16 context. We conclude by providing suggestions to help teacher educators who engage in teacher language education to better support teacher‐learning about translanguaging.

Global Perspectives on Teacher Professional Development: Navigating the Pandemic

Abstract Educational researchers, policymakers, and administrators agree that providing in-service teachers with high-quality professional development (PD) opportunities is essential to educational success. Despite the substantial sums invested in teacher PD by countries and jurisdictions, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused serious challenges to teacher learning around the world. As conventional face-to-face initiatives became impracticable (e.g., workshops, conferences, school-based PD) and the need to prioritize pandemic-specific topics intensified (e.g., emergency remote teaching), teacher PD was recast both formally (where and how teachers engaged in PD) and substantively (what teachers sought to learn from PD). Amidst the international upheavals caused by COVID-19, how have teacher PD infrastructures (policies, practices, theories) responded? For this Special Issue, we put this and other questions before a panel of PD scholars in six contexts: United States, Scotland (United Kingdom), Uruguay, Australia, United Arab Emirates, and Hong Kong (SAR China). In their respective contributions, authors discuss issues such as the limitations of PD systems based on compliance and external accountability mechanisms, the need to center teacher motivation in existing PD frameworks, matters of access and equity, the importance of developing technological infrastructures for online and hybrid learning, problems of online safety and wellbeing, and more. The Special Issue shows that the uncertainty of today’s times requires new, global perspectives on PD design, implementation, evaluation, theory, and scholarship. To nurture agentic, highly motivated, and effective teachers for the pandemic era and beyond, countries and jurisdictions should think more creatively about how to best support teacher learning. Keywords: Teacher professional development, in-service teachers, COVID-19, comparative education

Supporting teacher learning during the professional development experience: The case of national board certification

Amidst increasing globalized pressures to raise student achievement, nations are heavily investing in various forms of teacher professional development. In the United States, teachers are increasingly electing to pursue National Board Certification, yet few studies have analyzed the experience within the greater complex system of teaching and learning. Viewed from this approach, findings from this study suggest that numerous dynamic forces—relationships, partnerships, structures, and policies—interact in various patterns that can potentially support effective teacher professional development. Implications suggest a need for broader conceptualization, greater cohesion, and more strategic integration of teacher learning in education policy.

Seeking Support in Teacher Education for Racial Knowledge: The Role of Professional Networks and Social Identities

Drawing from the narrated experiences of teacher educators (TEs) at different institutions, this paper analyzes TEs’ perceptions of support related to their work in teaching about race and racism. TEs varied in the extent to which they viewed their institution as supportive, and they identified factors that signaled that their institution supported teacher learning about race and racism. TEs also described how their racial identities and positional privilege related to tenure status informed engagement with peers both for providing and seeking support. Implications for teacher education programs in providing support for TEs who teach about race and racism are discussed.

Collaborative elementary civics curriculum development to support teacher learning to enact culturally sustaining practices

This article compares case studies to better understand how third grade teachers, serving low-income (including Title I) schools, adapted their instruction in the midst of a global pandemic to better support their students' learning about locally-relevant civic issues. Civic perspective-taking components were embedded in the unit design with the aim of building deliberative, inclusive classrooms. The team designed lessons drawing from theories of culturally sustaining pedagogy. Using semi-structured interview data, we examined teachers' reported thinking and perceptions about students’ needs and their own struggles to deliver purposeful, equitable instruction. Findings indicate that as teachers collaboratively designed the lessons they discussed how to balance relevance and sensitivity in relation to content that mirrored students lived realities. This study advances our understanding of what challenges teachers overcome to integrate culturally-sustaining practices in their social studies instruction.

The Fourth Wall of Professional Learning and Cultures of Collaboration

Recent innovations in professional development are rife with a wide array of efforts focused on teacher collaboration. In this essay, we address some of the unexamined assumptions about the nature and significance of interactions in teacher professional collaboration, drawing on the concept of the “fourth wall” from theater and film studies. The fourth wall is a term used to describe the invisible wall that separates actors from their audience. We use this metaphor to interrogate the function of the fourth wall in professional learning and argue that it reflects a culture of professional learning that, despite innovations that tout teacher collaboration, upholds isolation in teaching and teacher learning and deep embedded norms of noninterference in one another’s practice. We also attend to the possibilities for supporting teacher learning that breaching the fourth wall affords when shared enactments of practice are used as a context for teachers’ sensemaking and collaboration.

Differentiated instruction for students with SEN in mainstream classrooms: contextual features and types of curriculum modifications

ABSTRACT This qualitative study explores what contributes to the development of differentiated instruction (DI) through the use of curriculum modifications for the inclusion of students with special educational needs (SEN) in three primary Singaporean schools. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews, descriptive observations, lesson plans and focus groups. Five teachers, six allied educators, and two learning support teachers (n = 13) participated in this research focusing on five students as “cases” for the professionals to provide individualized examples. Participants often provided restricted understandings about DI as an ability driven approach, which mainly requires modifications in the content of teaching based on staff perceptions of student readiness. However, undifferentiated learning objectives and assessment methods were commonly used. The participants described an overreliance on the use of instructional modifications and lack of curricular and alternative modifications, which they deemed as inadequate and unfair for the students. The findings indicate resounding evidence that contextual constraints, such as class size, a common standardized curriculum and national exams constitute critical impediments that affect the types of curriculum modifications used. The participants proposed an “exams-free” pedagogy to enhance diversity in modifications. The research implies a need to consider the contextual features that impact upon the quality of learner-centred instruction internationally.

Situating video as context for teacher learning

In this paper we contrast two locally situated models of supporting teacher learning using video reflection: a one-on-one coaching model that was implemented to support teachers in a wide-spread rural school district where in-person meetings were challenging, and a video club model that was implemented in a large, centrally organized school district. In both contexts our goal was to help elementary teachers learn about how they can support students in using representations to learn about science in their classrooms. We take a sociocultural approach to examining how the locally situated professional development models helped mediate the teachers' engagement with the video. Findings show that in both models, collaborative review of video cases helped the teachers to see new patterns and opportunities. We highlight how each was supported by the different models and offer suggestions for how future work can benefit from these opportunities.

Exploring the foci and depth of coach-teacher interactions during modeled lessons

While modeling teaching is a potentially productive coaching pedagogy, little is known about how coaches and teachers interact during modeled lessons to support teacher learning. This study explored the foci and depth of coach-teacher interactions during modeled lessons. Drawing on six coach-teacher dyads’ interactions (n = 295) across 25 lessons, qualitative analyses revealed six distinct types of interactions during modeling. Furthermore, we forward a new conceptualization of depth of coach-teacher interactions during modeling based on the extent to which the coach or teacher made their reasoning evident during interactions about content, pedagogy, and students. Implications for practice and future research are discussed.

Taking Away Excuses to Quit: The Role of Supports in Completion and Learning in Online Professional Development for Teachers

Online courses, particularly in the massive open online course (MOOC) format, have been lauded for their potential to democratize access to educational opportunities but criticized for their markedly low completion rates. Yet educators continue to enroll in online courses, including MOOCs, in high numbers. For teachers at under-resourced schools, free online courses may be the only professional development option. It thus remains important to understand whether online courses, in their various formats, can serve as vehicles to support teacher learning and whether this can happen on a large-scale. Extending prior research that explores the relationship between contextual factors, engagement, and learning in online settings, this mixed-method study examines outcomes in a MOOC designed for teachers of English learners (ELs). In particular, the study identifies and examines structural and social supports that were available to some course participants (release time, stipends, participating with colleagues, and having a facilitator who convened face-to-face meetings) and investigates whether these local conditions were significantly related to completion and learning. Findings indicate that participants who received more supports were significantly more likely to complete the course. While participants, on average, showed evidence of learning, participants receiving supports did not show evidence of learning more than other participants. This is potentially due to omitted variable bias because participants who completed the course without supports may differ from participants who completed the course with supports in important, unaccounted for ways. This study extends prior research about how learning environments impact online learning experiences and suggests that structural and social supports may be useful in facilitating MOOC completion.

Supervision and Teacher Wellness: An Essential Component for Improving Classroom Practice

Teaching has always been a stressful profession, but the additions of high-stakes accountability coupled with a global pandemic have increased stress to unprecedented levels. Thus, supervision must attend to teacher wellness to improve instructional practice. This article offers practical suggestions educational leaders can implement in their supervision to support teachers’ emotional well-being. Those strategies include being humble, giving statements of affirmation and practice, using data to drive inquiry, focusing on strengths, offering concrete suggestions, thinking aloud, re-energizing teachers intellectually, leveraging community resources, and developing teacher leaders. More information about these strategies and other practical ways to support teacher learning can be found in the book Leadership for Learning: How to Bring Out the Best in Teachers (2nd ed.).

Advancing the Science of Teaching Reading Equitably

ABSTRACTTeaching reading is more complex than reading, especially when teaching students from minoritized communities. Teaching reading equitably requires educators to integrate their knowledge of skills involved in reading, assisting students to learn to read, and everyday sociocultural practices and identities of readers. In this article, I examine what research has found across methodological traditions regarding teaching reading equitably, as well as what still needs to be explored. For the “science of reading” community, I frame equitable teaching as effective in assisting student reading performance and meaningful in terms of integrating values and practices from minoritized students’ everyday lives. Drawing largely on interpretive research, I identify sociocultural processes in teaching reading that connect with minoritized students’ everyday identities and experiences, support student initiative and expression, and foster collaborative relationships in the classroom to assist student participation and performance in reading. To advance the science of teaching reading equitably, I recommend that pluralistic research build generalizable evidence regarding effects of equitable teaching on reading and language gains for minoritized students, mechanisms in teaching reading equitably, and processes and materials to support teacher learning to sustain implementation of equitable practices to teach reading.

Teacher leaders’ brokerage practice in China: Impact on teacher learning in a school–university partnership

School–university partnerships bring meaningful learning opportunities for teachers, and empowering teachers with leadership roles has become an important approach for teacher learning. This study shows how teacher leaders exercised brokerage practice to support teacher learning in one small-scale school–university partnership in China based on interview data from a university expert, three school management team members, eight master teachers and backbone teachers as teacher leaders, and nine teachers. The study discusses the significance of expanding the forms of teacher leadership with brokerage practices, examines the combination of professional and managerial roles embedded within teacher leaders’ brokerage, and addresses the issue of unequal distribution of learning opportunities. Implications are also discussed.

Transitioning to remote learning: Lessons from supporting K‐12 teachers through a MOOC

AbstractThe recent face‐to‐face school closures due to COVID‐19 pushed teachers to quickly move their instruction online and support their students remotely. Whilst there has been a considerable push for technology integration in schools in recent years, there has been little focus on how to prepare teachers to teach online given that traditional schooling is based on a face‐to‐face delivery. As a result, many educators do not have adequate resources and preparation to support high quality and thoughtful remote learning. One way to quickly build teacher capacity is through the use of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) which can provide access to professional learning at scale. In this paper, we describe a mixed methods study from a MOOC designed to provide educators with knowledge on how to support their students and create a community of learners in remote learning contexts. Specifically, we share findings on teachers’ biggest challenges of teaching remotely, perceptions of the impact of MOOC on their ability to teach remotely, and MOOC participation data. We discuss implications of these findings on the design and delivery of MOOCs for teacher professional learning, in general, but also how to develop teacher competencies for effective remote instruction. Practitioner notesWhat is already known about this topic Online teaching and learning is challenging for teachers without sustained support There is not a one‐to‐one mapping of face‐to‐face pedagogical practices that translates to online teaching practices so learning to teach remotely and online is difficult What this paper adds Evidence that MOOCs that align with teacher needs can significantly impact educators’ perceptions of ability in teaching remotely Evidence that MOOCs that include just‐in‐time professional learning can significantly increase the participation rates Implications for practice and/or policy Use of MOOCs to support teacher learning

Designing educative curriculum materials in interdisciplinary teams: designer processes and contributions

Educative curricula support teacher learning as well as the learning of students. High quality educative curricula contain features that help teachers customize learning opportunities and environments in ways that meet the needs of their learners. Designing these features requires expertise related to subject matter content, pedagogy, teacher and student learning, and instructional design. In other words, it requires interdisciplinary team work – which is notoriously challenging. To understand and support collaborative interdisciplinary design processes, a retrospective case study was conducted on interdisciplinary design team work that yielded a high quality educative curriculum for inquiry-based science learning. Design documents and transcripts of interviews with six designers (a cognitive psychologist, a practising physicist, and four science educators) were analyzed to identify their contributions during the phases of analysis, development, and evaluation to create educative features for developing pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). Findings articulate specific educative features that can contribute to supporting PCK and thereby supporting instructional performance. Findings also reveal the proactive and reactive nature of designer contributions, describing different ways in which designers provide specialized inputs from a disciplinary perspective. Further, this study shows how designer contributions intermeshed, with contributions from one discipline shaping the work of colleagues, and thereby coordinating varied inputs to yield coherent educative materials. In addition, theoretical insights and recommendations for research on the nature of collaborative interdisciplinary design processes and implications for practice are given for supporting designers working in interdisciplinary teams to create educative curriculum materials for teacher (and student) learning.

Supporting teacher learning about argumentation through adaptive, school-based professional development

Engaging students in mathematical argumentation supports language development and conceptual understanding because students use verbal and written language in coordination with mathematical representations to notice patterns, make claims, and create and revise explanations. This study adds to the limited research base on how teachers learn to facilitate discussions specifically aimed to develop students’ capacities to engage in argumentation. We analyze teachers’ sensemaking about supporting argumentation in the classroom through their participation in an adaptive professional development (PD) design. The PD was embedded in two elementary schools with upper grade teachers which enabled them to engage in iterative cycles of investigation and enactment within their own classrooms. Through collaborative lesson design and inquiry into students’ experiences, teachers attended to the language students produced as they tried to formulate conjectures and produce explanations and the classroom participation structures that supported them. Our results suggest shifts in how teachers understood their role. Both cases speak to the complexities teachers face as they try to realize the recommendations for enhancing language learning and provide insight into what “rich” discourse means.

Evolving Problems of Practice: How a Teacher’s Reflective Courses of Action Contributed to Her Learning and Change

ABSTRACT Although literature emphasizes the value of recursive reflection on problems of practice to facilitate teacher learning and change, few studies investigate teachers’ iterative, evolving reflections on problems that emerge in their efforts to change their practice over time. This case study provides an in-depth, longitudinal analysis of one teacher’s incremental trajectory of change through examining her reflective discourse in pre- and post-observational planning and debriefing meetings with researchers over two-and-a-half school years. The middle school teacher was intentionally focused on changing her practice to support students’ historical inquiry, shifting from a more traditional, authoritative approach to a disciplinary-inquiry stance. Analysis entailed mapping the teacher’s talk about problems of practice in planning/debriefing meetings and how the evolution of her framing of problems was influenced by reflective courses of action. Analysis revealed the teacher’s courses of action differed depending on the type of problem she addressed and that these courses of action contributed to changes in her knowledge, practice, and dispositions. The paper addresses implications for studying and supporting teacher learning and change.

Complexities and opportunities in teachers' generation of videos from their own classrooms

Abstract Video cameras have become smaller and increasingly embedded in our social lives. This study investigates the implications of these changes for teachers' work with video in professional development. Specifically, we focus on complexities and opportunities associated with teachers generating videos from their own classrooms, in the context of a short online course where teachers tried several mathematical activities that invited student reasoning and discussion. We unpack the potential affordances of video generation for teacher learning by examining teachers' processes — how they captured video during instruction and selected clips to share — and the characteristics of their final video products. Analyses demonstrated that generating video clips was complex work for teachers, requiring coordination of multiple sets of considerations about their students, the video itself, video viewers, and the course. Further, capturing and selecting sparked different emphases for teachers. While capturing, teachers foregrounded video quality considerations while seeking to support students' experiences. Selecting engaged teachers in curating (and hence attending to) student thinking within their videos. Teachers' video products also demonstrated characteristics known to be supportive of teacher learning. We see these results as cause for optimism about the potential of teachers' video generation for supporting teacher learning.

Teacher-Facilitators’ Job-Crafting: Making Meaning and Relevance in Authentic Learning Environments

Purpose: Higher education institutions are being challenged to sustain their relevance in a disruptive world by moving from ego-systems to ecosystems. Teachers, as key actors, are required to redesign their work, shifting from traditional teacher-led processes towards the facilitation of student-driven learning in authentic environments. In ecosystems, with students, colleagues, and work-life partners, teachers need to modify their work by crafting their tasks, relationships, and mindsets. This study aims to make the change in teachers’ work transparent on a practical level. Study design/methodology/approach: A qualitative and practice-based approach was used to explore teacher facilitators experiences of their job crafting. Findings: The findings reveal the new meaning and relevance of the teacher facilitators work and can raise the awareness of higher education institutions to cultivate the future competencies of teachers. Originality/value: The study introduces the new nature and purpose of teachers’ work as a part of ecosystems. We suggest higher education institutions nurture an experimental learning culture and support teachers to go out of their comfort zones. Developing collaborative job crafting can be a sustainable way to do that and avoids the disconnection between what we are doing and what we should be doing.