How student teaching in an urban setting affects teacher candidates' career motivations

This is a qualitative study to determine changes in the motivation of senior student teachers to teach (at the elementary, early childhood, and secondary levels) in an urban setting during the student teaching internship in an urban public school. Emerging themes include roles of classroom teachers, discouragement from tenured teachers, school bureaucracy, views of students, relationships with cooperating teachers, candidates' views about subject matter, and their views about themselves. The findings indicate that motivation to teach changed during student teaching. This cohorts' experiences strengthened their confidence and commitment to teach in culturally diverse urban public schools rather than discouraging them. This research supports a contextual approach to understanding motivation and challenges educators to reflect on several issues of preservice training as well as collaboration with teacher practitioners. With a knowledge of what attracts teachers to the occupation and an understanding of how that attraction is influenced by field experiences in urban schools, programs which prepare teachers may be better able to educate teachers who want to teach in urban schools and can perform successfully in that setting.     

Understanding the Impact of Accountability on Preservice Teachers’ Decisions About Where to Teach

Research has shown that individuals who become teachers are uniquely oriented to the psychic rewards of teaching such as connecting with students and making a difference. Yet, in the era of “No Child Left Behind”, emphasis upon test scores as indicators of student learning, competition within and between school districts, and threats of external sanctions seem to promote a different orientation to teachers’ work. This is especially the case in schools with limited human, social, physical, and cultural capital serving disproportionate numbers of low-income, racial/ethnic and linguistic minority students typically located in urban areas. Given the existing problem of teacher shortages in urban schools and the current impact of accountability, this study seeks to explore two questions: How do preservice teachers believe their aspirations to teach will be affected by the accountability movement? And how do these views affect their considerations about where to teach?     

Feeling voice: The emotional politics of ‘student voice’ for teachers

In recent years, student voice has become a popular school reform strategy, with the promise of generating relations of trust, respect, belonging and student empowerment. However, when student voice practices are taken up by schools, student voice may also be associated with less affirmative feelings: it is often accounted for in terms of teacher ‘fear’, ‘resistance’ or ‘uncertainty’ about altered power relations. Such explanations risk individualising and pathologising teachers’ responses, rather than recognising the complexities of the institutional conditions of student voice. This article considers the affective politics of student voice: that is, the contestations that attend who gets to name how student voice feels in schools. Working with data from an evaluation study of three Australian primary schools who engage in ‘exemplary’ student voice practices, we listen to school leaders and facilitating teachers’ accounts about the responses of other teachers at their schools to student voice. Parallels are drawn between the construction of some teachers as reluctant, and previous analyses of ‘silenced’ student voices in schools. We argue that, in order to analyse the enactment of student voice in more nuanced tones, it is necessary to consider the profoundly emotional experience of teaching and learning, the ambivalences of teachers’ experiences of student voice and contemporary reconstitutions of teacher subjectivities.     

Successful components of school improvement in culturally diverse schools

Contemporary phenomena, including modernization, globalization, and migration, have altered the sociopolitical and cultural conditions of schooling. Schools are called upon to respond to such change through improvement efforts fostering intercultural education. To this end, this research examines school actors’ perceptions of the successful components of school improvement in culturally diverse schools. For the purposes of this research, we used the Cypriot education system as our case study to carry out observations and interviews with head teachers, teachers, immigrant and native students, and their parents. In identifying the inputs for the improvement of culturally diverse schools, as perceived by school actors, various components emerged, including listening to student voice, socioemotional and culturally responsive teaching, and increased parental involvement. Arguably, these contributing factors bear implications for school-based leadership, building successful professional communities, and enhancing intercultural competence in schools.     

Educators and youth activists: A negotiation over enhancing students’ role in school life

Recent attention to youth activism for school reform reveals positive student outcomes. Yet educators may object to the use of social actions in schools, diminishing opportunities for these benefits to accrue. This paper analyzes educators’ conceptions about the proper exercise of student voice within schools and how these coincide with activists’ tactics for school reform. The qualitative investigation rests on interviews with principals, teachers, community organizers, and students—all touched by a community-based program that encourages urban youth to organize and transform their schools. The paper seeks to bridge the perspectives of educators and activists in ways that enhance acceptance of a more robust role for students in school life.     

Information technology,mathematics achievement and educational equity in developed economies

The present study examined how access to home and school IT resources impacted student mathematics achievement. Data comprised 144,395 secondary school students from 7,308 schools in 22 developed economies who participated in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2012. Results of hierarchical linear modelling showed that after controlling for student and school covariates, student achievement benefited from their access to home IT resources (main effect), and from the access to both home IT resources and highly educated mothers (interactive effect). Furthermore, IT resource shortages in school had a detrimental impact on student achievement (main effect), and the shortage accentuated the negative effects of school shortage in qualified teachers on achievement (interactive effect). Lastly, the results showed that students with less home academic and cultural resources were more impacted by IT resource access when compared to peers from advantaged families.     

A Critical Survey of 1000 Activities

Attitudes, beliefs, perceptions, and classroom practices of teachers in 24 urban and suburban elementary schools throughout the United States were assessed with teacher questionnaires and classroom observations during a single school year. Teachers in schools serving students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds put greater emphasis on teacher authority and control and less on student autonomy and constructivist approaches than teachers in other schools did. Teachers in schools serving students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds also were less trusting of students and more skeptical about their abilities. Teachers’ beliefs were generally consistent with their practices, even when school poverty level and students’ mean achievement levels were statistically controlled.     

The Experiences of African American Physical Education Teacher Candidates at Secondary Urban Schools

Presently, most physical education teachers in the United States are White Americans and from middle class families. In fact, 83 % of all teachers in public schools are White Americans, whereas approximately 10 % of all African American teachers are representative of all teachers in the United States. A student might feel cultural dissonance that she or he is behaving appropriately based on the student’s cultural norm and upbringing, but the teachers who have different cultural and ethnic backgrounds than the students may inappropriately interpret or respond to the behavior. Therefore, it is important to study African American pre-service physical education teachers’ student teaching and field-based experiences with ethnically diverse adolescence (e.g., African American students), because they have the potential to develop a positive relationship between school support, teacher support, and academic achievement and influence student learning, motivation, and engagement in physical education. The purpose of this study was to describe and explain the experiences of African American physical education teacher education (PETE) candidates at secondary urban schools. The research design was explanatory multiple-case study situated in activity theory. Participants were seven African American PETE candidates. The qualitative data sources were interviews, weekly journal reflections, and e-portfolios. The results were (a) navigating power relationships between cooperative teachers and students, (b) a ‘shocking’ experience: Feeling under-prepared, and (c) encountered cultural normalcies and stereotypes in teaching physical education. PETE programs must better prepare teacher candidates for working in urban schools with greater cultural competence and higher self-efficacy.     

Co-ordination Within Schools,Commitment of Teachers and Students and Student Achievement

This research study investigates co-ordination strategies within schools, their relationships to both teacher and student commitment to school, and the relationship between student commitment and student achievement in Switzerland. Two different kinds of co-ordination strategies, structural and cultural, can be distinguished. Structural co-ordination strategies have to do with formal, lasting arrangements that allow an organisation to operate. These include roles, rules, procedures, and authority relations. Cultural co-ordination strategies are related to the nature of communications and the consensus on organisational goals in the school. Cultural mechanisms shape what teachers want to do. Drawn from TIMSS, the sample for the present analyses included principals, teachers and students in 178 classes at the lower secondary level in three Swiss cantons: Bale-Country, Berne and Zurich. Multiple regression analyses carried out with different indicators of teacher and student commitment to school showed that school coordination strategies can make a difference, although the effects were rather small. A further analysis that included student commitment indicators as predictors of mathematics achievement suggests that the affective/social and the cognitive domains are relatively independent at class level.     

Patterns of Urban Student Mobility and Local School Reform

Student mobility is a topic that frequently surfaces in discussions about the problems of urban schooling. Surprisingly, it tends to fade from the agenda as discussion turns toward reform initiatives and school restructuring. Student movement, however, penetrates the essential activity of schools--the interaction of teachers and students around learning. Using data from Chicago public elementary schools, I first describe the extent of urban school instability. Many schools, in fact, do not have a stable cohort of students whose progress they can track over time. Second, I explore the causes of this high level of instability, connected both to residential mobility and to more school-related reasons. Distinctive patterns emerge that reveal clusters of schools that are closely tied by the students they exchange from year to year. Third, given this context, I examine the impact of mobility on students, schools, and urban education more generally. Recent school reform efforts that center on promoting greater local school autonomy implicitly assume that students will attend a specific school consistently enough that the school can "make a difference" in their achievement. In the unstable urban context, however, even improving schools lose their accomplishments as students transfer, and mobile students forfeit the benefit of continuity of school services. Thus, not only does mobility impact individual students who are changing schools, it has deep (though often hidden) consequences for the schools these students attend and for the systemic changes intended by local school reform.     

Measuring the effect of charter schools on public school student achievement in an urban environment: Evidence from New York City

This paper uses student level data from New York City to study the relationship between a public school losing enrollment to charter school competitors and the academic achievement of students who remain enrolled in it. Geographic measures most often used to study the effect of school choice policies on public school student achievement are not well suited for densely populated urban environments. I adopt a direct approach and measure charter school exposure as the percentage of a public school's students who exited for a charter school at the end of the previous year. Depending on model specification, I find evidence that students in schools losing more students to charter schools either are unaffected by the competitive pressures of the choice option or benefit mildly in both math and English.     

Creating urban classroom communities worthy of trust

Developing trusting relationships between teachers and students in urban secondary schools everywhere is a challenging task that is essential to maintaining an effective learning environment. Trust involves a fragile web of relationships nurtured through positive daily interactions. We examined strategies that US urban high school teachers used to encourage hard-to-teach students to comply with school and class rules and engage in learning. Based on recommendations of these alienated students, we interviewed 18 teachers and observed four of their classes regularly for 4 months. We examine themes supporting an emerging theoretical framework of educational trust. Teachers encouraged their marginalized students to participate in learning by creating a curriculum and class environment that permitted many opportunities for engagement, provided positive interactions, encouraged the development of shared curriculum, and fostered student ownership. These features provided the foundation for educational trust based on themes of shared expectations, persistence, commitment, and voice.     

��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.     

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     

Disrupting deficit notions of difference: Counter-narratives of teachers and community in urban education

The author reports on research conducted of teachers and their instruction in a US urban public school, with narrative and counter-narrative employed as analytic tools. Central questions guiding the study included: How do teachers’ counter-narratives and experiences influence them in their urban school classrooms? How do teachers’ multiple and varied identities, especially their racial and cultural backgrounds, emerge in their counter-narratives and in their conceptions of and representations of their teaching? And how do teachers’ stories “counter” ways of knowing urban education in the US and influence their interactions with their students and the learning opportunities available in their classrooms? The evidence in the study suggests that although teachers in urban schools may employ pedagogical and curricular tools that differ from many mainstream classrooms, different does not necessarily mean deficit or deficient. The study does not present a romanticized version of the school or those in it; the teachers and students in the study experience adversity and difficulty as is the case with teachers and students in other contexts. However, implications are drawn from the teachers’ successful practices in urban schools to counter, disrupt, and interrupt pervasive discourses that only focus on the negative characteristics of teachers and students in urban schools.     

ASSESSING CHEMISTRY-LEARNING COMPETENCIES OF STUDENTS IN ISOLATED RURAL SENIOR HIGH SCHOOLS BY USING THE NATIONAL EXAMINATION: A CASE STUDY OF SIMEULUE ISLAND,INDONESIA

This study explored learning competency based on the Indonesian National Examination focusing especially on chemistry performance and the circumstances of senior high school students and teachers in rural areas of Simeulue Island, Indonesia. The National Examination total score and chemistry score for students in rural areas were consistently lower than students in urban areas during 2008–2010. The majority of rural students were failing to master key chemistry concepts. Their low performance on laboratory-based questions appeared to indicate that the associated practical work was not done as part of the chemistry courses. Some chemistry topics were not taught due to insufficient time, student weaknesses, insufficient textbooks, and other reasons. The issues of low competency of teachers, poverty for the majority of students, low enrollment in schools, and low competition among students in these rural senior high schools appeared to be common problems across rural settings. The local government has recommended providing a consolidated rural high school with qualified chemistry teachers, laboratories, and transportation to address factors negatively influencing student achievement. Furthermore, local rural school officials need to recruit and retain qualified teachers in these isolated areas, provide effective textbooks and instructional resources, and facilitate the professional development of chemistry teachers.     

Sense of belonging and transition to high schools in Peru

Sense of belonging is the degree to which students feel integrated with their peers and teachers at school. This study describes sense of belonging among Peruvian students entering high school. Socioeconomic status had no direct effect on sense of belonging but had an indirect effect through achievement. Rural students had a higher sense of belonging than their urban peers. This is likely due to rural children seeing the larger, better equipped high schools as improvements over their relatively small and more isolated primary schools. Some general orientation activities were organized by teachers and principals aimed at all incoming first graders but nothing was designed specifically for students who might face difficulties in adjusting to high school.     

Enacting culturally relevant pedagogy: asset mapping in urban classrooms

In an attempt to confront monolithic perceptions of achievement and an educational narrative that defines communities of Color by their supposed deficits, the current study presents asset mapping as an example of culturally relevant pedagogy in action. Asset mapping is a pedagogical tool for students to visually represent personalized stories of their cultural assets and participate in a community-based gallery walk to showcase their maps. Interviews and focus groups with third- and sixth-grade teachers and students from an urban public school revealed learning about self, learning about others, and building community as emergent themes after completing the project. We present these themes and discuss asset mapping as a possible model for strength-based pedagogy that centers the lived experiences of students, their families, and their shared stories in classroom curriculum.     

Linking School–Family–Community Partnerships in Urban Elementary Schools to Student Achievement on State Tests

This study examines the relationship between the quality of school, family, and community partnership programs and student performance on state-mandated achievement tests. Data from 82 elementary schools, located in a large urban area, were collected to explore the relationship between family and community involvement and students' achievement test performance. Analyses show that, controlling for school characteristics, the degree to which schools were working to overcome challenges to family and community involvement predicted higher percentages of students scoring at or above satisfactory on state achievement tests. The findings suggest that schools' efforts to involve families and the community in students' learning may be a useful approach to help students achieve in school, especially for students in early elementary grades. Also, the findings illustrate the importance for schools located in large urban areas to address obstacles to family and community involvement to realize the benefits associated with family and community involvement.     

Rural and Urban Differences in Student Achievement in Science and Mathematics: A Multilevel Analysis

Recent educational research has demonstrated rural/urban differences in achievement and success in higher education. However, in order to assess the rural school's impact on student outcomes, rural/urban comparisons must be made after accounting for student background variables. Researchers have begun to question the generalisability of the effective school model for urban, suburban, and rural schools, given substantial differences in their social and organisational environments (Hannaway & Talbert, 1993). The purpose of this research study was to examine differences in student achievement between rural and urban schools in Western Australia, after controlling for student background variables. By using multilevel modelling techniques, this study demonstrated that the location of the school had a significant effect upon student achievement, with students attending rural schools not performing as well as students from urban schools.