Chinese Teachers’ Professional Identity and Beliefs about the Teacher-Student Relationships in an Intercultural Context

This paper presents a qualitative study of immigrant Chinese teachers’ professional identity and beliefs about the teacher-student relationship in an intercultural context. Theoretically, this study takes its departure from a sociocultural perspective on understanding professional identity. The empirical analysis in the study drew mainly upon ethnographic interviews with a group of Chinese language teachers in Denmark concerning their life experiences, perceptions, and beliefs. The results of this study suggest that teachers’ beliefs about their roles as teachers and about student-teacher relationships are shaped by both their prior experiences and backgrounds and the current social and cultural contexts in which they are situated. Changes of context (e.g., from China to Denmark) often lead to a transformation of their professional identity and beliefs. Being a teacher in an intercultural context often exposes them to the confrontation of diverse challenges and dilemmas. On one hand, teachers in this study generally experienced a transformation from being a moral role model, subject expert, authority and parental role to being a learning facilitator and culture worker. On the other hand, they developed diverse individualized coping strategies to handle student-teacher interactions and other aspects of teachers’ professional identity.     

Building a Professional Learning Community: Teachers’ Documentation of and Reflections on Preschoolers’ Work

This study describes teachers’ experiences in a preschool professional learning community (PLC) in order to gain understanding of the role of documentation in group learning. A central underlying assumption of PLCs is that teacher learning involves talking with colleagues about teaching and grappling with the issues embodied in everyday classroom life. We utilized a qualitative case study design in order to emphasize the situated and contextual nature of teachers’ professional learning in context. Data sources included the following: observations of PLC sessions, interviews with participating teachers, and the classroom documentation teachers shared during the sessions. We found that the incorporation of documentation in the PLC made implicit assumptions about children visible in order to be scrutinized. In addition, the teachers’ reflections on the documentation highlighted conflicting notions about teaching as either technical practice or inquiry. In contrast to traditional delivery approaches to teacher learning, we argue that PLCs focused on documentation encourage teachers to problematize practice rather than simplify it. The process of reflecting on children’s work made shifts in thinking about the nature of teaching possible.     

Early-Years Teachers’ Professional Upgrading in Science: a Long-Term Programme

In this paper, we present a professional development/upgrading programme in science for early-years teachers and investigate its impact on the teachers’ competencies in relation to their knowledge and teaching of science. The basic idea of the programme was to motivate the teachers by making them members of an action research group aimed at developing and implementing curriculum activities to which they would contribute and thus meaningfully engaging them in their own learning. The programme used a ‘collaborative partnership’ model for the development of the activities. In this model, the collaborative notion is defined as an act of ‘shared creation’: partners share a goal and members bring their expertise to the partnership. Within this context, the partners were a researcher in science education with a background in physics, who also served as a facilitator, and six in-service early-years teachers with a background in early-years pedagogy and developmental sciences, who had many years of experience (classroom experts). These teachers participated in the programme as co-designers, but were involved to a significantly lesser degree than the researcher. The programme procedures comprised group work and individual teachers’ class work. Data sources included teachers’ essays, field-notes, lesson recordings and group-work records. Data were qualitatively analysed. The main results indicate improvement of teachers’ ‘transformed’ knowledge of the subject matter, development/improvement of knowledge of instructional strategies, including factors related to quality of implementation of the activities, knowledge of the pupils and improvement of the teachers’ efficacy.     

Teachers’ Goal Orientation Profiles and Participation in Professional Development Activities

Participation in professional development activities is important for teachers to continuously improve their knowledge and skills. However, teachers differ in their attitude towards learning activities. This paper examined how different goal orientation profiles are related to participation in professional development activities (acquiring information and asking feedback). To this end, we conducted latent profile analysis based on a sample of 984 teachers in vocational education. Five profiles were identified: diffuse (50.1%), moderate learning (12.3%), high avoidance (10.9%), performance oriented (15.9%) and success oriented (10.7%). Furthermore, means of acquiring information and asking feedback from teachers were compared across the profiles. Teachers with a success-oriented profile (high learning and performance approach goals) scored significantly higher while teachers with a high-avoidance profile scored significantly lower on asking for feedback and acquiring information. Exploration of background characteristics indicated that age, gender and work experience outside education were related to the goal orientation profiles. Our findings show that goal orientation profiles can be used to explain individual differences in teachers’ propensity to engage in professional development activities.     

Strangers and Professionals: Positioning Discourse in ESL Teachers’ Work

English Language Learners (ELLs) usually spend most of the school day with regular classroom teachers. The ability of English-as-a-second-language (ESL) teachers to help these students, then, depends in part on their ability to influence how the classroom teachers think of ELL students and ESL itself. One way ESL teachers do this is through “positioning discourses”—discursive practices that connect the children in certain ways to neighborhood reputations, political imagery, policy priorities, and professional responsibilities. This paper examines how ESL teachers in two contrasting school systems produce different kinds of positioning discourses in responding to different contextual constraints and pressures. Drawing on interview data, we show how teachers in an urban setting use elements of neighborhood reputation to position their students, while teachers in a more affluent suburb use discourses of expertise and professional knowledge to reshape the way ESL is understood. Our goals are to explicate how these discourses are produced and used.     

Science Teachers’ Professional Development about Science Centers

Science & Education - The purpose of this study is twofold: first, to delve into professional development (PD) of science teachers’ views about nature of science (NOS) throughout...     

Professional Communities in the Context of Teachers’ Professional lives: A Case of Mathematics Specialists

We describe an urban school initiative aimed at teachers’ professional development with the goal of increasing their mathematics content knowledge and helping them improve their practice. In the lowest performing schools, mathematics specialists were employed to teach only mathematics in upper-elementary grades (ages 9–12). One aspect of this initiative was a provision of time and space for the formation of site-based professional communities that were intended to support teachers in trying to implement changes in their practice. Teachers’ professional communities developed at some sites and not at others. In this analysis, we explore the conditions that afforded or constrained the development of teachers’ professional communities. Using two contrasting school sites as examples, we describe five aspects of the teachers’ individual and collective professional lives that influenced the emergence of teachers’ professional communities.     

Capturing and Enhancing Science Teachers’ Professional Knowledge

This paper reports research from a three-year Australian science teacher professional learning project, the Science Teaching and Learning (STaL) Project, in which groups of science teacher participants (across years K – 12) worked with academics over a one-year period as teacher researchers. Through reflecting on their experiences within the STaL Project and collecting data from their classrooms related to specific science teaching concerns, teacher participants constructed cases around particular aspects of their professional learning. The cases that these participants developed elicited rich insights into their teaching and their students’ learning of science. This paper discusses how the cases were developed by the teacher researcher participants and uses exemplars as a way of illustrating the nature of the professional knowledge developed.     

Teachers’ Continuing Professional Development and Higher Education

This paper presents and analyses data gathered from a survey of teachers in a range of secondary school English departments. It seeks to establish the ways in which teachers perceive their subject knowledge Continuing Professional Development (CPD) needs and the ways in which they would like to engage with Higher Education (HE) English as part of their CPD. It also explores teachers’ reasons for wishing to undertake such study, and the ways in which they believe such studies could contribute to their development. Finally, it goes on to consider some of the constraints on CPD and the possible implications of this for Higher Education Institutions. The interface between schools and HE has, historically, been limited. However, engagement in CPD is one of the most significant ways in which dialogue between secondary and HE teachers of English can be fruitfully established.     

Science Teachers’ Meaning-Making When Involved in a School-Based Professional Development Project

A group of teachers?? meaning-making when they are collaboratively analyzing artifacts from practice in local science classrooms in a school-based professional development (PD) project is examined through repeated interviews and represented as meaning-making maps. The interpretation of the teachers?? meaning-making includes both their reference to outcomes from the project and their expressed ideas about teaching and learning of science. All four teachers refer to experiences from experimenting in their classrooms and interpret the collected artifacts in relation to students?? learning. Furthermore, they all felt encouraged to continue collaboration around science. During the interviews, the teachers emphasize various elements apparently connected to concrete challenges they each experience in their professional work. Implications in relation to the design of PD are discussed.     

What Jim Crow’s Teachers Could Do: Educational Capital and Teachers’ Work in Under-resourced Schools

This article explains how Jim Crow’s teachers—former teachers of legally segregated schools for blacks—prepared and motivated disadvantaged students in spite of funding and resource deprivation. According to the author, black teachers fashioned situated pedagogies for the acquisition of educational capital that could be used in exchange for jobs, rights, and social power. Findings reveal three strategies of opportunity which provide some clues to how urban teachers today can educate poor children of color in under-resourced schools, such as generating materials and supplies, situating curriculum and instruction, and mobilizing human resources. The analysis draws upon 44 oral history interviews with former teachers in the coastal plains of North Carolina, as well as secondary historical sources.     

Utilizing Professional Vision in Supporting Preservice Teachers’ Learning About Contextualized Scientific Practices

Drawn from the cultural-historical theories of knowing and doing science, this article uses the concept of professional vision to explore what scientists and experienced teachers see and articulate as important aspects of climate science practices. The study takes an abductive reasoning approach to analyze scientists’ videotaped lectures to recognize what scientists pay attention to in their explanations of climate science practices. It then analyzes how ideas scientists attended align with experienced teachers’ sense-making of scientific practices to teach climate change. The findings show that experienced teachers’ and scientists’ explanations showed alignment in the focus on scientific practices, but indicated variations in the temporal and spatial reasoning of climate data. Furthermore, the interdisciplinarity of climate science was emphasized in climate scientists’ lectures, but was not apparent once scientists and teachers shared the same culture in meetings to provide feedback to preservice teachers. Given the importance of teaching through scientific practices in classrooms, this study provides suggestions to capture the epistemic diversity of scientific disciplines.     

Curriculum Discourse and Foreign Language Teachers’Professional Development

The significance and status of the teachers’professional development make the education system and the society pay more and more attentions.The article elaborates the internal contact of curriculum discourse and teachers’professional development from a few respects such as the rationality of curriculum discourse,the long-term nature of the teachers’professional development and many factors affecting the teachers’professional development.The article also analyzes the external and internal factors influencing Tibet foreign language teachers’professional development,and puts forward the corresponding countermeasures in the light of these problems.     

Associate Teachers’ Perceptions of Effective Mentorship Professional Development

Associate (mentor) teachers are essential partners in guiding teacher candidates into the profession; however, little training is offered for this critical role. This study explored, through the lens of self-determination theory, types of support and delivery most useful for successful mentorship during practicum. Online surveys and invited interviews targeted at associate teachers for one teacher preparation program (TPP) were used to gather data, with subsequent ordinal scale data display and theme derivation. Based on 281 survey respondents and 13 interviews, results highlighted specific TPP supports and the need for other partners (i.e., federations, boards) to engage more actively in supporting associate teachers.     

Perceptions About the Dominance of English as a Global Language: Impact on Foreign-Language Teachers’ Professional Identity

Using a novel theoretical framework that incorporates teacher identity, a school as community of practice, and English as a global language from a linguistic-imperialism perspective, this qualitative interview study with foreign-language teachers in Scotland, France, and Germany (N = 13) explores connections between foreign-language-learning decline and the impact of this decline on teachers’ identity across the three countries. Findings indicate similar trends across contexts in the dominance of English over other languages (and the identities of those who teach them) and support previous research on the importance of considering subject area, and its valuing by a range of stakeholders, as fundamental to teacher identity. Directions are proposed for future research and practice that emphasise taking an interdisciplinary approach to the notion of a subject area’s decline.     

Preservice and Inservice Teachers’ Challenges in the Planning of Practical Work in Physics

Practical work in school science plays many essential roles that have been discussed in the literature. However, less attention has been paid to how teachers learn the different roles of practical work and to the kind of challenges they face in their learning during laboratory courses designed for teachers. In the present study we applied the principles of grounded theory to frame a set of factors that seem to set major challenges concerning both successful work in the school physics laboratory and also in the preparation of lessons that exploit practical work. The subject groups of the study were preservice and inservice physics teachers who participated in a school laboratory course. Our results derived from a detailed analysis of tutoring discussions between the instructor and the participants in the course, which revealed that the challenges in practical or laboratory work consisted of the limitations of the laboratory facilities, an insufficient knowledge of physics, problems in understanding instructional approaches, and the general organization of practical work. Based on these findings, we present our recommendations on the preparation of preservice and inservice teachers for the more effective use of practical work in school science and in school physics.