STEM outreach activities: an approach to teachers’ professional development

Abstract

STEM outreach programmes in secondary schools are mediated by STEM teachers who are responsible for organising, implementing and evaluating the activities with a view to promoting STEM subjects. However, research investigating teachers’ STEM roles and professional development through participation in outreach activities is limited. This paper explores teachers’ views of STEM activities, how they understand their role as primary facilitators and the impact of their STEM engagement on their professional development. STEM outreach provides distinct opportunities for situated and dialogic learning. STEM teachers’ effectiveness in engaging students by demonstrating the importance and relevance of STEM subjects in the real world and engaging captivating STEM outreach partners not only supports students learning but also enhances their opportunities to develop their knowledge and skills. Semi structured interviews were conducted with eleven teachers from six different schools in the West Midlands, United Kingdom. The data reveals STEM facilitators become the ‘face’ of STEM to their pupils. The expertise, knowledge and partnerships STEM facilitators develop, broadens their capacity to deliver teaching imbued with real world applications and improve students’ understanding of the range of new and upcoming careers available. Most importantly, participating in STEM outreach activities help teachers maintain and reinforce their own sense of identity as STEM professionals. Outreach activities provide opportunities for teachers to interact with leading scientists and obtain exposure to cutting-edge research.     

Enhancing teachers’ counselling skills: student teachers’ views on a teachers’ education programme

The purpose of this small‐scale study is to investigate the outcomes of a brief teacher education programme by exploring student teachers’ views. The teacher education programme aimed to provide teachers with the opportunity to develop qualities and skills that facilitate communication and to enhance teachers’ competence to apply social and emotional (SEL) programmes’ intervention activities in the classroom. According to student teachers’ estimations, the teacher education programme provided them with new knowledge and experiences in communication and counselling, which they felt they could use in teaching practice. Besides, teachers reported that the programme enabled them to develop their self‐awareness and to adopt a non‐directive attitude during the implementation of SEL programme’s activities.     

The teachers’ registration movement

Abstract

This article explores the political background to the 1902 Education Act, and argues that Balfour's commitment to the measure was founded more an political expediency than a desire to initiate major educational reform. It concludes that Balfour's interest in education was, at best, lukewarm, at worst, apathetic.     

Exploring teachers’ inquiry-based attitude

Having a well-founded insight into the characteristics of teachers inquiry-based attitude (IA) supports operationalising IA as a learning goal in teacher education (TE). The aim of this study is to refine the notion of IA from an ill-defined global concept into something with reliable and valid characteristics. To do so, data were gathered on three different occasions amongst three different cohorts of teachers who participated in a master's programme at a Dutch university for applied sciences. This process of exploration and reconceptualisation was performed in collaboration with teacher educators. The results indicate that, statistically, IA has an internal reflective dimension and an external knowledge-sourcing dimension. Both dimensions can also statistically be differentiated from the personality traits openness to ideas, openness to change and epistemic curiosity. The implications of these findings for TE, plus recommendations for future research, are addressed.     

Student teachers’ and in-service teachers’ peer learning: a realist synthesis

The aim of this review in the form of a realist synthesis is to understand what makes peer (student) teacher learning activities effective. Three types of peer learning were explored: collaborative, coaching, and assessment activities. Hypotheses were developed and tested against a set of 63 studies. These hypotheses indicated what mechanisms (i.e., characteristics of the activities) would influence the effectiveness of the activities and which contexts (i.e., factors) influenced this process. Findings showed that activities wherein participants gain subject matter and pedagogical content knowledge and apply this into practice made such learning effective. Peer learning is also reinforced by facilitators, reflection, and feedback, and influenced by personal and interpersonal factors. The main contribution of this realist synthesis is the practical implications for developers of peer learning activities, for school leaders and teacher educators, and for (student) teachers.     

Consistency in teachers’ judgments

Professional teachers at first stage of secondary school were asked to assess the relative weights of five dimensions that in Italy must be considered when the final grades of students are decided. The teachers were also asked to give an overall evaluation of two samples of typical (i.e., students who record similar performances on all the dimensions) vs. atypical students (i.e., students who exhibit poor performance on at least one dimension and good or excellent performances on the others). The results show that the teachers shared a weighting scheme for assessment of the importance of the five dimensions. However, their overall evaluations were consistent with this weighting scheme only with reference to typical students. When the teachers evaluated atypical students, their judgements were highly inconsistent. The paper briefly discusses the implications of these findings.     

Measuring STEM students’ mathematical identities

Studies on identity in general and mathematical identity in particular have gained much interest over the last decades. However, although measurements have been proven to be potent tools in many scientific fields, a lack of consensus on ontological, epistemological, and methodological issues has complicated measurements of mathematical identities. Specifically, most studies conceptualise mathematical identity as something multidimensional and situated, which obviously complicates measurement, since these aspects violate basic requirements of measurement. However, most concepts that are measured in scientific work are both multidimensional and situated, even in physics. In effect, these concepts are being conceptualised as sufficiently uni-dimensional and invariant for measures to be meaningful. We assert that if the same judgements were to be made regarding mathematical identity, that is, whether identity can be measured with one instrument alone, whether one needs multiple instruments, or whether measurement is meaningless, it would be necessary to know how much of the multidimensionality can be captured by one measure and how situated mathematical identity is. Accordingly, this paper proposes a theoretical perspective on mathematical identity that is consistent with basic requirements of measurement. Moreover, characteristics of students’ mathematical identities are presented and the problem of “situatedness” is discussed.     

Exploring the characteristics of ‘teachers for excellence’: teachers’ own perceptions

This article is concerned first with identifying teacher characteristics connected with excellence. It then analyses the results of a survey conducted among primary school teachers in one local authority area in Scotland. Teachers responded to a questionnaire which asked them to rate in importance 44 characteristics of excellence. The findings suggest that teachers have a clear view of excellence. They consistently described excellence in terms of personal qualities and interpersonal skills. Teachers gave high ratings to qualities which demonstrated their expectations of positive classroom ethos and positive relationships with students. Practitioners consistently rated characteristics related to classroom ‘relationships in action’ as essential characteristics for excellent teachers. These findings suggest a new emphasis on interpersonal skills in continuing professional development for teachers who are increasingly expected to develop students’ dispositions relating to openness to new thinking; self‐respect and a commitment to responsible participation in social, cultural, economic and political life.     

Under-threes’ mathematical learning – teachers’ perspectives

This project highlights preschool teachers’ views of toddlers’ learning in mathematics. The Swedish national curriculum covers even the youngest children who are 1–3?years old. Interesting questions are thus: what should mathematics be for this age group and how should preschool teachers work with maths to achieve the curriculum objectives? Data were collected through interviews with six preschool teachers working in four different preschools. The data show that the teachers emphasize the body as very important for the learning process, which means that for these children, it is not a matter of simply talking about mathematical concepts, but experiencing them bodily. The teachers also report that they now pay more attention than previously to what material the children use and how they interact with it. They are more aware of how they organize and offer the various materials in the preschool and how this influences the way children use them and, consequently, their learning processes.     

Validity in teachers’ summative assessments

This paper describes some of the findings of a project which set out to explore and develop teachers’ understanding and practices in their summative assessments. The focus was on those summative assessments that are used on a regular basis within schools for guiding the progress of pupils and for internal accountability. The project combined both intervention and research elements. The intervention aimed both to explore how teachers might improve those practices in the light of their re‐examination of their validity, and to engage them in moderation exercises within and between schools to audit examples of students’ work and to discuss their appraisals of these examples. This paper reports findings, arising from this work, of the research that aimed to study how teachers understand validity, and how they formulate their classroom assessment practices in the light of that understanding. The paper also considers how that understanding might be challenged and developed. It was found that teachers’ attention to validity issues had been undermined by the external test regimes, but that teachers could re‐address these issues by reflection on their values and by engagement in a shared development of portfolio assessments.     

Modeling teachers’ reactions to unexpectedness

BackgroundEven experienced teachers make inconsistent classroom decisions in unexpected situations. From the cognitive load theory perspective, the effective handling of the novel, unexpected events by teachers depends on the cognitive load of the task, the teaching context in which the unexpectedness appears, and the available cognitive capacity.AimsTeachers’ reactions to unexpected mathematical events, in particular the unexpectedness of the arithmetic calculation, was modeled, investigated experimentally, and explained within the theoretical framework of cognitive load theory.Sample64 mathematics teacher trainees took part in the experiment.MethodsIn a dual-task arrangement, participants verified alternative answers to simple mathematical questions while memorizing task-irrelevant information. The answers represented low (schematic good responses), and high (unexpected good responses) processing load conditions, and control condition (incorrect responses). The memory load was low or high representing levels of extraneous load. The participants’ cognitive capacity was estimated by a complex working memory span task.ResultsThe verification of unexpected but correct answers was slow and more error-prone as compared with the processing speed and accuracy of schematic answers, presumably due to elevated processing (intrinsic) load. The increase in memory load resulted in slower and more inaccurate verifications. However, working memory capacity was found to mediate the extraneous load effect.ConclusionsThe results stress the importance of well-organized schemas for effective reactions to unexpected classroom events. Furthermore, it highlights the importance of accurately understanding and being aware of the impact of cognitive load on teachers to improve teaching practice.     

Investigating teachers’ images of mathematics

Research suggests that understanding new images of mathematics is very challenging and can contribute to teacher resistance. An explicit exploration of personal views of mathematics may be necessary for pedagogical change. One possible way for exploring these images is through mathematical metaphors. As metaphors focus on similarities, they can be used to express already-held perceptions about the nature of mathematics. In addition to providing a way of talking about current views of mathematics, the analogous dimensions of metaphors can prompt new ways of thinking about these images. In this article, I consider the use of metaphors as a strategy for explicating elementary teachers’ views of mathematics. I claim that the investigation of metaphors of mathematics helped create a shared communicative space and enhanced the quality of the discussion with the teachers. In particular, our exploration of the metaphor mathematics is a language encouraged a consideration of the humanistic dimensions of mathematics and contributed to a varied re-imaging of mathematics.     

Trainee teachers’ experience of reflection

This article reports an investigation of trainee teachers’ experience of reflection whilst undertaking a teaching qualification for the post-compulsory sector. The study used a sequential, mixed-methods design, employing a structured questionnaire and a semi-structured interview; 127 individuals completed the questionnaire about their experience of reflection and keeping a reflective journal. The questionnaire responses were used to select a sample of 15 individuals for interview. The findings indicate that, whilst the majority value reflection and believe keeping a journal is useful, finding time to reflect can be problematic. Two potential areas of difficulty are identified, namely, individual preferences for engagement with reflection and the use of reflective journals. Where course requirements are at variance with an individual’s preferred approach, difficulties with reflection may be experienced. Therefore this article recommends that course requirements need to allow flexibility to enable individuals to try different techniques and adopt whichever they are most comfortable with.     

Mathematics teachers’ representations of authority

Issues of authority abound in education and schooling but have not been interrogated sufficiently. We describe a tool that we have developed to initiate dialogue with teachers about authority in their classrooms—using a diagram to represent authority in their classrooms. Our analysis of the diagrams mathematics teachers created and discussed in our work with them illustrates the importance of understanding teachers’ perspectives about authority. To understand better how mathematics teachers think about the authority in their classrooms, we investigated what sources of authority they represented in their diagrams, and how the teachers related these sources to each other. The diversity in the teachers’ representations exceeded our anticipations, indicating that research on authority in classrooms has merely scratched the surface of understanding the ways mathematics teachers think about authority in their classrooms.     

Video narratives to assess student teachers’ competence as new teachers

In teacher education programmes, written portfolios or text-based self-evaluations are generally used to document the development of student teachers’ competence. However, such approaches do no justice to the complex nature of teaching as they tend to lead to evidence in which teacher competencies are disconnected and removed from the actual teaching practice. In one postgraduate teacher education programme, video narratives were evaluated as a valid way to assess student teachers’ teaching competencies, promoting connections amongst different competencies, situating these in practice and showing their development over time. Data were gathered from self-reports of both teacher educators and student teachers as well as student teachers’ completed video narratives. Most student teachers succeeded in meeting the set criteria for the video narrative assignment with connected video clips and text frames. However, student teachers also came up with only a few video episodes and loosely connected clips, reflections and other sources. Although most of the students during the programme did explicitly reflect upon their personal development towards becoming a teacher, almost none of them explicitly connected these ideas to their long-term development. We conclude that video narratives show potential to be used as a valid assessment of student teachers’ teaching competence. Yet, structured guidance as well as ill-structured assignments are needed in framing assessment of student teachers in teacher preparation: the former to clarify the aims, format and criteria and the latter to enable student teachers to reflect on their teaching in a personally, meaningful way.     

Pre-service teachers’ future-oriented mathematical identity work

Research on identity has been a growing domain in the contexts of teacher education and mathematics education; however, identity work has been explored to a much lesser extent, with a future orientation overlooked. In addition, earlier studies have not provided sufficient knowledge on how different elementary teacher education programs might facilitate pre-service teachers’ identity work. In this study, we compare future-oriented mathematical identity work through a narrative framework considering six pre-service teachers undergoing two different teacher education programs. All pre-service teachers reported having had negative experiences with mathematics during their school years. Based on the results we conclude that despite the striking similarities in pre-service teachers’ mathematical backgrounds, the ways in which these cases are conducting their identity work differ substantially. It seems that the main reasons for these differences are different emphases and pedagogical practices in mathematics education courses. Additionally, we further elaborate on our earlier conceptualisation of identity work.