Advances in Research on Teaching - Böcker

This volume revisits and updates theory and research on self-fulfilling prophecies and other aspects of the effects of teachers' expectations in classrooms. The introductory chapter describes the waxing and waning of a flurry of research on the self-fulfilling prophecy effects of teachers' expectations concerning students' learning potentials, then identifies current aspects of research on this topic that are evident in contemporary work on teacher efficacy, student motivation, gender, student diversity, equity, and many other aspects of contemporary discussions of schooling. Two literature review and synthesis chapters follow, one on teacher expectations and the other on teacher efficacy. Then come six chapters presenting work on expectation-related issues: teachers' efficacy perceptions with respect to difficult-to-teach students, the mutual adaptations that occur between teachers and students as they condition one anothers' expectations and actions, expectation-related phenomena in urban high schools, the teacher's pet phenomenon and other expectation- and attitude-related aspects of teacher-student interaction that affect students' attitudes, students' negative reactions to differential treatment by teachers and the effects of intervention studies designed to maximize the equity and quality of students' educational experiences, and the labeling effects associated with special education diagnoses. The volume concludes with a discussion chapter that synthesizes, critiques, and draws connections across chapters, identifies accomplishments to date, and suggest next steps in extending research on this important topic.

This volume explores the tension between the search for generic principles of good teaching that cut across school subjects and the belief that portrayals of best practices ought to be framed separately for each subject. Its contributors all favor teaching in ways that encourage students to learn each subject with understanding of its big ideas, appreciation of its value, and acquisition of the disposition to apply it in their lives outside of school. They consider curricular, instructional, and assessment aspects of best practices that foster this kind of learning in fourteen school subjects, focusing on instructional methods and learning activities. In the introduction, Editor Jere Brophy presents twelve generic guidelines for good teaching that he believes represent current consensus about best practices that should be applicable to any school subject. Then, leading scholars concerned with curriculum and instruction in particular school subjects (beginning reading, content area reading and literature studies, writing, number, geometry, biology, physics, chemistry, earth science, history, physical geography, cultural studies, citizenship education, and economics) synthesize current thinking about best practices in teaching their respective subjects, commenting on the applicability of generic principles but focusing on subject-special goals and methods. These state-of-the-field contributions take into account not only relatively formal research, but also the wisdom of practice as represented in standards documents, case studies of good teaching, and the methods and activities commonly recommended in subject-specific teacher education texts. The fourteen chapters examine best practices with a much closer lens than more conventional approaches that consider language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies teaching in general but do not focus on the strands that compose these four broad curricular areas. In a final discussion chapter, Brophy draws from these chapters to reassess the applicability of generic guidelines across subjects and to identify commonalities and points of contention in what the authors have to say about instructional materials, content representations, discourse management, learning activities, assessment, technology, and other factors involved in teaching school subjects effectively.

This volume is a sympathetic but analytical and critical view of social constructivist teaching, considering both its affordances (what it offers to students when implemented well in situations for which it is well suited) and its constraints (enabling conditions; situations in which these conditions are absent and other forms of teaching are more appropriate). Contributors were asked to explain what social constructivist teaching means in the areas of teaching in which their scholarly work has concentrated, to describe the forms that such teaching takes and the rationale for using them, assess their strengths/areas of applicability and their weaknesses/areas of irrelevance or limited applicability, and talk about how the approaches would need to be adjusted from their usual forms in order to match the affordances and limitations of certain students, instructional situations, etc. The authors focus on theory and research relating to social constructivist teaching, not merely social constructivist ideas about epistemology or learning. Taken together, the contributions encompass most grade levels and school subjects and include attention to small-group as well as whole-class settings and to selection of learning activities as well as scaffolding of discourse. Most currently available scholarly writing on social constructivist teaching is limited to consideration of propositional knowledge (defining it and identifying its key characteristics) and procedural knowledge (describing its implementation in detail). This volume also includes much-needed conditional knowledge (specification of when and why it would or would not be used).

This book features contribution from people who have developed and used video in teacher education. The focus is on video as opposed to other technology (e-mail, etc.) and its use in teacher education. The video can be stored on videotapes, CD-Rom, DVD, or computer drives, and it can be used in either preservice or inservice teacher education/professional development programs. Contributors explain the nature of the video they use in their teacher education programs or courses and talk about how they use it, focusing in particular on principles for: making the videos (decisions about how and what to capture on video, the degree to which the teaching should be scripted, whether it should be shown uninterrupted or segmented and edited, and so on), and principles for using the video in the teacher education program (why and how it is used at what points in the program, how viewings are structured and scaffolded by the teacher educator, and so on).

This volume is designed to accomplish three primary purposes: illustrate a variety of qualitative methods that researchers have used to study teaching and teacher education; assess the affordances and constraints of these methods and the ways that they focus and shape explorations of teaching; and, illuminate representative questions and findings associated with each method described. The book is organized around three issues that impact research in qualitative paradigms: perspective, methodology, and representation. The first section, 'Perspective: Whom Should I Ask?' explores what can be learned by assessing teaching from different perspectives (teachers, teacher educators, students, parents), emphasizing that the perspective of the respondent influences what we can learn and shapes both our questions and our potential findings. The second section 'Methodology: How Do I Look?' addresses some of the qualitative research strategies that have been used to study teaching, including historical accounts, photos, drawings, and video. The third section, 'Representation: How Do I Show What I Saw?' explores the affordances and constraints of narratives, practical arguments, video ethnography, portfolios, and theater as methods for representing research findings. Qualitative research paradigms typically do not make claims based in the kinds of foundational criteria for generating knowledge that establish bases for generalizability. The book addresses this dilemma by providing findings, insights, and claims from qualitative research that appear to be useful in settings beyond those that generated the data, and thus inform our thinking about teaching and teacher education. In addition, its explorations of the affordances and constraints of qualitative research methods provide insightful and occasionally controversial contributions to our thinking about research on teaching and teacher education.

Current accreditation practices require that teacher education institutions in the United States not only create programs that enact research-based best practices but that they also document their existence and efficacy in preparing teachers. "Tensions in Teacher Preparation: Accountability, Assessment, and Accreditation" addresses the challenges of meeting national accreditation requirements, including designing assessment instruments and making data-driven decisions. The process of establishing and implementing accountability creates tensions in faculty and institutions. Faculty must give up valued content and instructional styles in order to align course objectives and assessment instruments across the program. Institutions with multiple licensure programs must make adjustments in order to share data collection instruments and processes that will support data-driven decisions. The paradigm shifts required by the emphasis on accountability can be both frustrating and productive. This book explores and shares tensions created as teacher education programs experience changes because of accountability requirements related to the accreditation process.

The authors explore how individuals' identity and personal practical knowledge are being formed, shifted or interrupted through moments in teacher education which the authors have carefully and thoughtfully constructed. The particularity of the stories, expressed in this collection, provide us with multiple perspectives and multiple entry points into making deeper sense of the complexity of curriculum-making in teacher education. As the stories of experience resonate with our own or as they stand apart from them, they provoke us to re-imagine teacher education, and to retell and relive our own stories of teacher education with new possibility. Narrative inquiry offers teacher educators a way to move the telling of stories of curriculum-making in teacher education forward, to delve more deeply into stories in order to make sense of experience and to attend more closely to a curriculum of life that is educative for the self and others in teacher education.

This book documents a radical shift in thinking from focusing on the school as the place where curriculum is made to realizing the ways children and families are engaged as curriculum makers in homes, in communities, and in the spaces in-between, outside of school. The narrative inquiry framing this book investigates the tensions experienced by teachers, children and families as they make curriculum attentive to lives. It draws on a research project involving multiperspectival narrative inquiries spanning four research sites and traces the tensions experienced by children, families and teachers in multiple curriculum making sites and some of the profound identity making and assessment making implications that become visible. Its attention to the relational in narrative inquiry is focused on tensions that shape lives and, as well, the unfolding of narrative inquiries. This informative book has a wide reaching audience of educational researchers, teacher educators, research methodologists, particularly those interested in narrative inquiry, curriculum scholars, graduate students, university faculty, teachers, administrators and parents alike.

This book is the representation of a narrative inquiry conducted with five ninth grade boys that were identified as displaying multiple literacies, looking specifically at how these boys storied their literate identities. After the stories were collected, the author conducted several negotiation sessions with the boys and their parents at the school, as well as in their homes. These negotiations facilitated a methodological concept that the book terms distillation: an interim step for determining which narratives in an inquiry are emblematic. Several lenses for conceptualizing the stories of these boys were made evident during the research. An analysis of the collected stories revealed that the boys' stories moved beyond current conceptions of either identity or literacy alone and instead offered a way of defining literate identity as simultaneously being and doing literacy. In light of this definition, the boys' stories revealed plotlines that together described literate identity as a form of capital. The question of how the boys story themselves, the original research question, is ultimately answered using a meta-narrative, or archetype, where a hero distributes a boon, or gift to his society. The implications for this research include a need to examine classroom space in order to facilitate the deployment of literate identity capital, as well as space for living out the meta-narratives that these boys are composing.

This fourth volume in the series discusses such topics as building a sense of history in a first-grade classroom, teaching for understanding in a third-grade geography lesson, and social studies education in an urban fourth-grade classroom.

"Narrative Inquirers in the Midst of Meaning-making: Interpretive Acts of Teacher Educators" illustrates interim narrative field texts of identity as "teacher educator stories" and demonstrates how researchers utilize common places of temporality, sociality, and place in analyzing narratives. It describes conceptualizations of narrative research processes, bringing forward narrative tools and methods of layering narratives from experienced narrative researchers. Through the metaphor of braided rivers, the chapters are woven together through unique chapter interim dialogues which spotlight the insights discovered within the three-dimensional inquiry space. From chapters on the temporal dimension of narrative inquiry, on burrowing and broadening through narrative, on openness and inconclusivity in interpretation, on plotlines discovered through the interpretive tool of chronotypes, and on the cross-cultural interpretation of field texts, researchers and teacher educators can reach new conclusions about the ontology and epistemology of narrative research, in the midst of meaning-making.

Current accreditation practices require that teacher education institutions in the United States not only create programs that enact research-based best practices but that they also document their existence and efficacy in preparing teachers. "Tensions in Teacher Preparation: Accountability, Assessment, and Accreditation" addresses the challenges of meeting national accreditation requirements, including designing assessment instruments and making data-driven decisions. The process of establishing and implementing accountability creates tensions in faculty and institutions. Faculty must give up valued content and instructional styles in order to align course objectives and assessment instruments across the program. Institutions with multiple licensure programs must make adjustments in order to share data collection instruments and processes that will support data-driven decisions. The paradigm shifts required by the emphasis on accountability can be both frustrating and productive. This book explores and shares tensions created as teacher education programs experience changes because of accountability requirements related to the accreditation process.

"Warrior Women" makes visible the ongoing intergenerational narrative reverberations (Young, 2003; 2005) shaped through Canada's residential school era which denied the communal and cultural, economic, educational, human, familial, linguistic, and spiritual rights of Aboriginal people. Attending to these narrative reverberations foregrounded the continuing colonial barriers faced by six Aboriginal post secondary students as they composed their lives in a current era of increasing standardization in Canadian universities and schools. Yet, what also became visible were ways in which the Aboriginal teachers increasingly reclaimed or drew upon their ancestral ways of knowing and being.

This book documents a radical shift in thinking from focusing on the school as the place where curriculum is made to realizing the ways children and families are engaged as curriculum makers in homes, in communities, and in the spaces in-between, outside of school. The narrative inquiry framing this book investigates the tensions experienced by teachers, children and families as they make curriculum attentive to lives. It draws on a research project involving multiperspectival narrative inquiries spanning four research sites and traces the tensions experienced by children, families and teachers in multiple curriculum making sites and some of the profound identity making and assessment making implications that become visible. Its attention to the relational in narrative inquiry is focused on tensions that shape lives and, as well, the unfolding of narrative inquiries. This informative book has a wide reaching audience of educational researchers, teacher educators, research methodologists, particularly those interested in narrative inquiry, curriculum scholars, graduate students, university faculty, teachers, administrators and parents alike.

Emotion and School: Understanding How the Hidden Curriculum Influences Relationships, Leadership, Teaching, and Learning reports the history, developments, applications and possible future directions of relational and emotion-focused school research from North America, Asia-Pacific and Europe. It begins by scoping the field from both a psychological and sociological perspective. The chapters frame the key debates in the research literature while adding the unique perspective of experts from the field, before honing in on the school: the administration context, teacher context and student context. The book explores the contests within the field, including psychological and socio-cultural knowledges, individual and collectives, emotions as inputs/outcomes, and the false binary of emotions and rational thought. The middle sections of the book take these perspectives into the field to see how they operate in schools. First, methods for identifying and responding to emotion and relationships in schools are presented. Second, the positive and negative products of emotions and emotion work are outlined and their effects on relationships and school functioning are discussed. The book provides readers with new insights into the hidden curriculum. It offers new ways of working with emotion in a variety of relationships for positive outcomes: the selection and induction of teachers; the role of emotions in leading; emotional and emotion learning; and, the inter-relationship between emotions, school culture, classroom and staffroom dynamics.

The chapters in this book will focus on pre-service and in-service science teacher education, because both are equally important. With case studies for China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan topics include: Professional Development of Chemistry Teachers in the New Curriculum, Using Classroom Observation to Assist Teacher Professional Development and Science Teacher Education and Science as Inquiry: Promises and Dilemmas.

This volume covers advances that have occurred in the thirty year existence of the International Study Association on Teachers and Teaching (ISATT), the organization that helped transition the study of teacher thinking to the study of teachers and teaching in all of its complexities. This evolution meant that teachers and the act of teaching are no longer exclusively studied from the outside, but from the inside as well. The chapters capture an international paradigm shift that set the course of teaching and teacher education research. The origins of the movement are traced, work of researchers who contributed to the movement is featured, the spread of the movement into new regions is followed, and the future of the international research community that resulted is imagined. Thirteen section editors and the two main editors present the volume by themes, with work from several regions covered in each theme area. Each sub-section includes (1) a representative sample of research conducted historically on a particular topic; (2) a review of what developments have occurred in the interim; and (3) contemporary piece/s of scholarship.

To this point in time, teacher education has been approached in mostly insular ways because it is largely driven by state and national education policies. However, the spread of the global economy and the increased stature of international comparison tests (i.e., TIMSS) has changed all that. All countries in the world understand that education is vital to human and economic prosperity and that teacher education unavoidably is implicated. But the snag is this: political forces shaping public opinion in individual nations (particularly the U.S.) are deeply divided concerning how teacher education should proceed. This book acknowledges this Achilles heel tension, but does not become weighed down by it. Instead, it focuses on 'the practical' (Schwab, 1969), matters that have been locally deliberated and enacted. Pedagogies are named, origins (cultural/practical/theoretical/policy roots) are traced and a live example of the pedagogy unfurling in the local setting is presented from an insider-view. After that, the conditions necessary for the pedagogy to be transported successfully to another international location are discussed.

"The book volume shares six narrative accounts, which offer glimpses into the teachers' lives, which are composed with attention to place, temporality, and personal and social dimensions. By inquiring narratively into the experiences of these teachers, the book identifies the complex ways in which the teachers' personal practical knowledge is shaped by their personal knowledge landscapes as well as professional knowledge landscapes. Questions are raised about the implications of seeing teacher attrition as a process rather than singular event, that is, as a process of coming to tell a story to leave by, for our understandings of teacher knowledge and identity. As we shift from seeing "beginning teachers" to seeing "teachers as beginning", that is, as seeing teachers as people with experiences of personal and professional becoming, we shift from seeing them as more than content knowledge and pedagogic skills, but as people in the midst of living lives. This narrative and more holistic understanding of teacher knowledge and identity will help preservice teacher education programs, schools and school districts to better sustain people as they begin to teach and become teachers"

The Advances in Research on Teaching series was established to provide state-of-the-art conceptualization and analysis of the processes involved in functioning as a classroom teacher. These include not only the behaviors of teachers that can be observed in the classroom, but also the planning, thinking, and decision making that occur before, during, and after interaction with students.

Today’s schools compartmentalize children and curriculum. Standardization dictates curricular content and assessment, narrowing the focus of classrooms and schools that serve diverse populations from varied geographical backgrounds. Against the backdrop of the western-derived, institutional framework of schooling are cultural ways of knowing that are place-based, holistic, experiential, and connected to oral storytelling. In the current movement toward acknowledging and understanding cultural knowledge, teacher education programs need to work in collaboration with cultural communities, honoring traditions and epistemologies and seeking to revitalize and sustain (Paris, 2012) language and culture. Such initiatives inform the big picture of educational reform and enrich mainstream university teacher education programs. This book highlights the journeys, challenges and unfolding stories of transformation that reside within university/community/school partnerships focused on cultural and linguistic revitalization through schooling.

Teacher educators need to be able to not only teach preservice teachers how to teach language arts, math, social studies, or science, but also to teach the language their students need to talk, read, and write about these subjects. Despite this need, there is a lack of research on how best to prepare preservice teachers to teach emergent bilinguals. In this book, teacher educators from institutions across the U.S. report their research with preservice teachers in large cities, suburban communities, and rural border areas. In each chapter, the authors explain what they have learned as they have conducted research on education for preservice teachers who will teach emergent bilinguals in mainstream, bilingual, and ESL.

Between 1990 and 2010, the English language learner (ELL) population in U.S. schools grew by 80 percent. While the highest concentration of English language learners, now more commonly referred to as emergent bilinguals (EBLs) remains in the traditional immigrant destination states of California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, and New Jersey, in all 50 states there are growing numbers of emergent bilinguals. Interest in these learners has encouraged research and publications, but most of this research has centered on the students themselves and the politics surrounding their education. Publications featuring the research of teacher educators preparing teachers to work with EBLs in schools are much needed. Teacher educators must know how to help inservice teachers provide effective instruction to the increasing number of linguistically diverse students in the schools.

All countries in the world understand that education is vital to human and economic prosperity and that teacher education unavoidably is implicated. But the snag is this: political forces shaping public opinion in individual nations (particularly the U.S.) are deeply divided concerning how teacher education should proceed. This book acknowledges this Achilles heel tension, but does not become weighed down by it. Instead, it focuses on 'the practical' (Schwab, 1969), matters that have been locally deliberated and enacted. Pedagogies are named, origins (cultural/practical/theoretical/policy roots) are traced and a live example of the pedagogy unfurling in the local setting is presented from an insider-view.

This proposed volume will profile research projects and methods that are at the top of the innovation curve in terms of their implications for teaching and teacher education. Chapters included in this volume include profiles of cutting edge work on methodological possibilities of studying diversity in online settings, engaging diverse adolescents and their parents in online coursework, working effectively with adolescents in need of credit recovery, pre-empting failure with the practical use of blended coursework for young children, supporting students with various types of disabilities in online settings, problematizing and unpacking the work of teachers in online settings as they plan for and attend to the needs of students who have not succeeded in traditional school situations, examining issues of glocality and ecosophia as pedagogical stances, and framing the work of teacher educators as they conceptualize curriculum to meet the needs of diverse students in taking online courses and thriving in virtual learning environments.

All countries in the world understand that education is vital to human and economic prosperity and that teacher education unavoidably is implicated. But the snag is this: political forces shaping public opinion in individual nations (particularly the U.S.) are deeply divided concerning how teacher education should proceed. This book acknowledges this Achilles heel tension, but does not become weighed down by it. Instead, it focuses on the practical (t) (Schwab, 1969), matters that have been locally deliberated and enacted. Pedagogies are named, origins (cultural/practical/theoretical/policy roots) are traced and a live example of the pedagogy unfurling in the local setting is presented from an insider-view.

"Warrior Women" makes visible the ongoing intergenerational narrative reverberations (Young, 2003; 2005) shaped through Canada's residential school era which denied the communal and cultural, economic, educational, human, familial, linguistic, and spiritual rights of Aboriginal people. Attending to these narrative reverberations foregrounded the continuing colonial barriers faced by six Aboriginal post secondary students as they composed their lives in a current era of increasing standardization in Canadian universities and schools. Yet, what also became visible were ways in which the Aboriginal teachers increasingly reclaimed or drew upon their ancestral ways of knowing and being.

This book aims to explore and make visible the intersection of subject matter knowledge and teacher knowledge in the narratives of teachers. This complicated interaction between these two bodies of knowledge is often studied and little understood. This book uses narrative to examine the complexities of teaching and learning. The authors of the chapters, as well as the editors, use innovative approaches to narrative methodology for research on teaching and teacher education in areas of education critical to teachers’ lives. Particularly through this book, they continue to advance the work of researchers to display narratives of educator lives and ways of knowing while opening the space for a community of narrative scholars.

Changes in the discipline of english language arts teacher education have produced a much more expansive understanding of literacy and of what teachers of English language arts do. This volume addresses these changes by featuring innovation—both theoretical and applied—in the field itself. Changes in the field of English language arts teacher education suggest a need to also examine how teachers approach learning to teach in a field that has so quickly evolved. This book seeks to understand how a future teaching force will approach this changing landscape and how we, as English teacher educators, might effectively prepare them to do so.