Many school districts do not require science in the elementary school curriculum or place significantly more emphasis on the performance of students on the ELA and Math tests. With science education shifting to the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), there is a critical need for high quality science instruction in elementary schools. This study examines the experiences of 28 elementary teachers engaged in a science education professional development program that was comprised of 60 kindergarten through twelve grade teachers. I examine the experiences of the 28 elementary teachers as they work in vertically aligned professional learning communities with middle and high school teachers. Findings in this study indicate that the model provides a supportive environment for elementary teachers to grow and develop both personally and professionally in their science teaching practice. Evidence is presented that shows how a learning community of elementary, middle and high school teachers can provide an opportunity for elementary teachers to socially construct knowledge of how to best support student success in science. Additionally, the findings show that elementary teachers are able to socially construct knowledge about effective teaching practices in science that support core science teaching practices. The findings also indicate that the nature of these learning communities also provided many structures that can support increased efficacy amongst elementary science teachers. Finally, the experiences of elementary teachers engaged in his study were overwhelmingly positive, leading to increased trust and respect amongst peers and improved confidence and motivation to teach science at the elementary level.

The current demographic changes in the U.S. have resulted in a national culture gap, which contributes to the achievement and opportunity disparities that persistently plague students of color. According to the U.S. Department of Education, 86% of all PreK-12 grade teachers are European Americans. Yet, the student population in urban settings continues to be overwhelming economically disadvantaged students of color. Plaguing the nation’s schools are concerns about identifying teachers capable of successfully teaching in diverse classrooms, as stakeholders continue to speculate about the efficacy of White teachers to teach students of color due to the White teachers’ lack of understanding about and sensitivity toward students of color. Consequently, educators struggle to effectively serve their culturally dissimilar students. Despite the technical fixes of school reforms over the past three decades, however, the achievement and opportunity gaps remain. Hence, an adaptive approach to closing the opportunity and achievement gaps necessitates challenging our nation’s beliefs, values, and assumptions through a series of professional learning opportunities, as engaging in a series of intensive professional learning within a 12-month period improves student achievement by as much as 21 percentile points. The purpose of this study was to develop the Cultural Competence Professional Learning Module (CCPLM, 2016), which is grounded in Adult Learning Theory, Critical Race Theory, and Culturally Relevant Pedagogy and is designed to foster Cultural Competence in NYC DoE public school teachers. The researcher used the Cultural Competence Needs Assessment Survey (2016) and the Multicultural Personality Questionnaire (2000) to ascertain NYC DoE schools administrators’ level of cultural competence and their beliefs about their teachers’ cultural competence. Of the school administrators who completed the surveys and were culturally competent, 15 provided feedback on the CCPLM’s content and design in a focus group. Concurrently, four national experts on professional learning and diversity in schools also reviewed and provided feedback on the module. The results from the study support the need for a professional learning module that fosters NYC educators’ cultural competence. Delimitations and limitations of the study are discussed.

Writing instruction has been neglected, both in teacher preparation courses and in professional development in literacy. Yet, the adoption of new standards and teacher evaluation systems by many states demands increased writing instruction and teacher “effectiveness” in providing it. Teachers, then, have faced higher expectations for writing instruction with little support for what those expectations mean or how to enact them in their own contexts. To meet these demands, it has been suggested that teachers must see themselves as writers in order to work most productively with children as writers. Therefore, if teachers must identify as writers to be “effective,” then teachers who do not identify as writers are also denied an identity as “good teachers.” These static, binary identity categories serve as “cover stories” to obscure a much more complicated reality. Informed by critical writing pedagogy and a literacy-and-identity studies framework, this study explored how teacher-writers in one school-based writing group perform, understand, and narrate their identities as writers and teachers of writing. Utilizing a narrative inquiry methodology for group meetings and interviews, I analyzed the complex, fluid, and sometimes contradictory identities of teacher-writers, and the construction, reconstruction, and mobilization of stories within and about the group. The static, binary identities group members claimed served as cover stories, the static categorical writer-selves that we construct in relation to our conceptions of an idealized writer. My study concluded that the relative autonomy of the writing group provided a shelter from the school culture of accountability where emotion and profanation were possible. This work proposed that, in acknowledging the complex nature of writing identities and the “unofficial” emotional lives of teachers, we can push beyond a static writer/non-writer binary and disrupt a hierarchical, outcome-based notion of staff development. As a result, space for staff development, in which a diverse school community joins together to engage in experiences, learning, and identity work that make space for emotion, may be created.

The purpose of this study is to explore and identify flow characteristics in experienced middle school and high school band directors in the context of their teaching. The research was conducted using a qualitative multi-case study through the use of non-participant observations, field notes, and interviews with observational video with stimulated recall to identify the characteristics of flow in a total of five experienced middle school or high school band directors. It was apparent from the findings that every experienced middle school and high school band director experienced flow characteristics at different times while instructing their bands; conditions that facilitated and inhibited characteristics of flow as well as qualities that sustained characteristics of flow also were observed. This research may contribute to improved professional development and preparation of band directors; it may help them to recognize and achieve flow and develop good teaching practices, thereby enabling their students to reach their learning potential.

Set within a discursive field of humanist and neoliberal thought, this post-qualitative study attended to student teachers’ “stuck moments” in a university-based, social justice-oriented teacher education program (SJTE). It sought to problematize the familiar tendency of ascribing student teachers’ stuck moments as symptomatic of the theory-practice gap, an argument frequently lobbied by policy makers to dismantle university-based teacher education in favor of alternative (read: more lucrative) programs. Challenging the representational logic that undergirds prevailing conceptualizations of stuckness and the theory-practice gap obsession in teacher education, this study conceptualized stuck moments as a fluid, moving assemblage of bodies (human and nonhuman), and discursive, affective, and material forces. Informed by posthumanist theories of affect, this case study of six preservice teachers enrolled in an SJTE program used a rhizomatic mapping process that entailed assembling a series of wonder cabinets to map the discursive, affective, and material forces that shape student teachers’ stuck moment(s) and explore what these stuck moments do to student teachers. Data sources included field notes and jottings, individual and group conversations, and the creation of wonder cabinets of stuckness. The findings of this study suggest that the materiality of field placement sites (i.e., the physical and discursive), the pressure on student teachers to achieve teaching mastery, participants’ desire to have an impact on their students, and the challenges of enacting critical/justice practices, constitute the stuck moment assemblage. These constituting elements also illuminate the infiltration of learning discourses in student teachers’ stuckness. With their focus on mastery, normative teacher identity categories, measurable goals, and telos-driven progress narratives, learning discourses—while seductive for student teachers—collide with the tenuousness and uncertainty of social justice work. These discourses also generate and intensify the negative affects that animate student teachers’ stuck moments. These affects include, among others, worry, shame, and loneliness. This research foregrounds how stuckness holds the potential to simultaneously expose and oppose the conflicting discourses, affective attachments, and intensities, that student teachers encounter as they navigate through the various spaces of their SJTE program.

Professional development (PD) is often viewed as essential to improve classroom practices--as a way to create changes in districts, changes in classrooms, and changes in teachers--which, in turn, strives to improve student learning. Many insist that for a PD initiative to be successful, it needs to create changes in teachers’ classroom practices, who are indeed at the ground level of interpreting, implementing, adapting, and enacting what PD offers. Researchers claim that teacher resistance is the central problem of PD failure (Janas, 1998). Confined to the duality of compliance vs. resistance to PD, teachers either change or do not change according to the grading system that the administrators and researchers impose. A binary view of teachers who meet the expectations and those who do not meet the expectations of the district and PD personnel is, then, inadequate to studying the process of what happens beyond that narrow conception of teachers who participate in district/school-wide PD. V. Richardson (2003) argues that teacher resistance is a symptom of a disconnect between a structural reform agenda and teachers’ concern for teaching students well. Within the context of a locally initiated PD program that included elements of effective PD proposed by a body of research, I examined a select group of participating teachers’ experiences. Based on the classroom practice of a teacher whose students have shown drastic growth on high stakes tests despite social factors, the district had expanded the program as a district-wide initiative. Using care theory, I specifically explored changes in 12 teachers’ beliefs and practices as a result of their PD participation, in addition to identifying factors that facilitated program implementation. The results showed that the “caring teacher” identity mediated classroom practice changes, that teachers selectively used PD based on the feedback from their students rather than changes to their knowledge and beliefs. Based on this reciprocity, teachers’ self-identification as caring teachers defies traditional labeling of participating members as “compliant” or “resistant”; all teachers in the study described how caring about and caring for their students led to program implementation with a varying degree of fidelity.

Novice science teachers struggle to incorporate reform-based perspectives of teaching and learning into their planning and instruction. Some argue that this is due to a mismatch between teachers’ beliefs and the goals of reform. However, it is widely recognized that the relationship between teachers’ beliefs and science teaching is tenuous at best. Previous attempts to understand the mismatch between preservice teachers’ espoused beliefs and their classroom practices draw upon models of teacher cognition that consider beliefs and knowledge as the main drivers of their actions. In this study I use a goal-driven model of science teacher cognition as my theoretical framework. This model posits that classroom practices are an attempt to achieve particular goals. Based on this model, I conducted a cross-case analysis using qualitative methods to examine the relationship between teachers’ beliefs, knowledge, and goals and the types of learning opportunities they design. Data were collected through participant interviews and document analysis. Findings are consistent with the theoretical premises of this model, suggesting that the goals teachers pursue are influenced by their beliefs about teaching and learning science, together with the contextual characteristics of their placement. Findings suggest that the design and enactment of high cognitive demand learning tasks is facilitated by several factors. First, preservice teachers need to operationalize their beliefs into learning goals for their students, including explicit epistemic goals that seek to engage students in the use of science practices to make sense of disciplinary ideas. Second, in order to achieve their goals, preservice science teachers need to learn how to design scaffolds that bridge students’ classroom practices with the practices of the discipline to make sense of scientific ideas. Finally, the goals of the teacher education program, the school, and the personal goals that preservice teachers aim to pursue may conflict; whether and how they solve these conflicts influence the cognitive demand of the tasks they design. This study suggests that helping student teachers develop and pursuing goals that characterize high cognitive demand tasks have the potential to improve their teaching practices.

A large body of recent research calls for expanding what it means to teach literacy in the content areas. This includes movement away from conceiving of content literacy instruction as generic literacy strategies superimposed on content-area text. Instead, the focus is on the discursive literate practices of the disciplines, including ways of thinking, acting, and believing. This disciplinary literacy perspective addresses the literacy demands specific to disciplines such as history and views literacy as socially situated. Little research has been done to find out how teachers respond to expectations to incorporate literacy in their content area classrooms, and few opportunities exist for teachers to explore the literacy practices inherent in the disciplines, or to collaborate on how these might be taught. Thus, this practitioner research focuses on a teacher inquiry group formed to explore literacy in the middle and secondary social studies classroom. Consistent with practitioner research and an inquiry as stance perspective, the productive and generative potential of tension and conflicts was considered. The talk and activities of teachers were documented as they participated in the group to illuminate the discourses on which teachers drew when they talked about literacy, and to demonstrate how, in this context, teachers might collaboratively interrogate, transform, and generate knowledge around literacy in social studies. This study contributes to conversations about literacy instruction in subject areas specifically by attending to teachers’ perspectives. The talk was analyzed using a modified discourse analysis approach, framed by perspectives on language described by Gee and Bakhtin. Findings show that the typical discourse patterns of the inquiry group talk were shaped by curricular and institutional expectations that produced normalized notions of what counts as reading and texts in social studies classrooms. Disciplinary discourses were also evident. Additionally, the inquiry group talk was shaped by discourses of student ability that suggested links to racial, socio-economic, and developmental factors, as well as special education labeling. Moments of intensity that arose out of tensions or conflict resulted in the interrogation, transformation, and generation of knowledge around literacy in social studies; it broadened to include discipline-specific practices while continuing to encompass generic ones.

Interest in the elementary education major by underrepresented minority (URM) students at a public four-year institution (Queens College) increased from 36% of declared majors in 2012 to 51% in 2017. However, a disproportionate number of URM students drop out of the educator pipeline, leaving the average percentage of URMs who complete the elementary education major at 22%. While there has been a great deal of research on the preparation of preservice teachers, the bulk of the scholarly literature is focused on the final student teaching practicum and preservice teachers’ experiences at the end of their academic programs. Little research has been done on beginning teacher education students and how their educational experiences, both past and present, influence the way they see themselves as learners and future teachers. Guided by a sociocultural lens, this qualitative study examines teacher education students’ educational experiences and how those experiences influence and shape their paths into the teaching profession. The study was conducted using an interpretive inquiry approach to enable the exploration of participants’ lived educational experiences (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990), using data collected from semi-structured interviews, critical incident reports, and a focus group. Analyses informed by narrative inquiry and grounded theory methodologies were used to look across data collected from participants to paint a rich chronicle of the participants’ stories. Findings highlight the pedagogy of care in conversation with notions of identity, belonging, and community, in order to note its significance for the more oft- studied aspects of teaching. This study contributes to research on teacher education and teaching and learning in higher education, and considers a different perspective on long-standing ideas about communities of practice.

李傑泉. / 論文(博士)--香港中文大學歷史學部, 1997. / 參考文獻: p. 318-340 / 中英文摘要. / Available also through the Internet via Dissertations & theses @ Chinese University of Hong Kong. / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, MI : ProQuest Information and Learning Company, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / Li Jiequan. / Lun wen (Bo shi)--Xianggang Zhong wen da xue li shi xue bu, 1997. / Can kao wen xian: p. 318-340 / Zhong Ying wen zhai yao.