Primary teachers’ understanding of the interactive whiteboard as a tool for children’s collaborative learning and knowledge‐building

This paper reports on the second phase of a joint teacher/researcher project that explored teachers’ understandings of the potential of the interactive whiteboard (IWB) as a tool for primary school children’s collaborative group work. By examining teachers’ written analyses and discussions of work carried out in their own classrooms, the paper seeks to contribute to the debate about the ways in which the use of IWBs can contribute to changes in pedagogy. It highlights the interrelationships between collaborative learning and factors identified as important in the research carried out by teachers, amongst them the children’s technical skills and confidence, the mediating role of the teacher, the IWB affordances for knowledge‐building and the teachers’ own knowledge, attitudes and professional development. The paper also provides an account of how participation by the teachers in a course with Faculty staff, focused on the collaborative co‐construction of knowledge related to learning and to classroom research grounded in the values and principles of socio‐cultural theory, supported changes in pedagogic practice.     

Four‐year‐old Children in Reception Classrooms: participant perceptions and practice

There continues to be an increasing number of four‐year‐old children in reception classrooms in the UK. The child‐school incorporation process is a dynamic, multifaceted, interactive and poorly understood phenomenon. This paper summarises the pilot stage of a project that investigated this critical period in the life histories of a group of children. The project viewed the researcher, teacher, parent and child as collaborators in an illuminative process. There is a need to challenge the notion that the child simply ‘adjusts’ to school. Children are most likely to be under stress during the first weeks of school when the reduplicated rites of separation, transition and incorporation are going on. Appropriate changes and real improvements in policy, provision and practice need to be based upon a cognizance of the lived experiences of these rites for all the participants.     

The teacher–learner relationship in the management of discipline in public high schools

Abstract

This article discusses data from a case study involving Grade 8–12 teachers in 14 classrooms. In all the schools that were identified, one teacher from each of the schools was identified for interviewing. After the interview the teacher was used as an ‘informant’ to identify other teachers who could provide additional information on the issue of classroom discipline in public high schools. Teachers are uncertain about how to relate to the learners and still maintain discipline in the classrooms. Reasons for the persistence of poor teacher–learner relationship include lack of knowledge regarding the effective use of alternatives to corporal punishment and the use of power to establish teacher authority. The results of the study showed that teachers, who are successful in managing misbehaviour in the classrooms, maintain good relations with the learners, encourage self-discipline and dignity, and involve the parents, learner peers as well as other teachers in the learning process. Involving all people who are close to the learner is essential in encouraging the learner to accept the teacher's authority and establish the required interpersonal classroom relationships.     

Developing a professional vision of classroom practices of a mathematics teacher: views from a researcher and a teacher

The term professional vision points to the many nuanced ways professionals see. This paper traces the development of a professional vision of a researcher and a teacher looking at classroom practices. The researcher’s interest was to capture and study notable aspects of the teacher’s practice. Through a coding scheme, disparate classroom events were organized and analyzed to yield a researcher’s professional vision of the teacher’s practices. For the teacher, through reviewing the video records of his own classroom practices, his professional vision provided a basis for him to reflect and develop professionally. Leveraging on the work of the researcher, he initiated and transformed his own practices. Their collaboration yielded a mutually informed development of professional vision of classroom practices. In juxtaposing the two developments, the researcher and the teacher’s views can be contrasted, their distinctive interests highlighted and common grounds explored. Some implications for developing professional vision are drawn, and it is in the common grounds of the teacher’s professional development and seeing with a goal of enhancing of student learning that hold some promise of a mutual interest in developing a professional vision of classroom practices.     

Toward a social pedagogy of classroom group work

In any classroom, pupils will be drawn together for many purposes and we can refer to such within classroom contexts as ‘groupings’. The teacher often creates these, and the way that they are set up, and how they are used for particular learning purposes. If the relationships between grouping size, interaction type and learning tasks in groups are planned strategically then learning experiences will be more effective. However, research suggests that the relationships between these elements are often unplanned and the ‘social pedagogic’ potential of classroom learning is therefore unrealised. In this paper we explore the notion of social pedagogy in relation to group work. It is argued that research and theory relevant to group work in classrooms is limited, and that a new approach, sensitive to group work under everyday classroom conditions is required. This paper identifies key features of a social pedagogy of classroom group work, which can inform effective group work in classrooms. It also describes the background to a current large scale UK project which has been set up to design with teachers a programme of high quality group work in classrooms at both primary and secondary phases.     

Roles of a teacher and researcher during in situ professional development around the implementation of mathematical modeling tasks

Partnership with teachers for professional development has been considered beneficial because of the potential of collaborative work in the teacher’s own classroom to be relevant to practice. From this perspective, both teachers and researchers can draw on their own expertise and work as authentic partners. In this study, we address the need for such collaboration and focus on how a teacher and a researcher performed their roles when collaboratively implementing mathematical modeling tasks within a context of in situ professional development. Using multi-tier design-based research, as a framework, a researcher worked in a teacher’s classroom to implement a series of research-based mathematical modeling activities. A broad corpus of data from this interaction was analyzed, including audio recordings of interviews with the teacher, video recordings of three mathematical modeling lessons, researcher field notes and journal reflections, instructional materials, and students’ written work using the principles for designing activities for teachers. The emerging roles and relationships between the teacher and the researcher were documented, as (1) the researcher implemented the professional development, (2) the teacher shared her concerns, (3) the researcher responded to the teacher’s challenges, and (3) the teacher reflected on student development. As a case study of collaboration, the participants’ roles and strategies to overcome challenges and achieve shared objectives can benefit teachers and researchers who plan to collaboratively implement modeling in the classroom. The study supports the value and viability of this form of in situ professional development, indicating that significant changes in teachers’ thinking about their students’ mathematical model development can occur in relatively short periods of time.     

Rhetoric and practice in pre-service teacher education: the case of Teach For America

Teach For America (TFA), an organization that places college graduates in urban and rural classrooms for two-year terms of service, is lauded by reformers who see its five-week summer training institute as evidence that teachers have little to learn before entering classrooms. Yet, while boosters see TFA as a radical alternative to traditional teacher education, a look at the evolution of their increasingly robust summer training model hardly affirms that perception. In fact, much of what is done in the summer institute parallels the work of traditional teacher education programs in the USA – a surprising state of affairs given the rhetoric of so many TFA supporters. This project traces the evolution of TFA’s summer training institute across two decades, highlighting the growing divide between TFA’s outward-facing image and its actual work. Framing TFA’s summer institute as a case study for examining the relationship between rhetoric and practice in education, the article raises broader questions about how the policy-making context affects the construction and perception of reality.     

Strategies for Developing Positive Behaviour Management. Teacher Behaviour Outcomes and Attitudes to the Change Process

This paper describes an extended action research project run in a large secondary school over an 18‐month period. The work was part of a wider strategy for change within the school. The data presented here describes some of the features of the change process and reflections on its impact. A key aim was to challenge and enable teachers to modify their behaviour in order to increase the number of specific positive feedback statements they made in their classrooms to their students. The paper reports on three main strands of data that were collected: observation of teacher and pupil behaviours in classrooms, feedback from questionnaires completed by teachers who took part in staff groups formed to discuss behaviour management, and qualitative data from interviews and a focus group with staff at the end of the project. All provide evidence of a change in teachers’ behaviour and information about teachers’ attitudes to the change process.     

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.     

Blurring the boundaries: connecting research,practice and professional learning

Educational researchers can incorporate benefits for themselves and teacher participants by planning for interactions between research, practice and teachers’ professional learning from the outset of a project. However, the dual role of a researcher as a professional learning partner has rarely been explicated and theorised in studies of teacher–researcher relationships. The study described in this paper occurred in the context of early childhood education. The notion of a critical friend was extended and validated as a useful theorisation of the relationship. Four ways that I acted as a critical friend are described. The expertise, roles, boundaries and hybridity of a co‐constructed approach to research are discussed. The importance of a researcher as critical friend having research and theoretical knowledge to shift teacher knowledge and practice is argued. Implications for teacher–researcher partnerships in terms of strengthening coherence between research, practice and professional learning are suggested.     

The Dialectic Relationship between Research and Practice in Mathematics Teacher Education

This paper addresses issues linking research in student teacher learning with reflection on practice in mathematics teacher education. From a situated perspective on learning and practice, we explore our own practice as teacher educators while researching student teacher learning in our classrooms. We describe a study on student teacher learning, considering student teacher learning as a “process of becoming”, and how the results of this research have affected our development as mathematics teacher educators and members of a community of inquiry. Our work shows how in the mathematics teacher education context the relationship between theory and practice becomes an element of both teacher educator and researcher development.     

Learning about democracy at school: an action research project in early childhood education

This article examines part of an action research project carried out in a Spanish public school. We explain the complex reality of an early childhood education classroom. Focusing on early childhood education, the project was developed in collaboration with a teacher from one of the classrooms of four year olds. Several of the children in the class have serious behaviour problems. The teacher (Lucía) is very concerned because they take their anger and frustration out on objects, classmates and adults by hitting them. She has a lot of difficulty working with these problem children. This research work deals with transforming the practices of the researcher, the pupils and the teacher. One of the first critical challenges was to turn classroom discussions into opportunities for addressing the injustices that the children experience daily. Teaching should serve to empower children. Programmed classroom discussions can be a place where pupils are given the chance to speak out about conflicts, and where important decisions are made to address them.     

Facilitating critical reflection on practice through collaborative research

This paper emanates from a study that analysed the critical reflection of teacher researchers as they talked about their investigations of the home cultures and literacies of a small group of children from socioculturally diverse family contexts. The collaborative research enterprise was undertaken by university and teacher researchers. The important role that collaborative teacher research and social interaction played in the critical reflection and co-construction of professional understandings in the project is the focus of this paper. The teacher researchers’ theorising about the complexity of their work as a result of the collaborative enterprise is discussed. Through the voiced research and critical reflection of the teachers, it has become obvious that their life’s experiences and resources are powerful in their pedagogical theorising. Teachers comment on the way in which they are positioned by ‘the system’ as technicians and how they experience tension between their own professional and primary discourses and that of the system. It is suggested that teachers be given opportunity within their work sites to enter the conversations about curriculum, pedagogy and change in knowledgeable and meaningful ways that are grounded in collaborative reflection and research. This paper explores the critical reflection and the social construction of new understandings about the complexity of teachers’ work that occurred in a collaborative research project carried out by a university-based researcher and four school-based early years teacher researchers. It will show how the collaborative research process facilitated critical reflection on previously unquestioned or unconsidered issues about the teachers’ work. The paper has been written by the university researcher under the watchful eye of the teacher researchers who want to remain anonymous. Their pseudonyms have been used. When the terms of this project were negotiated among the group, it was agreed that the voices of the teachers would always be reported authentically and anonymously. It was also agreed that any theorising, integrated language analysis (Freeman, 1996) or reporting that might be carried out, would be done by the university researcher That is not to say that the teacher researchers have not spoken about their involvement in the project to colleagues in professional development forums and conferences. Nor is to say that the teachers were not privy to the analysis process. It is to say that written reports for publication are to be done by the university researcher.     

Does a teacher’s classroom observation rating vary across multiple classrooms?

Classroom observations have been increasingly used for teacher evaluations, and it is important to examine the measurement quality and the use of observation ratings. When a teacher is observed in multiple classrooms, his or her observation ratings may vary across classrooms. In that case, using ratings from one classroom per teacher may not be adequate to represent a teacher’s instructional quality. Drawing on the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) dataset, this study examined the variation of a teacher’s classroom observation ratings across his or her multiple classrooms. The results indicate that the math classrooms accounted for 4.9 to 14.7% of the variance in the classroom observation ratings and English language arts (ELA) classrooms accounted for 6.7 to 15.5% of the variance in the ratings. The results of this study suggest that teachers’ multiple classrooms should be taken into consideration when classroom observation ratings are used to evaluate teachers in high-stakes settings.     

A democratic community of practice: unpicking all those words

The No Outsiders research consortium draws upon the Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) notion of a community of practice with a shared focus on ‘researching approaches to sexualities equality in primary schools’. While the word ‘community’, for some, may carry connotations of harmony and even homogeneity, the project proposal anticipated that much of the project development would emerge from dissensus, rather than consensus. In this paper two participants, the senior researcher and a teacher‐researcher, will analyse themes that have emerged through web‐based and email discussions among participants over the course of a year focusing on negotiating these kinds of hierarchical relationships among teacher‐researchers and university researchers. Rather than providing guidelines for establishing and maintaining a democratic community of practice, we examine the complexities inherent in the process. We argue that the negotiation process itself is a crucial aspect of collaboration, and recommend resisting the temptation to expect these negotiations to minimize dissent and reach compromise.     

The work of the teacher-educator in Australia: Reconstructing the “superhero” performer/academic in an audit culture

What is it that teacher-educators “do”? This paper draws on interview data with Deans/Heads of Schools of Education in the Australian context to explore this question by asking: How is the teacher-educator produced as a category of academic worker? Using critical approaches to discourse analysis, the paper presents two interlocked storylines woven with varying emphasis through the interviews. First, the teacher-educator is produced as a superhero researcher and teacher, elevated by the expectations of the Excellence in Research for Australia audit/surveillance tools. Second, there is a concomitant struggle to reconcile pressure to research with commitment to meeting the needs of schooling systems, and to addressing the work of the teacher-educator in ethical terms. It is suggested that teacher-educators’ work reflects a desire to legitimate various performances of teacher education within current dynamics of audit culture pressures, set against the less visible ethical project of education more broadly conceived.     

The Dialectic Relationship between Research and Practice in Mathematics Teacher Education

This paper addresses issues linking research in student teacher learning with reflection on practice in mathematics teacher education. From a situated perspective on learning and practice, we explore our own practice as teacher educators while researching student teacher learning in our classrooms. We describe a study on student teacher learning, considering student teacher learning as a “process of becoming”, and how the results of this research have affected our development as mathematics teacher educators and members of a community of inquiry. Our work shows how in the mathematics teacher education context the relationship between theory and practice becomes an element of both teacher educator and researcher development.     

Preparing teachers for inclusive education: using inclusive pedagogy to enhance teaching and learning for all

As the concept of ‘inclusive education’ has gained currency, students who would previously have been referred to specialist forms of provision, having been judged ‘less able’, are now believed to belong in mainstream classrooms. However, it is often argued that teachers lack the necessary knowledge and skills to work with such students in inclusive classrooms. This paper reports findings of a study of a new initial teacher education course that starts from the premise that the question is not whether teachers have the necessary knowledge and skills to teach in inclusive classrooms, but how to make best use of what they already know when learners experience difficulty. The theoretical rationale for the development of the course is outlined and examples of how teachers might engage in more inclusive practice are presented.