Teachers as Designers of Learning Environments

Abstract

This study examined how six Singapore teachers approached the design and implementation of a unit of work (topic) to demonstrate exemplary classroom practices that engage learners and use ICT in knowledge-generative rather than presentational activities. After a reflection and feedback session on the first lesson observation involving the researcher and the teacher, the teacher redesigned the lesson to enhance ICT use and involve students more actively in their learning. Our study revealed that there is a difference between students' physical engagement and cognitive engagement in a task and that the teacher, as a designer of the learning environment, needs to make explicit the cognitive processes involved in using the tool to ensure students' effective use of ICT. The teachers' understanding of what constitutes effective learning and their roles in students' learning determine how they design the learning environment. In essence, it is the teacher's skill in managing the “tripartite” partnership of IT tool, learning task, and teacher support that brings about higher levels of student engagement.     

Instructional Climate in Dutch Secondary Education

Research, aimed at constructing an instrument for measuring instructional climate, was conducted in 121 Dutch schools for senior general secondary education. The instrument comprised scales for students, teachers, heads of department and principals. All scales proved to be sufficiently reliable and valid. The results show that the following variables are significantly related to students' results in mathematics: students' enjoyment of mathematics; students' attitude towards high grades; students' enjoyment of learning; appreciation of how teachers prepare students for tests; students' appreciation of the teacher as a person; students' appreciation of teaching abilities; an orderly instructional climate in the classroom; frequent monitoring of student results; emphasizing achievement by teachers; and the principals' emphasis on a task oriented climate.     

Instructional practices in secondary science: How teachers achieve local and standards-based success

This article reports on analyses of the instructional practices of six middle- and high-school science teachers in the United States who participated in a research-practice partnership that aims to support reform science education goals at scale. All six teachers were well qualified, experienced, and locally successful—respected by students, parents, colleagues, and administrators—but they differed in their success in supporting students' three-dimensional learning. Our goal is to understand how the teachers' instructional practices contributed to their similarities in achieving local success and to differences in enabling students' learning, and to consider the implications of these findings for research-practice partnerships. Data sources included classroom videos supplemented by interviews with teachers and focus students and examples of student work. We also compared students' learning gains by teacher using pre–post assessments that elicited three-dimensional performances. Analyses of classroom videos showed how all six teachers achieved local success—they led effectively managed classrooms, covered the curriculum by teaching almost all unit activities, and assessed students' work in fair and efficient ways. There were important differences, however, in how teachers engaged students in science practices. Teachers in classrooms where students achieved lower learning gains followed a pattern of practice we describe as activity-based teaching, in which students completed investigations and hands-on activities with few opportunities for sensemaking discussions or three-dimensional science performances. Teachers whose students achieved higher learning gains combined the social stability characteristic of local classroom success with more demanding instructional practices associated with scientific sensemaking and cognitive apprenticeship. We conclude with a discussion of implications for research-practice partnerships, highlighting how partnerships need to support all teachers in achieving both local and standards-based success.     

Exploring science teaching in interaction at the instructional core

Recent instructional reforms in science education aim to change the way students engage in learning in the discipline, as they describe that students are to engage with disciplinary core ideas, crosscutting concepts, and the practices of science to make sense of phenomena (NRC, 2012). For such sensemaking to become a reality, there is a need to understand the ways in which students' thinking can be maintained throughout the trajectory of science lessons. Past research in this area tends to foreground either the curriculum or teachers' practices. We propose a more comprehensive view of science instruction, one that requires attention to teachers' practice, the instructional task, and students' engagement. In this study, by examining the implementation of the same lesson across three different classrooms, our analysis of classroom videos and artifacts of students' work revealed how the interaction of teachers' practices, students' intellectual engagement, and a cognitively demanding task together support rigorous instruction. Our analyses shed light on their interaction that shapes opportunities for students' thinking and sensemaking throughout the trajectory of a science lesson. The findings provide implications for ways to promote rigorous opportunities for students' learning in science classrooms.     

Impact of Expert Teaching Quality on Novice Academic Performance in the Jigsaw Cooperative Learning Method

We assessed the impact of expert students' instructional quality on the academic performance of novice students in 12th-grade physics classes organized in an expert model of cooperative learning (‘jigsaw classroom’). The instructional quality of 129 expert students was measured by a newly developed rating system. As expected, when aggregating across all four subtopics taught, regression analysis revealed that academic performance of novice students increases with the quality of expert students' instruction. The difficulty of subtopics, however, moderates this effect: higher instructional quality of more difficult subtopics did not lead to better academic performance of novice students. We interpret this finding in the light of Cognitive Load Theory. Demanding tasks cause high intrinsic cognitive load and hindered the novice students' learning.     

Taking Up Opportunities to Learn: Constructing Dispositions in Mathematics Classrooms

This article presents an analysis of how students' dispositions toward learning shift and change over time through their engagement with particular classroom practices and identifies classroom practices that support the development of more productive dispositions. An analysis of 4 purposefully selected students from 2 different classrooms reveals that membership in a classroom activity system does not determine one's emergent disposition toward learning. However, it is likely that similar types of dispositions might emerge within a single classroom activity system. The analysis further seeks to understand the mechanisms that underlie the ways in which dispositions are enacted in moments of interaction, and how aspects of classroom practice impact this enactment. The findings support the argument that social, affective, and motivational factors are not simply influences on learning but are, instead, central to and inseparable from the learning process.     

The defining features of teacher talk within autonomy-supportive classroom management

Classroom management practices were studied in middle school classrooms with positive interpersonal classroom climates, high levels of student engagement, and high levels of autonomy support. Students' motivational responses to autonomy-supportive instructional interactions were explored to understand variability within classroom management practices identified and described in this study as providing autonomy support. Our findings suggest proactive classroom management is enacted through instructional interactions wherein teachers scaffold students' autonomous self-regulatory capacities that sustain student engagement in classroom activities by supporting students' strategy use, transferring responsibility to students, encouraging students' to structure physical and social contexts to support learning, and promoting prosocial behavior.     

A Method for Measuring Retention in Reading

ABSTRACT

The authors used self-regulated learning (SRL) as a lens for examining teachers' conceptions of assessment and their classroom assessment practices. Fifteen upper-elementary and middle school teachers participated in semistructured interviews designed to uncover their beliefs about the forms and functions of classroom assessment. Observational data were collected in the teachers' classrooms. The findings show that while teachers have complex understandings of classroom assessment, their assessment environments are not optimal for supporting students' development of SRL habits. Teachers tend to see themselves as the initiators and controllers of assessment opportunities, prioritize attainment of content information, and value written assessment products over practices that generate intangible data. The authors describe these trends as consequences of the competing audiences teachers have to satisfy with their assessment practices.     

‘Shoot for the moon!’ Students' identities as writers in the context of the classroom

A study of students' identities as writers was carried out in the classroom of a New Zealand primary teacher who had been formally identified by a national body of teachers as having excellent practice in supporting literacy acquisition. The researchers, Professor Janice Wearmouth, from the University of Bedfordshire, Mere Berryman, from the University of Waikato, New Zealand, and Lisa Whittle, from the Department of Conservation, Wellington, New Zealand, aimed to compare high and low literacy achievers' identities as writers within the context of this teacher's pedagogy and the learning environment of her classroom. The researchers concluded that all students, both high and low achievers, were developing very positive writing identities in a context where the teacher's method of supporting her students' writing was very well planned through a process‐writing approach. This teacher had a very high degree of subject and pedagogical content knowledge and an acute awareness of her students' literacy learning needs. Her approach had an immediacy of responsiveness in relation to every student's learning and, above all, had recognition of the overwhelming importance of positive relationships in the classroom, teacher to student and peer to peer.     

Cogenerated understandings of mindfulness-based breathing in elementary mathematics classrooms

Bringing an awareness of emotions to the fore through mindfulness-based breathing and providing a space to discuss them is a way of promoting teacher and student agency in collectively developing structures specific to their learning environment. The authors explore students', teachers', and researchers' collective sensemaking through cogenerative dialoguing (cogen) about a mindfulness-based breathing practice at the start of mathematics lessons in an elementary classroom. They found that the power of cogen as hybridized space enabled the generation of collective understanding and the potential for all cogen participants to become engaged in an authentic and transformative way in discussing classroom life. The authors argue that the mindfulness-based breathing practice itself acted as a heuristic for thinking about learning environments and, during the reflexive process of thinking about the breathing practice, new forms of classroom culture unfolded both expanding classroom structures and the practice itself, and laying bare otherwise taken-for-granted practices.     

DSLM Instructional Approach to Conceptual Change Involving Thermal Expansion

This article examines the process of students' conceptual change involving thermal expansion as a result of employing the Dual Situated Learning Model (DSLM) (She, 2001, 2002) as a classroom instructional approach. The dual situated learning events of this model are designed according to the students' ontological viewpoint of the science concepts as well as the nature of these concepts. Moreover, these events serve two functions in creating dissonance with the pre-existing knowledge and providing new schema for constructing a more scientific view of the concept. DSLM has been shown to promote students' conceptual change using one-to-one instructional procedure (She, 2002). This study further demonstrates that DSLM holds great potential to facilitate the conceptual change process involving thermal expansion through classroom instruction, even the difficult concept or higher hierarchical level one.     

Using Activity Theory to Examine How Teachers' Lesson Plans Meet Students' Learning Needs

How is lesson planning useful? This research study used Cultural Historical Activity Theory and intersubjectivity to answer this questions. This research explored to what extent teacher candidates' lesson plans (i.e., alignment among objectives, assessment, and instruction), and analyses of assessment data mediate their thinking about students' learning needs. Four to five daily lesson plans with corresponding videos and commentaries from 10 elementary school (K–6) teacher candidates were used in this study. Qualitative analyses revealed that teacher candidates seldom considered their students' learning needs and seldom anticipated how instructional activities facilitated students' thinking. One teacher candidate, however, used assessment data to consider students' learning needs and to plan future lessons to meet students' learning needs. The implication of research findings suggest that teacher education programs must improve in developing teacher candidates' skills of aligning lesson plan features and using assessment data as tools to mediate their thinking about students' learning needs.     

Improvement in Student Performance and Perceptions through a Flipped Anatomy Classroom: Shifting from Passive Traditional to Active Blended Learning

One of the major challenges facing anatomy educators is delivering the anatomy materials in fewer hours with a reduction of anatomy courses in the integrated curricula. The flipped classroom modality may be an innovative solution. However, its effectiveness remains under debate due to a lack of outcome-based research and the mixed results of students' performance. The present study aimed to determine the outcome of the flipped classroom based upon the level of student cognition. The study investigated performance on 17 multiple-choice anatomy questions as a part of the final examination of the musculoskeletal system module. The results were compared between the first-year female students of Qassim Medical College, specifically the flipped classroom group (46 students) of the academic year (2018–2019) and the traditional group (49 students) of the academic year (2017–2018). The mean differences in the students' grades on the anatomy questions at the level of knowledge, application, and analysis using Cohen's d test were 0.43, 1.41, and 1.01, respectively. These results suggest the positive impact of flipping the students' classrooms on improving their levels of thinking according to Bloom's taxonomy. Perception surveys also revealed students' enthusiasm for the pre-class activities, leading to a better performance in the class with more engagement with their peers and teachers. The present study suggested that the flipped classroom modality can be performed to compensate for the reduction of anatomy educational hours. However, further studies are recommended to investigate the best practices of the flipped classroom that fit with the students' needs and workloads.     

Explaining Variation in How Classroom Communities Adapt the Practice of Scientific Argumentation

Research and practice has placed an increasing emphasis on aligning classroom practices with scientific practices such as scientific argumentation. In this paper, I explore 1 challenge associated with this goal by examining how existing classroom practices influence students' engagement in the practice of scientific argumentation. To do so, I present discourse data from 2 middle school classes engaged in argumentation activities. For each class, I compare existing classroom practices to a discussion designed to facilitate argumentation. My analysis reveals that the existing classroom practices influenced the way in which students responded to the disparate ideas being discussed and that the immediate learning environment influenced the frequency with which students justified their ideas and directly responded to one another. This study suggests that the goal structures that aligned with the existing classroom practices carried over to students' argumentative interactions, influencing how they responded to the disparate ideas. However, the immediate learning environment—including activity structure, software tools, and teaching strategies—seemed to foster student-to-student interactions and justification of ideas.     

Moving across physical and online spaces: a case study in a blended primary classroom

With the introduction of digital tools and online connectivity in primary schools, the shape of teaching and learning is shifting beyond the physical classroom. Drawing on the architecture of productive learning networks framework, we examine the affordances and limitations of an upper primary learning network and focus on how the digital and physical elements involved in set design shape teachers' pedagogical approaches and students' learning processes. The findings suggest that blended spaces support teachers' distributed orchestration of classroom activities across tools and resources while also leveraging students' engagement in reciprocal teaching and collaborative learning.     

A Case Study of Systemic Aspects of Assessment Technologies

Current designs and classroom uses of assessment technology do not adequately reflect or support human practices that produce meaningful information about student learning. We base this argument on findings from a study of the diverse practices making up an assessment system in a fifth-grade mathematics classroom where students have extensive access to personal computing. Videotaped records of classroom activities, reflecting both teachers' and students' perspectives on the classroom, are analyzed with teachers to develop a grounded theoretical framework for describing assessment practices. We present the framework, use it to compare different examples of assessment activities, and propose new criteria for designing systemically valid assessments as kinds of technology that support and extend existing classroom practices.     

Students’ emotions of enjoyment and boredom and their use of cognitive learning strategies – How do they affect one another?

To better understand the relationship between enjoyment and boredom and students' use of cognitive learning strategies, we analyzed both directions of effects between these constructs as described in the control-value theory of achievement emotions (Pekrun, 2006; 2018). Our study used a sequential design in which students' (N = 338 4th grade students) effective use of cognitive learning strategies was measured in real learning situations, allowing insights into the temporal order of effects and discrimination between intra- and interindividual effects (N = 8020 assessments within students). An increased intraindividual level of enjoyment positively predicted subsequent effective use of learning strategies, whereas effective use of learning strategies did not predict students’ subsequent enjoyment on the intraindividual level. Interindividual differences in enjoyment and effective use of cognitive learning strategies were unrelated, whereas negative relations were found for boredom and effective strategy use. On the intraindividual level, boredom and effective strategy use were unrelated.     

Exploring ideological becoming in professional development for teachers of multilingual learners: Perspectives on translanguaging in the classroom

This paper explores teachers' perspectives on the pedagogical resource of using students' first languages in the classroom. The authors implemented this action research case study within the context of a larger 15-week online, asynchronous, professional development course, where K-12 in-service public school teacher-participants were introduced to translanguaging and engaged in study and reflection on current practices and the benefits of including students' first languages in learning. This paper reports on the responses of seven representative teacher-participants from Hawai'i, USA, on their learning, with findings showing varied acceptance and resistance to encouraging and supporting their students' first language in the classroom.     

Toward an Understanding of Authentic Learning: Student Perceptions of an Authentic Classroom

Advocates of educational reform often describe classroom instruction as inauthentic. That is, most classroom learning activities are structured around artificial contexts for learning, and students only engage in tasks and remember information at superficial levels. Some teachers are attempting to break traditional classroom practices by creating authentic contexts for learning. To date, most of the research on authentic classrooms has described the processes teachers have used to develop the classroom environment (learning activities, resources, etc.); however, few have examined authentic classrooms from the students' perspective: “What do students think about authentic classrooms?” The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine a unique learning environment at a large, Midwest high school to understand how students perceived that environment. Most of the students reported a positive experience and described the classroom as fun and exciting with real-world relevance. However, there were several students who did not share these views, and many students were not successful.