Does MSP Participation Increase the Supply of Math Teachers? Developing and Testing an Analytic Model

An important feature of the Math and Science Partnership (MSP) Program of the National Science Foundation is to increase K-12 student achievement in math and science by increasing the quality, quantity, and diversity of the nation's K-12 math and science teachers. Because the underlying supply of math and science teachers is never directly observed, the central premise of this article is that an examination of the extent to which the MSP Program might impact the quantity and quality of math and science teachers requires careful thought and modeling.

With that starting point, this study first develops a model that supports a premise that shifts in underlying supply can be inferred from shifts in the percentage of certified math teachers employed when (a) salaries are constrained to be below market clearing salaries and (b) uncertified or “out-of-field” certified teachers can compete as substitutes for certified math teachers. The study then tests the plausibility of the model using data from Texas and in so doing provides preliminary estimates of the extent to which a school or school district's MSP participation affected the supply of certified math teaches available to that school or district. The results, although inconclusive on the question of the labor supply effects of MSP participation by a school or school district, do suggest the reasonableness of the model for future work when more appropriate data will be available.     

Should I Stay or Should I Go? Examining the Career Choices of Alternatively Licensed Teachers in Urban Schools

In order to address the issue of persistent teacher shortages, urban districts increasingly rely on alternatively licensed teachers who are often viewed as well-suited to work in urban areas because of their greater age, life and work experiences, and understanding of diverse communities. Yet, research on the retention of these teachers remains inconclusive, with some notable studies suggesting that alternatively licensed teachers are as likely as their traditionally prepared counterparts to quit teaching or migrate out of urban school settings. In this study, we explore the process and salient considerations of five alternatively licensed math and science teachers deciding whether or not to continue teaching in a Midwestern, urban school district. Whereas previous studies typically examine teacher recruitment and retention issues through a narrow analysis of labor market incentives and other external inducements, our study situates teachers’ career decisions within a more holistic narrative that illustrates how individual actions are never determined by any single factor, but rather a web of simultaneous and sometimes contradictory forces generated by prior expectations and immediate realities that are professional as well as personal in nature.     

Conflicting Discourses: Navigating the Tensions of Becoming a Literacy Coach

During recent years, literacy coaching has become a widespread model of professional development for teachers in schools across the United States. However, there is a shortage of research and policy to inform the preparation and ongoing work of literacy coaches. In this article, the researchers use a modified version of Gee’s identity framework to examine teachers’ reflective writing as they learned about and practiced coaching in one school district. Findings show that teachers invoked multiple conflicting discourses of coaching that contributed to tensions in their work. The researchers argue that such tensions can stand in the way of educators constructing coaching identities that allow them to support and sustain meaningful professional development for teachers.     

Professional development in inquiry‐based science for elementary teachers of diverse student groups

As part of a larger project aimed at promoting science and literacy for culturally and linguistically diverse elementary students, this study has two objectives: (a) to describe teachers' initial beliefs and practices about inquiry‐based science and (b) to examine the impact of the professional development intervention (primarily through instructional units and teacher workshops) on teachers' beliefs and practices related to inquiry‐based science. The research involved 53 third‐ and fourth‐grade teachers at six elementary schools in a large urban school district. At the end of the school year, teachers reported enhanced knowledge of science content and stronger beliefs about the importance of science instruction with diverse student groups, although their actual practices did not change significantly. Based on the results of this first year of implementation as part of a 3‐year longitudinal design, implications for professional development and further research are discussed. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 41: 1021–1043, 2004     

Videoconferencing in Math and Science Preservice Elementary Teachers’ Field Placements

This study was designed to examine benefits and challenges of teaching through videoconferencing in the context of students’ field placement experiences, particularly as it relates to an inquiry-based approach to teaching and learning math and science. In the context of mathematics and science methods courses, preservice teachers, with the supervision of professors, field placement supervisors and cooperating teachers, taught a series of math and science lessons via video conferencing to 5th grade classes in a major urban public school. Two major results of this study indicate that: (1) teaching through videoconferencing highlights strengths and weaknesses in questioning skill techniques that are at the heart of an inquiry-based approach; (2) teaching through videoconferencing raises the intellectual challenge of teaching and allows preservice teachers to look face to face into their limited understanding of the content matter in math and science.     

Investing in the renewal of urban science teaching

This article provides a conceptual framework for understanding what is involved in improving urban science teaching and what might be implied by conducting research on its improvement. It is argued in this article that three sets of forces and conditions have a direct impact on urban science classrooms: first, the array of interdependent policies at school, district, and state levels about science teaching in particular and about education improvement more broadly construed; next, the investment and use of instructionally relevant resources at each of the three levels and their differing impacts on the renewal of urban science teaching; and finally, the broader context in which urban science teaching occurs mediating how these resources are—or can be—used. Mediating factors include the professional peer community, subject‐specific instructional leadership, the professional development infrastructure, the supply of available science teachers, and the broader community context. The article concludes with suggestions for how this framework informs directions for future research on the promise and limits of efforts to renew science teaching in urban settings. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 38: 1089–1100, 2001     

Teachers,tasks, and tensions: lessons from a research–practice partnership

How teachers make sense of new academic standards significantly shapes the implementation of those standards. Professional development organized around the analysis of mathematical tasks has potential to prepare teachers for standards implementation by helping them develop common understandings of standards and how to help students meet ambitious new learning goals. In practice, however, designers and participants bring different goals to the professional development context, which becomes evident when teachers engage in task analysis. In this article, we use the design tensions framework (Tatar in Human Comput Interact 22(4):413–451, 2007. doi: 10.1080/07370020701638814) to analyze these tensions within a research–practice partnership comprised of five university researchers, three district curriculum leaders from a large urban school district, 12 high school Algebra 1 teachers from nine schools in the district, and a small team of Web engineers. Primary data for the study consist of participant observation and field notes of meetings in which project stakeholders negotiated the design of the professional development, as well as interview and survey data. An analysis based on the design tensions framework helped our partnership surface, both in the moment and retrospectively, the need for designers of professional development focused on standards implementation to be adaptive and willing to evolve activities to satisfy multiple stakeholders’ goals for participation.     

Urban schools' teachers enacting project‐based science

What teaching practices foster inquiry and promote students to learn challenging subject matter in urban schools? Inquiry‐based instruction and successful inquiry learning and teaching in project‐based science (PBS) were described in previous studies (Brown & Campione, 1990 ; Crawford, 1999 ; Krajcik, Blumenfeld, Marx, Bass, & Fredricks, 1998 ; Krajcik, Blumenfeld, Marx, & Solloway, 1994 ; Minstrell & van Zee, 2000 ). In this article, we describe the characteristics of inquiry teaching practices that promote student learning in urban schools. Teaching is a major factor that affects both achievement of and attitude of students toward science (Tamir, 1998 ). Our involvement in reform in a large urban district includes the development of suitable learning materials and providing continuous and practiced‐based professional development (Fishman & Davis, in press; van Es, Reiser, Matese, & Gomez, 2002 ). Urban schools face particular challenges when enacting inquiry‐based teaching practices like those espoused in PBS. In this article, we describe two case studies of urban teachers whose students achieved high gains on pre‐ and posttests and who demonstrated a great deal of preparedness and commitment to their students. Teachers' attempts to help their students to perform well are described and analyzed. The teachers we discuss work in a school district that strives to bring about reform in mathematics and science through systemic reform. The Center for Learning Technologies in Urban Schools (LeTUS) collaborates with the Detroit Public Schools to bring about reform in middle‐school science. Through this collaboration, diverse populations of urban‐school students learn science through inquiry‐oriented projects and the use of various educational learning technologies. For inquiry‐based science to succeed in urban schools, teachers must play an important role in enacting the curriculum while addressing the unique needs of students. The aim of this article is to describe patterns of good science teaching in urban school. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 43: 722–745, 2006     

Technology‐rich inquiry science in urban classrooms: What are the barriers to inquiry pedagogy?*

What are the barriers to technology‐rich inquiry pedagogy in urban science classrooms, and what kinds of programs and support structures allow these barriers to be overcome? Research on the pedagogical practices within urban classrooms suggests that as a result of many constraints, many urban teachers' practices emphasize directive, controlling teaching, that is, the “pedagogy of poverty” (Haberman, 1991 ), rather than the facilitation of students' ownership and control over their learning, as advocated in inquiry science. On balance, research programs that advocate standards‐based or inquiry teaching pedagogies demonstrate strong learning outcomes by urban students. This study tracked classroom research on a technology‐rich inquiry weather program with six urban science teachers. The teachers implemented this program in coordination with a district‐wide middle school science reform. Results indicated that despite many challenges in the first year of implementation, students in all 19 classrooms of this program demonstrated significant content and inquiry gains. In addition, case study data comprised of twice‐weekly classroom observations and interviews with the six teachers suggest support structures that were both conducive and challenging to inquiry pedagogy. Our work has extended previous studies on urban science pedagogy and practices as it has begun to articulate what role the technological component plays either in contributing to the challenges we experienced or in helping urban science classrooms to realize inquiry science and other positive learning values. Although these data outline results after only the first year of systemic reform, we suggest that they begin to build evidence for the role of technology‐rich inquiry programs in combating the pedagogy of poverty in urban science classrooms. © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 39: 128‐150, 2002     

Resisting the marginalization of science in an urban school: Coactivating social,cultural, material,and strategic resources

This study describes the resources and strategies middle school teachers, urban fellows, and a district science staff developer coactivated to resist the marginalization of science in a high‐poverty, low‐performing urban school. Through critical narrative inquiry, I document factors that marginalized science in three teachers' classrooms. The narratives show that constraints related to cultural, material, and social resources contributed to a more global symbolic resource constraint, the low status and priority of science in the school. The narratives develop a new category of strategic resources embodied or controlled by others and leveraged to improve students' opportunities to learn science. Attention to a broader array of resources, including social, symbolic, and strategic resources, helps to excavate some of the inertial forces that might derail efforts to teach for social justice. The findings provide a sense of how and why teachers might activate resources to resist the marginalization of science in their classrooms. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 47:840–860, 2010     

‘We did see the lapwing’ – practising environmental citizenship in upper-secondary science education

This article explores factors that promote the practice of environmental citizenship in science education and aims to contribute to the development of the concept of practising environmental citizenship. We follow six Norwegian secondary students (aged 16–17) participating in a small-scale intervention study conducting an assignment on a socioscientific issue (SSI) in their local district. Our findings reveal that dealing with an SSI in real-world settings through out-of-school activities set in the students’ local district is important for practising environmental citizenship. This article also addresses the tensions between the practice of environmental citizenship and the cultural issues related to school science. Our findings reveal that tensions exist between working with ready-made-science, as students normally do, to deal with science-in-the-making through an SSI. This research discuss the practical implications of the concept of practising environmental citizenship in science.     

Striking a Balance Between Innovation and Standards: A Study of Teachers Implementing Project-Based Approaches to Teaching Science

This research reports on the efforts of six middle school and high school science teachers in a public school district in New York City to balance innovative teaching methods and strategies with the New York State Learning Standards and Regents requirements. More specifically, this research examines the factors that influenced the implementation of project-based approaches to teaching and learning science. Observations of meetings and classrooms, and collection of artifacts such as curricula, project planners, demographic profiles, student work, and test results served as the primary data sources that were triangulated and related to current theory on project-based learning in science. Four teachers embraced aspects of project-based learning in science and two rejected most aspects of teaching project-based learning in science. Implications for science professional development are discussed.     

Navigating role forces and the aesthetic|authentic caring dialectic: a novice urban science teacher’s developmental trajectory

Examining role forces and resources available to new teachers is crucial to understanding how teachers use and expand cultural, social, and symbolic resources and how they engage teaching for social justice and caring in urban science education. This critical narrative inquiry explores three levels of story. First, the narratives explore my role as a district science staff developer and my efforts to leverage district resources to improve students’ opportunities to learn science. Second, the narratives explore the ways in which a novice science teacher, Tina, navigated role forces and the aesthetic|authentic caring dialectic in a high poverty, urban school. A third level of narrative draws on sociological theories of human interaction to explore role forces and how they shaped Tina’s developmental trajectory. I describe how Tina expanded cultural, social, and symbolic resources to enact her teaching role.     

The Development of a Community of Practice for Educators Working with Newcomer,Spanish-speaking Students

Drawing on 3 years of observational, survey, and interview data, this article highlights the importance of communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991) for school staff members supporting Spanish-speaking, newcomer students in large, comprehensive high schools that often lack the resources to directly support this population. We highlight how a research project focused on the implementation and development of a bilingual math and science curriculum across 4 schools in urban and rural California provided teachers, counselors and school leaders the necessary space and community to know what and how to best serve immigrant, Spanish-dominant students. The article demonstrates how these school staff people leveraged the research project meetings and check-ins with research assistants to share best practices and common challenges across schools and roles when working with newcomer students.     

They Said It Couldn't Be Done: Implementing a Career Academy Program for a Diverse High School Population

The literature on teacher turnover has traditionally focused on teachers whose destinations are external to the school (be it another school, district or state, or profession). In this article I examine internal turnover that takes place among teachers who remain at their school but change their subject assignments. I analyze the levels, causes, and impacts on school reform of internal turnover within the science faculties at three urban middle schools during 4 years of a whole-school reform program. Major findings include the following: (a) Internal turnover levels are high, higher than external turnover; (b) subject assignments made without regard to both teachers' subject interests and stability of assignments appear to be the primary causes of internal turnover; (c) district policies allowing elementary-certified teachers to teach any subject foster internal turnover; and (d) internal turnover has serious detrimental impacts on school reform. I identify district and school-level policy options to reduce the level of internal turnover to support reform.     

Learning to teach science in urban schools

Teaching in urban schools, with their problems of violence, lack of resources, and inadequate funding, is difficult. It is even more difficult to learn to teach in urban schools. Yet learning in those locations where one will subsequently be working has been shown to be the best preparation for teaching. In this article we propose coteaching as a viable model for teacher preparation and the professional development of urban science teachers. Coteaching—working at the elbow of someone else—allows new teachers to experience appropriate and timely action by providing them with shared experiences that become the topic of their professional conversations with other coteachers (including peers, the cooperating teacher, university supervisors, and high school students). This article also includes an ethnography describing the experiences of a new teacher who had been assigned to an urban high school as field experience, during which she enacted a curriculum that was culturally relevant to her African American students, acknowledged their minority status with respect to science, and enabled them to pursue the school district standards. Even though coteaching enables learning to teach and curricula reform, we raise doubts about whether our approaches to teacher education and enacting science curricula are hegemonic and oppressive to the students we seek to emancipate through education. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 38: 941–964, 2001     

��It depends on what science teacher you got��: urban science self-efficacy from teacher and student voices

In the United States today, urban schools serve the majority of high-poverty and high minority populations including large numbers of Hispanic students. While many Hispanic students perform below grade level in middle school science, the science teaching community as a whole is lacking elements of diversity as teachers struggle to meet the needs of all learners. Researchers have recognized that science teacher effectiveness, one consequence of self-efficacy among teachers, is associated with future science achievement and science-related careers of their students. This qualitative study explores how three science teachers’ effectiveness in the classroom impacts students’ science self-efficacy beliefs at one urban middle school. Hispanic students were the focus of this investigation due to demographics and history of underperformance within this district. Teachers’ perspectives, as well as outside observer evaluations of instructional strategies and classroom climates were triangulated to explore dynamics that influence students’ interests and motivation to learn science using a framework to link teachers’ sense of efficacy (focusing on student outcomes). Findings suggest the impact teacher effectiveness can have on student outcomes, including strengthened student science self-efficacy and increased science achievement. Building awareness and support in teachers’ sense of efficacy, as well as developing respectful and supportive relationships between educator/facilitator and pupil during the transition to middle school may construct permanence and accomplishment for all in science.     

Becoming an urban science teacher: How beginning teachers negotiate contradictory school contexts

Teacher attrition rates are high in urban schools, particularly for new science teachers. Little research has addressed how science teachers can be prepared to effectively bridge the divide between preparation and urban teaching. We utilized the theoretical frameworks of social justice, identity, and structure-agency to investigate this transition. Specifically, we examined the Urban Science Teacher Preparation (USTP) program as a critical case of “well-prepared” urban science teachers. Study participants included one cohort of four teachers. Data, primarily from individual interviews, a focus group, and written reflections, were collected from participants during pre-service preparation and their first year of teaching. The USTP program nurtured the development of a professional identity aligned with teaching science for social justice, with a unique emphasis on identifying structural injustices in schools. Findings indicate all four teachers used their identities to negotiate school policies and procedures that restricted student opportunities to learn science through three processes: deconstructing the context, positioning themselves within and against the context, and enacting their identities. These findings suggest the importance of USTP programs to provide teacher candidates with political clarity for teaching for social justice and sustained induction support to resist school socialization pressures.     

Coteaching and Disturbances: Building a Better System for Learning to Teach Science

Science education research has examined the benefits of coteaching for learning to teach in elementary and secondary school contexts where coteachers bring variable levels of experience to the work of coteaching. Coteaching as a pedagogical strategy is being implemented at the university level but with limited research. Drawing from the field of activity theory and our emic experience as coteachers, we examine the enactment of coteaching in university science education courses. One of the tools central to our examination of coteaching included the analysis of disturbances in the work and object of preparing science teachers. This analysis highlighted the role, during discursive interactions, of problem posing and problem solving for addressing observed disturbances. The presence of an extra instructor provided increased opportunities in the system for recognizing and valuing disturbances as indicators of underlying contradictions or tensions in elements of the activity system of the learning and teaching of science teachers. Our analysis suggests that coteaching offers expanded opportunities for the evolution of the activity system of preparing science teachers.