Thesis (Ph. D.)--Colorado State University, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references.

Clinical simulations are a promising approach to preparing preservice teachers for culturally responsive teaching. These simulations use actors to portray the role of students, parents, and coworkers in common problems of practice, but with a focus on issues of culture in such interactions. In this dissertation, I provide six design principles derived from both literature in medical education on standardized patient encounters for cultural competence as well as sociological literature on the relational work of doctors and teachers to guide the design and use of clinical simulations for culturally responsive teaching. I then use thematic analysis to examine what teachers learned from a clinical simulation of a student-teacher interaction that focused on issues of race and classroom discipline. Within this analysis, I conceptualize culturally responsive teaching as comprised of cultural consciousness, cultural competence, and critical reflection and look at how teachersâ starting points with respect to their own cultural identity development affected what they learned from the simulation. Finally, I provide a description of three trajectories of learning as focal cases in cross-comparative case analysis by looking at how three preservice teachers framed the problem in the simulation over time. In doing so, I look at when and how teachers were âpulled up shortâ by the experience such that it might serve as a critical incident in their professional development. Findings contribute to research on how preservice teachers learn to be culturally responsive and how to design and use clinical simulations for that purpose, and to broader conversations about how to adapt and refine instructional approaches from other professions.

This study explores the productive use of translanguaging in elementary classrooms where instruction is delivered primarily in English and teachers and students do not share proficiencies in studentsâ heritage languages. Using qualitative methods derived from ethnography of communication and discourse analysis, the study explores how one 2nd grade and one 3rd grade classroom incorporated various translanguaging pedagogies. From a communities of practice perspective, this study found that teachers with limited proficiencies in studentsâ heritage languages can leverage these languages to promote student achievement, but that teacher and student negotiation of how, when, and why these resources are leveraged is necessary. Overlapping aspects of learning communitiesâengagement, shared resources, and joint enterprisesâinformed the productive use of translanguaging pedagogies. Teacher perspectives on language use in their classrooms also played an important role in determining how these pedagogies were implemented. This work emphasizes the importance of classroom communities in shaping how language is used to negotiate meaning.

Given the difficulty in learning teaching that aims for the ambitious student learning goals prescribed in current standards documents, supports are needed in order to develop and sustain teachersâ enactment of ambitious instruction. Teacher workgroups are a common strategy for instructional improvement, but how teachers engage in activities during workgroup time shapes the learning opportunities that can develop. In this comparative case study, I take a situative view of learning to examine the learning opportunities afforded in workgroup meetings with middle-school math teachers and pedagogically expert facilitators. Using interaction analysis, I analyze how tools are used by facilitators during workgroup meetings. Both the nature of the tool and facilitatorsâ orientations towards those tools shaped the learning opportunities available to teachers. This work provides an example of the not-sufficient nature of tool use and emphasizes that how tools are used mediates the extent to which the tools can support teachersâ learning.

Prior research on teacher learning in the context of large-scale instructional reform suggests that it is important to attend to both school and district factors and teacher-level factors when trying to understand variation in the impact of professional development efforts on the quality of teachersâ instruction. This dissertation study sought to answer the following research questions: (1) How do district-organized pull-out professional development, one-on-one instructional coaching, school-based teacher collaborative time, and school leadersâ instructional expectations impact the quality of teachersâ instruction over time? (2) How do teachersâ current instructional expertise (the depth of their mathematical knowledge for teaching, their visions of high-quality instruction, and their views of their struggling studentsâ mathematical capabilities) mediate the influence of instructional supports and principalsâ expectations on their development of ambitious practice? Using data from the Middle School Mathematics and the Institutional Settings of Teaching (MIST) project, this study involved a qualitative, comparative analysis of eleven teachers: eight whose instructional quality improved or declined over time in the context of district-wide reform efforts, and three teachers whose instruction remained procedurally oriented. Drawing on interview and survey data from these teachers and their colleagues, I examined potentially critical between-school and between-teacher differences in teachersâ instructional expertise, the types and quality of district- or school-based supports for their learning, and the instructional expectations of their school leaders. I found that those who improved worked regularly with an instructional coach with substantial expertise in inquiry-oriented math instruction. I also found that three of the four teachers who improved had developed an ambitious vision of instruction and had come to view their own diverse students as capable of engaging in rigorous mathematical activity; this in turn appeared to lead to their identification with their districtâs reform efforts. These findings suggest that effecting lasting instructional improvement at scale might involve supporting teachers to (a) develop a sophisticated vision of instruction and (b) come to see their own students as capable of engaging in rigorous mathematics, then (c) navigate the ongoing challenges involved in enacting ambitious instruction with diverse students.

An emerging body of research has demonstrated that multimodal composing is a complicated and multifaceted process which involves the coordination of semiotic, material, and interactional resources. This qualitative study explores how young adolescent students enrolled in an academic enrichment program used digital tools to respond to and analyze literary texts. Data sources included video and audio recordings of classroom interactions, students multimodal compositions, artifacts from the composing process, screen recordings, in-process and final student interviews, surveys, and instructional artifacts. Findings show that students navigated different composing identities, composing pathways, and moments of creative tension as they composed multimodal products. Through the in-depth analysis of students individual and collaborative processes and products, this study traces the material, personal, and interactional resources that students bring to collaborative composingand presents a description of how students take on a variety of interactional roles in the creation of their joint work. This research also documents the pedagogical structures and conditions which may support and hinder students collaborative, multimodal composing.

In program evaluation research, measures of realized classroom instruction are often referred to as fidelity measures. Although there is a wide consensus that fidelity measures should be grounded in the program theories guiding the intervention, there is very little explicit discussion of how to adequately represent program theories, or how to scale a measure that can be interpreted in terms of the program theories. This dissertation is an example of a construct modeling approach to fidelity measurement. Here program theory is represented as the structure, processes, and underlying constructs of the designed intervention. Observable variables were generated and scored, and the data was modeled using a Partial Credit Model. The model largely supports the distinctions in the construct map and the correspondence between construct and scale. Additional implications for observation measures of classroom interactions are discussed.

An attempt was made to investigate two aspects of the learning and teaching context. One deals with how the sets of beliefs or expectations pupils hold about some phenomena affect the sense they make of experiences given to them in science classes. The other deals with the potential effect of the inevitable use of "scientific" and "everyday" language by both teachers and pupils in instruction. A sample of thirty Portuguese students from grade five to grade nine (10-15 years old) were given laboratory experiences and "parallel" everyday phenomena to discuss individually with the interviewer and then were invited to describe orally what and why things happened. The fundamental conceptions that students hold, the changes of these conceptions with students' age, as well as their consistency in different contexts and in similar tasks were identified in this experiment. The results suggested that these students, although having been exposed to formal teaching, still retain and use intuitive notions to think: about experiences in science lessons. The focus of the second experiment was to investigate how teachers' own perceptions may influence the development of pupils' ideas. It was carried out by observing seven teachers during ordinary classroom activities, to discover the relative contributions of 'scientific' and 'everyday' meaning in the language they used. Common features in teachers' and students' conceptualizations of "heat", "temperature" and "energy" were identified. Two main questions were discussed: i) what are the implications of the semantic variability in the disparate linguistic references for science education? ii) how to bridge the gap between teachers' and students' understandings, i.e., what connections can be made between what teachers and students talk about and perceive from discourse in the classroom? The results of this study seemed to reinforce the idea that it is impossible to keep external, everyday, informal culture out of the science classroom.

In recent years, leading educational scholars have argued for computational thinking to be an essential focus of K12 curriculum. Although now incorporated as an essential concept for STEM education, research has shown that curricular integration of computational thinking and modeling is a complex and challenging endeavor which involves the introduction and adoption of new literacies to both teachers and students, alongside disciplinary ideas and practices that students already find challenging to understand. This three-paper dissertation addresses the challenge of merging computational thinking and modeling with elementary science curricula along three dimensions â material, cognitive and social - by investigating how students and the classroom teacher make use of forms of activity that integrate agent-based computational modeling with other forms of scientific modeling to support the co-development of scientific and computational literacy in the elementary classroom. The first paper examines the close-interplay between the material and cognitive dimensions by investigating the forms of reasoning fourth graders utilized to develop more expert-like explanations of predator-prey relationships and population change due to natural selection after interacting with an agent-based model. The second paper elaborates on the interplay between the material and cognitive dimensions as well as extends the work conducted in the first paper by investigating how computational modeling is enhanced through its integration with other material forms, specifically with scientific modeling. The role of the teacher in re-shaping the structure of activity, and how those re-shapings influenced the knowledge that developed during activity was an additional component of this work. The third paper takes a more integrative stance and investigates the interplay between social, material and cognitive dimensions of emerging computational and scientific literacies through the development of sociomathematical norms across several months of activity. This paper advances an argument that the teacherâs emphasis on mathematizing and measurement as key forms of learning activities helped to meaningfully establish computation as the âlanguageâ of science in the elementary classroom. As a set, this work contributes to our understanding of how computational thinking and programming can transform elementary science education. Together, these papers illustrate how integration of computation as a language of science in the elementary classroom involves careful consideration of the complex interplay between materials, both computational and non-computational, cognition and classroom culture and highlights the complex social dimensions that allow (or do not allow) various computational competencies to thrive in a classroom setting.

Several studies have identified positive relationships between strong principal instructional leadership and improved student outcomes. However, few researchers have examined how principals influence the nature of instruction, particularly as it relates to ambitious goals for student learning. I conducted a mixed-methods analysis to investigate relationships between principalsâ understanding of inquiry-oriented mathematics instruction, district context, school context, and the extent to which they implemented strategies that had the potential to support teachersâ development of ambitious instructional practices. In a logistic regression analysis, I found district membership significantly predicted the implementation of improvement strategies rather than principalsâ understanding of inquiry-oriented mathematics instruction. A follow-up qualitative analysis revealed that principals who implemented improvement strategies often sought out other instructional leaders (e.g. district math specialists, school math coach) to both diagnose issues in current math instruction and facilitate learning events (e.g. professional development) to foster improvements in the quality of instruction. Additionally, principals who implemented instructional improvement strategies worked in districts that provided more support for principals as instructional leaders and worked with teachers who had greater instructional expertise. Additional research is needed to understand how principals come to recognize and value instructional leaders with expertise in inquiry-oriented math instruction.