Who is to retrain the teacher trainers?: A Papua New Guinea case study

The single most important factor to improve the quality of education in a developing country appears to be increased general and professional education of teachers. Initially, it seems that this may be appropriately addressed in the teachers' colleges. However, the teacher educators themselves, often have received their own education either from the universities of developed countries or from “expert” expatriates at home. Often the result has been an adapted western curriculum being offered in the teachers' colleges, which is inappropriate to the student teachers. As a means of obtaining increased insight into a developing country's context, this study sought to gain some understanding of how Papua New Guinea teacher educators and inservice teachers negotiate their western higher education at the University of Papua New Guinea. This may provide assistance to expatriate educators to provide an educational experience that addresses student learning needs with appropriate process and content.     

The Nature of Social Practice Among School Professionals: Consequences of the Academic Pressure Exerted by Teachers in Their Teaching

The purpose of this study was to measure teachers' views about trust between teachers, trust between the principal and teachers, peer collaboration, positive attitudes towards the school and how these antecedents influence the academic pressure teachers put on pupils with respect to learning and learning intensity and performance. The methodology involved was a cross-sectional survey of 234 teachers from 11 Norwegian schools. The structural equation analysis indicated that principal-teacher trust has a moderately high impact on such constructs as “teacher-teacher trust” and “academic pressure” and that “teacher-teacher trust” has a moderately high impact on teachers' “peer collaboration”. “Peer collaboration” has a lower impact on “academic pressure”, while the impact of “positive attitudes towards the school” was moderately high. The article concludes with a discussion of the knowledge basis for understanding how social practice among teachers and school leaders in school communities is mobilised for a sustained focus on pupil learning. Implications for practice and directions for future research are discussed.     

Teacher-Advocates Respond to ESSA: “Support the Good Parts—Resist the Bad Parts”

Although researchers consider them powerful, teacher policy advocates are among the least studied stakeholders in U.S. public education reform today. Although plenty of attention has been given to the impact of policy on teachers' work, little research explores how teachers interpret or interact with policy. Drawing on the work of Spillane, Reiser, and Reimer (2002) on teachers' policy implementation and Coburn's (2001) work on teachers' collective sense-making of policy, this qualitative study examines the different ways in which five teachers interpreted, translated, and enacted a response to ESSA. The findings describe how contextual factors influence teachers' relationship with education policy: (a) structural supports for grassroots involvement via social networks are instrumental in mobilizing teachers, and (b) unless a more bottom-up approach is taken that enables teacher agency, sense-making, and advocacy, top-down school policies will continue to hold limited promise. The paper concludes with implications for understanding how teachers are indeed policy advocates.     

U.S. Teachers as Policy Protagonists in Digital Public Spaces?

Teachers engage with policies far beyond the confines of their classroom and seemingly unrelated to their classroom practice, stretching the parameters of theories such as street-level bureaucracy (Lipsky, 2010; Weatherly & Lipsky, 1977) and doing policy in schools (Ball, Maguire, & Braun, 2012). This was observed in ethnographic studies and analyses, suggesting a “policy protagonism” in which teachers engaged in public arenas with the state and with the public outside of school to address problems they faced within school walls (Robert & McEntarfer, 2014). Four attributes of policy protagonism are defining policy “problems,” seeking power and resources to address those policy-worthy problems, “using” social categories and symbolic identities such as perceptions of teachers as mothers and caregivers, and, finally, demanding multiple seats at the decision-making table. Using discourse analysis, I examine Massachusetts' teachers' publications in local and national online newspapers between 2012–2014 that identify Teach Plus Teaching Policy Fellows, teachers who presumably wish to engage with public policy and are taught how to do so. The sample only demonstrated application of the first attribute, defining policy problems. Changes in policy and policymaking will only come from systematic and sustained engagement of teachers in policy protagonism in both real and virtual public spaces. Although teaching policy fellows were trained to do just that, the analysis suggests that more effort is needed to support teachers' policy work in public spaces. There is no silver bullet to the educational challenge of strengthening teachers' policy work and gaining a seat at the policy table.     

Rethinking Equity: Preservice Teachers' Perceptions and Practice Around Policy

Despite the body of literature around practicing teachers and policy (Knapp, Ferguson, Bamberg, &; Hill, 1998; Kumar &; Scuderi, 2000; Lortie, 1975/2002), little is known about the involvement of their preservice counterparts. Preservice teachers have limited exposure to policy-related coursework in their professional training (Floden &; Meniketti, 2005) and scholarship is relatively silent regarding preservice teachers' experiences with educational policies and their sense-making process (Spillane, 2004; Weick, 1995; see Heineke, Ryan, &; Tocci, 2015, for a notable exception).

This paper examines preservice teachers negotiating and making sense of a particular policy, the Massachusetts' Rethinking Equity and Teaching for English Language Learners (RETELL). It addresses the following questions: First, what do preservice teachers know about policy in general and the RETELL language policy in particular? Second, how do preservice teachers make sense of the implementation of the RETELL policy in the various settings of their professional training? Third, in what ways do preservice teachers' experiences with the policy influence their orientations toward teaching emergent bilingual students? This analysis demonstrates that preservice teachers have limited general knowledge of educational policy process, and limited specific knowledge around the RETELL language policy. Yet, they learn important lessons about how to “do” policy from their field supervisors and play an important role in policy implementation. The impact of the RETELL policy on preservice teachers' beliefs about teaching emergent bilingual students is mediated by the lack of policy information they receive and by their experiences in the field. This paper adds to the limited literature around preservice teachers involvement in policy and offers recommendations for highlighting the importance of policy education in teacher training.     

Assessment as Judgment-in-Context: Analysing how teachers evaluate students' writing 1

In this paper, we analyse teachers' judgments of students' written texts. We document how teachers use evidence in ways that depend both on their knowledge of the students and on the assessment framework they need to use. We analyse teachers' judgments by contrasting the structures of assessments made using teachers' normal classroom judgment processes with those made using an external set of “benchmark” standards. We show how the tension between demands for system-wide assessment validity and localised contextually sensitive site validity impacts on the richness and consistency of the judgment processes. We conclude that current understandings of teacher judgment processes that operate in everyday assessment practices generally fail to account for the complexity and dynamism of this routine classroom activity. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the methodology of judgment analysis, combined with think-aloud protocols, has the potential to shed light on the complexities associated with the operation of judgment in educational assessment.     

Teachers’ Lives in Context: A Framework for Understanding Barriers to High-Quality Teaching Within Resource Deprived Settings

There is a profound for more effective schools, especially within resource-poor communities in low- and middle-income countries. A wide range of literature identifies teachers as the most critical component of schools in regards to student learning. Despite this, there is a dearth of literature on how teachers' experiences influence their ability to attend school, remain in the teaching profession, and provide high quality teaching within the classroom. This study presents a theoretical framework for understanding the role of teachers' lives in context (skills, knowledge, and attitudes; poverty and health; contextual supports/barriers to teaching) in influencing teacher effectiveness. This framework builds upon Tseng and Seidman's (2007) systems framework for understanding youth social settings in order to incorporate teachers' lives into a larger model of educational effectiveness. This synthesis reveals significant gaps in our understanding of teachers' experiences and how they affect teaching. At the teacher attendance, attrition, and pedagogical quality and a key moderator of educational interventions. Implications for research, practice, and policy are discussed.     

Perform or else: the performative enhancement of teacher professionalism

The Singapore Ministry of Education's Enhanced Performance Management System (EPMS) was instituted in 2005 as a system of professional accountability to enhance the standards and stakes of teacher professionalism in schools. This essay explores how the EPMS, with its underlying paradigm of performance management, functions as a “technology of discipline” within the political economy of teacher professionalization in Singapore. The analysis centres on the discursive mechanisms of a standardized appraisal instrument known as the Work Review Form. Applying speech act theory via the insights of J.L. Austin and J. Butler, I argue that teachers' professional qualities are not only described and prescribed but also produced by the appraisal protocols of the EPMS – a process contingent on the discursive performativity of the Work Review Form. Implicated in this notion of performativity are the rhetorical manoeuvres by which teachers perform “on paper” under the pressure to perform. Such performance pressures point to a range of ethical ambiguities surrounding the “enhanced management” of teachers' work under the profit-motive of performance excellence.     

The “Datafication” of Teaching: Can Teachers Speak Back to the Numbers?

Teachers face considerable and increasing pressure in their working lives. Labor intensification compels teachers to work faster, harder, and longer. However, teachers also experience increasing external control over what they teach and how they teach. These processes are increasingly made possible by the “datafication” of teaching, whereby the educational process is increasingly transformed into numbers that allow measurement, comparison, and the functioning of high-stakes accountability systems linked to rewards and sanctions. Although there is no question that being able to use student assessment data to support learning has an important place in teachers' repertoire of skills, “datafication” refers to the use of data in a way that has become increasingly detached from supporting learning and is much more concerned with the management of teacher performance as an end in itself. This article presents two currents of critical thought in relation to teachers' work, labor process theory and poststructural analyses grounded in the concept of performativity, and discusses them as a way of “making sense” of teachers' work and the “datafication” of teaching, with a particular focus on questions of control and resistance.

?It seeks to understand why, despite the pressures on teachers, teacher resistance has seldom developed in ways, at times, or on a scale that both experience and theoretical insight might have predicted. There are clearly significant differences between the two perspectives presented in this article, not least in the ways they conceptualize and explain “resistance.” However, common ground is identifiable and the two theoretical approaches can be bridged in a form that can be productive for those seeking to “speak back to the numbers.” In looking to broker this theoretical divide, I argue that frame theory, rooted within the sociology of social movements, can offer a fruitful way of theory bridging, while also providing the basis for a wider politics of transformation. The article offers several examples of grassroots initiatives formed to oppose standardized testing in England that provide practical examples of this “ideas work” in action.     

Research on Teachers and Teacher Education in Scandinavia: a retrospective review

The important role in learning and upbringing played by teachers has been acknowledged for a long time. However, research on this question belongs with few exceptions, to the post‐war area in all the Nordic countries. During the last few decades a extensive research within a variety of studies have addressed the question. And, in accord with realistic expectations, the research conducted within this area since the middle of the 1950ties reflects a change in the interest of researchers similar to that found outside the Nordic countries, from studies of teacher behaviour to research on teacher cognition and analyses of the interactions between students and teachers in the classroom. The review also reveals a clear and significant change in the use of research methods: quantitative methods have declined while qualitative methods have expanded. It seems characteristic of research within this area that a great number of studies have been explorative in nature and that few of them have been followed up by more intensive and theoretically grounded research. It is the authors' opinion that, considering the great number of unanswered questions and the importance of solid knowledge of the questions related to teachers' qualifications and to teacher education, it seems that research within this area is still in its infancy stage.     

Teacher classroom interactions and behaviours: Indications of bias

In some recent studies, researchers have measured teacher implicit bias and some have shown that teacher bias predicts student academic outcomes. Currently, however, how bias is portrayed to individual students is largely unknown. In this exploratory qualitative study, observations totalling 4 h per participant were undertaken with ten secondary, six intermediate, and four primary teachers in New Zealand. We utilised a thematic analysis approach to identify three themes: “differential nonverbal behaviours”, “differential academic interactions” and “differential reactions under the same conditions” that captured teachers' classroom interactions. Our findings suggested that teachers’ differential behaviours were mediating teacher bias. This was because teacher bias was recorded in every classroom; however, teachers displayed biased behaviours to varying degrees. Bias was displayed through various nonverbal and academic interactions, and some teachers portrayed their bias by treating some students differently when the situation for all students was the same.     

Designing Nordic technology-enhanced learning

The latest developments of information and communication technologies (ICT) and its large penetration in different sectors of our society pose new challenges and demands in the field of education. This special issue entitled “Designing Nordic technology-enhanced learning (TEL)”, presents and discusses how researchers in the Nordic countries are currently framing and thinking about issues that are related to pedagogical design of learning spaces, digital literacies, educational professional development, design of tools engaging students in collaborative inquiry learning as well as design-oriented multimodal understandings of learning.The objective pursued with the special issue has been to reflect upon current problems that educational institutions, practitioners and TEL researchers are facing in the Nordic countries as regards the acknowledgment of young people's ICT practices within formal education. Such analytical work has led us to identify and elaborate on what we believe constitute forthcoming research challenges for learning and education in the Nordic countries.     

Teacher Education for Research‐based Practice in Expanded Roles: Finland's experience

Preparing teachers for a research‐based professionalism has been the central mission of teacher education in Finland since the mid‐1970s. More recently, as a result of such national policy developments as school‐based curriculum development and local decision‐making, the conception of teachers' work and professionalism has expanded. Drawing on experience within the teacher education programmes at the University of Helsinki and Åbo Akademi University, this paper discusses some of the programmatic issues that these developments have raised in class‐teacher, i.e. “elementary”, teacher education programmes. We focus in particular firstly on the research thesis that is a part of every teacher education programme in Finland, and the hallmark of the research‐based professional ideal; and, secondly on the emerging issues that derive from the need to incorporate the expanded understanding of the teacher's role within the curriculum of teacher education.     

Preservice teachers' expectations about the first year of teaching

“Unrealistic optimism,” a construct used in health psychology, provided a framework for examining preservice teachers' expectations about teaching. Subjects showed a consistent tendency to believe that they would experience less difficulty than the “average first-year teacher” on 33 different teaching tasks. This optimistic bias was significantly greater for tasks perceived to be under the teacher's control and for tasks dealing with organization and management. Implications for teacher education and for the prevention of “reality shock” are discussed.     

Culture,context and the quality of education: evidence from a small‐scale extended case study in England and Denmark

Much recent education policy‐making around the world has focused on a restructuring of the role of the classroom teacher in a bid to increase the ‘quality’ of the educational experience and raise pupil attainment. However, the definition of quality, as expressed through policy, may not always accord with the aims and aspirations of individual teachers who work within a specific cultural context. The rhetoric and intent expressed in policy texts may even have the potential to restrict the quality of what teachers do. This paper draws on some of the findings from a small‐scale comparative study of teachers' work in England and Denmark which used an extended case study approach, set in a socio‐cultural framework, to examine the relationship of policy trends to teacher values and professional practice. Evidence from the study is used to discuss the issue of ‘quality’, highlighting contextually specific variations which impact on the implementation of national policy at the local level. Through a discussion of the study's methodology, attention is also drawn to the need for a more contextually sensitive approach to the creation and evaluation of policy which, while recognising universal concerns, also pays heed to local priorities and teacher values.     

Teachers' beliefs and practices: a dynamic and complex relationship

Research on teachers' beliefs has provided useful insights into understanding processes of teaching. However, no research has explored teachers' beliefs as a system nor have researchers investigated the substance of interactions between teachers' beliefs, practices and context. Therefore, the author adopts complexity theory to explore the features of the teachers' belief system and how interactions between different components of the teachers' belief system contribute to complex features of their beliefs. The author illustrates this application by using a case study example of a language teacher in a Chinese secondary school. The study used the methods of semi-structured interviews, observations and stimulated recall interviews. It revealed the co-existence of different types of beliefs. The interaction of these beliefs determined the relationship between the teacher's beliefs and practice. Moreover, the practices of “token adoption” and eclectic approach were noted as the non-linear features of the teacher's belief system at the time of curriculum reform.     

Preservice teachers' in‐the‐moment teaching decisions in reading

This study examines the types of in‐the‐moment teaching decisions 97 preservice teachers made while teaching reading and how their growing bodies of teacher knowledge influenced their abilities to think, know, feel and act like a teacher (Feiman‐Nemser, 2008 ). Findings indicated that the teacher educator's use of “metacognitive decision‐making” to promote a culture of identifying, drawing attention to, reflecting on and evaluating teaching decisions influenced the preservice teachers' abilities to think, know, feel and act like a teacher. These findings have implications for teacher education and for those who support novice teachers.     

Teacher education reform in Europe: the case of Norway; trends and tensions in a global perspective

This article focuses on teacher education reforms and related discourses. Internationally, the last decade has been an intensive period of educational reforms and restructuring, particularly regarding teacher education. Even though teacher education in Europe has a high degree of complexity and variations, common trends in the reforms are identifiable. The article deals with trends and tensions in teacher education reforms examining Norwegian teacher education as a “case” within Europe. As an analytical tool, the term “warrants”, interpreted as “reasonable grounds” for actions, is used together with our own analytical categories to capture trends in teacher education in a global perspective. One conclusion is that we can see the impact of the new global market orientation in the national discourses on teacher education.