The psychological environment and teachers’ collective-efficacy beliefs

The psychological environment of schools is a powerful determinant of staff well-being and educational outcomes for children. The work reported here explored teachers’ Collective-Efficacy (CE) and well-being. Staff in a sample of schools completed a survey of their CE. A sub-sample of teachers was interviewed to elicit views about the relationship between CE and leadership practices. Overall staff CE was correlated with key indicators of pupils’ attainments. Four themes in the interviews indicated attributions for staff well-being and motivation: Communication, Learning, Supporting Roles, and Stress Management. Enhancing CE is critical for staff well-being. At a time when staff recruitment, retention and well-being may be jeopardised, the findings here indicate the critical importance of professional relationships for the ethos and effectiveness of schools.     

The development of student teachers’ professional identity

This study focuses on student teachers’ perceptions of their professional identity. The respondents are students enrolled in a three‐year course in secondary education teaching at bachelor level. Questionnaires were filled out by first‐year, second‐year and third‐year students from two colleges. The questionnaire included four scales: commitment to teaching, professional orientation, task orientation and self‐efficacy. In the first five months of the first‐year course, a shift in students’ task orientation was observed: students developed a more pupil‐centred view on teaching. Practical experience with classroom teaching again caused a shift: students focused less on the subject matter, on maintaining order in the classroom, on the long‐term educational qualification targets and self‐efficacy decreased. Students with work placement experience developed a more ‘realistic’ view of learning and teaching compared to students without this experience. A final important difference in professional identity is based on students’ gender: while male students tend to attach more importance to discipline in the classroom, their female counterparts focus more on student involvement.     

The influence of contrast effects upon teachers’ marks

A marking exercise is described in which 336 teachers evaluated three samples of written work, which differed in quality and authorship. The sequence of the work samples was rotated such that each piece of work was seen and marked in each of the three possible positions. This allowed comparisons to be made between the marks awarded to work of varying standards when it preceded or followed other work of contrasting quality. There was a tendency for the good piece of work to be assessed more favourably when it followed work of a lower standard than when it preceded such work. Conversely, the poor quality work was assessed more harshly when it followed, rather than preceded, work of contrasting quality. Furthermore, two samples of work preceding work of a contrasting quality produced greater biasing effects than a single sample.     

The structure of prospective kindergarten teachers’ proportional reasoning

Lamon (Teaching fractions and ratios for understanding. Essential content knowledge and instructional strategies for teachers, 2nd edn. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, 2005) claimed that the development of proportional reasoning relies on various kinds of understanding and thinking processes. The critical components suggested were individuals’ understanding of the rational number subconstructs, unitizing, quantities and covariance, relative thinking, measurement and “reasoning up and down”. In this study, we empirically tested a theoretical model based on the one suggested by Lamon (Teaching fractions and ratios for understanding. Essential content knowledge and instructional strategies for teachers, 2nd edn. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, 2005), as well as an extended model which included an additional component of solving missing value proportional problems. Data were collected from 238 prospective kindergarten teachers. To a great extent, the data provided support for the extended model. These findings allow us to make some first speculations regarding the knowledge that prospective kindergarten teachers possess in regard to proportional reasoning and the types of processes that might be emphasized during their education.     

The circulation of expertise in teachers’ professional communities

This study qualitatively explores expertise as a critical resource on which quality teaching depends. The study sample is comprised of six South African schools from the poorest poverty quintiles achieving relatively higher and lower academic outcomes. From interview data gathered over three years with teachers and other school staff, findings reveal significant differences between schools in the kinds of expertise that circulate in teacher communities. Remediation strategies that support student learning at specific levels of complexity stand out as a significant form of expertise. In schools performing above demographic expectations, teachers have more opportunities to access knowledge as an instructional resource, enabled by the recognition of differences in expertise. The study offers insight into what kinds of pedagogic strategies might disrupt educational inequalities and support the quality of teaching and learning within a system of scarce resources.     

The palimpsest layers of pre-service teachers’ literacy autobiographies

In this article, we examine three literacy autobiographies written by pre-service teachers. Narratives are seen as not just stories relating a set of facts, but rather a means by which individuals interpret their experience. Literacy autobiographies are a reflective and interpretive account of one’s development as a literate being. Using the tools of narrative analysis, we (a) examine these stories to understand the processes of literacy development through the experiences of learners’ storied lives; (b) seek to understand the impact that teachers’ literacy journeys have on their view of literacy and literacy education; and (c) explore what these literacy autobiographies reveal about the contributions of teacher reflection to pre-service teacher education. Our analysis points to the importance of personal relationships in the development of literacy, providing the context within which literacy practices give meaning to the literacy events active in the narrators’ lives. We also note a persistent view of traditional forms of literacy in contrast to pre-service teachers’ involvement in multiliteracies, and argue that this gap needs to be addressed in order to prepare teachers for the twenty-first century classroom. We also consider how reflection can be a more intentional aspect of pre-service teacher education to enhance pedagogy and learning.     

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 impact of peer collaboration on teachers’ practical knowledge

Due to changes in Dutch mathematics education, teachers are expected to use new teaching methods such as enquiry-based teaching. In this study, we investigate how teachers design, implement and evaluate new methods for statistics teaching for 7^th-graders during a professional development trajectory based on peer collaboration. We monitored teachers’ development in a network of four mathematics teachers from the same school. By using a mixed-methods approach in which we combined data from interviews, concept maps and classroom observations, we describe changes in teachers’ practical knowledge. We found how the nature of these changes highly depends on teachers’ personal concerns that emerge during the trajectory. Some teachers considered their concerns as challenges stimulating their learning, while other teachers experienced their concerns as a reason to fall back to previous teaching methods. Based on our results, we give some recommendations for organising teacher networks.     

The role of emotions in student teachers’ professional identity

This paper presents findings of a qualitative interview study of the role of emotions in the professional identity of student teachers. Strong positive and negative emotions (mostly related to pupils and supervisors) were expressed about personal teaching experiences. The results confirm that emotions play an important role in social learning and, therefore, influence the development of professional identity. The two most important findings were that negative emotions exercised the strongest influence and that supervisors neglected the role of positive emotions as a support for learning. The study supports the concept that it is important for teacher educators to help student teachers understand their emotional experiences (focusing foremost on positive factors in their experience) and to develop the ability to express their own emotions in addition to understanding the emotions of others.     

The impact of educational development workshops on teachers’ practice

Abstract

Workshops are common practice as a staff and educational development tool in higher education around the world, yet while it is common to seek participants’ immediate reactions there been little attempt made to measure their impact. This paper reviews the available literature on the effectiveness of workshops and reports the findings of a study in to the effectiveness of 33 workshops delivered by the Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development over a four month period. The study used questionnaires at the end of the workshops and four months later, and these were followed up by telephone interviews with a sample of participants. The study demonstrates that workshops can lead to changes in practice, and that these changes are themselves deemed to be successful by those involved. In addition, where at the end of a workshop participants report that they are likely to make changes this can be used as a reasonably accurate predictor of subsequent change. The features of workshops identified in end‐of‐workshop questionnaires which are linked with likelihood of subsequent change are also reported.     

The Australian teachers’ federation (1921–1991)

In the context of international consensus that the knowledge economy requires more highly educated people, the Australian federal, state and territory governments agreed on a set of policies and targets for lifting the minimum level of educational attainment of young people, which are analysed in Part 1 of this paper. This Compact with young Australians will have the most impact on the quarter of young people who in the past would have left school early. The second part of the paper explores the transition experiences of early leavers who move on to a ‘second chance’ school. Based on their experiences, the paper concludes that to genuinely enable more young people to complete senior secondary education requires recognition of a broad range of benefits, rather than focusing mainly on economic outcomes, and support for re-entry through second chance education rather than coercing young people to remain in mainstream schooling.     

The impact of collaboration on teachers’ individual data use

Research considers collaboration to be a significant factor in terms of how teachers use data to improve their practice. Nevertheless, the effects of teacher collaboration with regard to teachers’ individual data use has remained largely underexplored. Moreover, little attention has been paid to the interplay between collaboration and the personal factors that influence teachers’ data use. This paper addresses this research gap by defining factors that affect collaboration, and by investigating the impact of collaboration on teachers’ individual data use. The resulting research questions were answered by drawing on questionnaire data from 1,472 primary and secondary school teachers in Flanders. The findings indicate that collaboration is the main explanatory factor for teachers’ individual data use compared to teachers’ self-efficacy and attitude. Therefore, this study demonstrates the value of collaboration for future research and for creating a supportive environment for teachers’ individual data use.     

The social functions of teachers’ beliefs in an online class

This study presents an investigation of teachers’ beliefs about working with English learners, as constructed in online class discussions. Using conversation and discourse analysis from a discursive psychology (DP) perspective, analysis focuses on the discursive production of beliefs and the social actions achieved by this production in interaction. By orienting to teachers’ beliefs as interactionally emergent phenomena, findings highlight the ways that teachers account for their belief claims and the ways that teachers’ statements of belief work to perform certain social functions within the forum itself, including affiliation and disagreement. Implications for teacher education and for the potential of DP to contribute to research on teachers’ beliefs are discussed.     

The Change Room promotes teachers’ agency to change their practice

It is generally agreed that it is difficult for schools to bring about lasting changes in classroom practice. This paper gives an account of an action research group of 21 practitioners in an upper secondary school in Iceland, where a new model, the Change Room, was introduced to enhance changes in classroom practice. The aim was to increase students’ sense of responsibility for their studies. The Change Room connected the Change Laboratory, one of the methods of developmental work research established by Engeström and action research as elaborated by McNiff. In the Change Room the activity theory provided the teachers with a conceptual framework and tools to analyse what changes were needed and wanted in classroom practice and action research provided an approach to guide them when carrying out and evaluating these changes. Change Room meeting records were used for reflection, which revealed that the main tensions teachers experienced in classroom practice was firstly between didactic and dialogic teaching methods, secondly between the demand to cover the syllabus and a sense of urgency for deep learning and thirdly between active and passive students as learners. In order to resolve these tensions teachers tried out new methods to attempt to change their practice in the direction of more active student learning and more listening to students’ voices. The Change Room offers a promising direction to increase teachers’ agency to change their practice and sustain that change. As such, it speaks to international concerns about effective school reform.     

Classroom teachers’ experiences implementing a movement integration program: Barriers,facilitators, and continuance

This study was designed to qualitatively examine fifteen classroom teachers' experiences in implementing a movement integration (MI) program, TAKE 10!^®, using the comprehensive school physical activity program framework. Data were collected through observations, semi-structured interviews, and questionnaires. Barriers to MI implementation included time and space constraints, whilst facilitators were gaining knowledge during training and developing competencies through experience. Reasons for program continuance included scheduling MI into weekly routines, children's request for the program, and collaboration among teachers. Suggestions for teachers' professional development related to MI are provided in view of the study's findings.     

Teacher preparation for movement education: increasing pre-service teachers’ competence for working with young children

This study explores pre-service teachers’ perceptions of movement education, the benefits they perceive from participating in a 12-week movement education module in a course on play, and the module’s effects on their confidence and competence in regard to incorporating movement into a curriculum. Findings suggest that the pre-service teachers achieved a deeper understanding of movement education and appreciated the module as a worthwhile professional growth experience. Specifically, they viewed the module as enabling them to build a new understanding of movement, to express themselves physically, to develop movement skills, to engage in social interactions, and to teach a variety of subjects using movement education principles. The study demonstrated that the module of this nature constitutes a useful educational tool for fostering the professional development of pre-service teachers in regard to their beliefs, attitudes, and skills pertaining to movement education.     

The contribution of research to teachers’ professional learning and development

This paper summarises findings from several systematic research reviews about the contribution of research to effective continuing professional development and learning (CPDL) activities and their impact on pupils and teachers. It starts with a review of how teachers engage in and with research as part of CPDL, how teachers and researchers shape professional learning activities and identifies key processes linked to positive outcomes. Finally it explores how different research contributions can be developed to make a more visible contribution to CPDL.The paper highlights common characteristics of effective CPDL, including: sustained collaboration with professional colleagues, including both making use of specialist expertise and structured peer support for embedding specialist contributions; an understanding of and commitment to professional learning, including enquiry-oriented learning and learning to learn from looking; a focus on refining teaching and learning, working towards aspirations for specific pupils side by side with theory; and effective scaffolding and modelling of learning by both teachers and leaders for colleagues and for pupils. The key implications of these findings are explored in the conclusions and include the importance of conceptualising researchers’ contributions to CPDL as specialist expertise and/or researchers and Masters tutors harnessing the potential of peer support between teachers. They also explore overlaps between core research and teaching skills and the need for a shared language between teachers and researchers to enable concepts like analysis, theory and criticality to be valued as practical tools for enhancing professional practice.