Search

In this study of 211 teacher work samples derived from a professional development programme, teachers' conceptualisations of student inquiry were revealed by examining the nature of perceived outcomes and the role of critical thinking that animated teachers' student inquiries collected over nine years. Using a schema adapted from the literature, this paper presents a taxonomy of inquiry outcomes as engagement, as a means to develop content and skills, and as an end in itself. Results show that teachers utilised inquiry predominantly as a means to support student learning of content knowledge and skills. Descriptions of exemplar projects and three representative case study portraits reveal both how teachers perceived inquiry outcomes and the nature of student thinking. Researchers concluded that inquiry outcomes are a result of teachers' choices, particularly in relation to assessment practices. Moreover, inquiry-as-ends more consistently leveraged support for critical thinking than other outcomes. Professional development should attend to teachers' articulation of their purposes for inquiry to better enable teachers to develop inquiry activities that promote students' critical thinking.

Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity (SCALE) provided a commentary on the manuscripts in the first part of this special issue, which highlighted the benefits of edTPA and the necessity for such assessment programs to improve teacher education and strengthen teaching practices. In turn, the authors responded to the SCALE commentary. The authors' responses raise concerns about equity, fairness, and unintended consequences of teacher performance assessments. These responses highlight the need for continued dialogue on ways to improve teacher education and strengthen the teaching profession.

This article explores how candidates' experiences in multiple initial certification programs within a single School of Education evolved over the first three semesters of New York's implementation of edTPA as a requirement for initial licensure. The data reviewed included primarily surveys and interviews of teaching candidates, framed by critical perspectives on accountability, teacher performativity, and constructivist theories on learning to teach. Results suggest candidates' perceptions of program alignment and edTPA benefits improved while several challenges persisted. These included the lack of mentor teacher knowledge about the edTPA as well as disconnects between candidates' edTPA scores and local program evaluations. Additionally, student teachers' perceptions of a subtractive experience of the edTPA continued in spite of improved perceptions about the benefits of the exam and across all scoring levels, programs, and semesters. A discussion of these results considers the implication of policies that reify quality, compel performance management, and contribute to values conflict for candidates in the particularly unique developmental moment of learning to teach. These voices of student teachers, often underrepresented in the research on edTPA, urge a reconsideration of the policy on teacher performance assessments in terms of how such policies impact the experiences of those learning to teach.

Over 30 states have adopted the edTPA as a performance assessment for pre-service teachers. While many have adopted the edTPA as a program requirement, few require the edTPA for licensure of individual teacher candidates, but many states are poised to do so. While the edTPA is grounded on experiences with advanced certification and program level uses of teacher performance assessments, the research in these areas has focused on program implementation. Little research features student teacher voices and the impact of the assessment on the student teaching experience. The purpose of this article is to describe the perspectives of the first rounds of teacher candidates who completed the edTPA as a licensure exam while student teaching in multiple initial certification programs within a single School of Education. In addition to score results and student work, in-depth interviews and survey responses were the primary data collected and analyzed. In spite of pass rates over 80% with 35% at mastery levels across programs during the first two cohorts of implementation, candidate perceptions revealed contradictory views of the edTPA and its impact on candidate learning and the student teaching experience. These experiences are discussed in consideration of four themes that explore the edTPA as a reflective, educative, mandated, and subtractive experience. In light of the use of the edTPA as a high-stakes test for individual licensure, important considerations and cautions for teacher educators, policymakers, and administrators poised to phase in full-scale implementation of this assessment for high-stakes purposes are raised.

This study examines cases of teacher leaders in a professional development program that employed teacher inquiry to promote student inquiry. Program documents, observations, and interviews were examined to create three cases of high school science and math teachers learning to inquire in tandem. Guided by Cochran-Smith and Lytle's (2009) "inquiry stance," the study shows how commitment to student inquiry comes through learning gained through teacher inquiry. While conceptual understandings of teacher and student inquiry reinforced the learning of both, the parallel development of practical skills for both inquiry processes was not observed. Such conceptual growth was neither steady nor linear and characterized by some backward movement followed by significant shifts in thinking. Growth was grounded in increased experience with the process over time that deepened the teachers' trust in their students' ability to create their own knowledge--an understanding of the learning process that was made more visible by the program's requirements for teachers to evaluate student inquiry as a focus of their teacher inquiry. The study confirms the need for ongoing professional development in the more complex forms of student learning embedded in newer national standards while suggesting that approaches towards professional learning must holds similar high expectations for teachers and attention to the equally complex learning required of teachers if we truly aim to create such possibilities for student learning at higher levels.

This study explores faculty perspectives of social justice in teacher education within one New York institution with a social justice focus. Grounded in the institution's self-study process for accreditation, the researchers were a part of a team that collected data from structured interviews, including a card sort, of 42 full time teacher educators across 16 programs in the institution. Informed by sociocultural theories (Vygotsky, 1978, Wertsch, 1991), a content analysis revealed the language selected by faculty as well as their meaning-making process and describes how individuals contextualized those meanings. Findings demonstrated a range of meanings and lack of a shared understanding about social justice. Even where apparent consensus existed around particular terminology, the content analysis revealed that individual meanings were deeply contextualized within disciplines and, thereby, were quite distinct. We raise questions regarding how to use dialogue as a meaning making process, the possibilities for a range of meanings, and the significance of contextualizing social justice. The study suggests that significant tensions remain but that "being in tension" is a critical position and potentially informative to faculty who might consider using a framework that invites more diverse perspective rather than embrace a unitary meaning of the term.

At its core, inquiry--whether conducted with students or teachers--is a process of making observations, asking questions, working with evidence, and interpreting data. Even though research shows well-documented benefits to understanding content, secondary teachers often hesitate to incorporate inquiry for learning. This article presents two qualities which are crucial to inquiry: autonomy and authenticity. The author discusses going from teacher inquiry to collaborative inquiry, including 4 keys to collaborative inquiry.

This study explores the first year of a grant-funded professional development program that utilized collaborative inquiry to develop teachers' capacities to enact inquiry learning with secondary students in a variety of content areas. Guided by a vision of inquiry as a complex endeavor, located along a continuum of decisions about authentic disciplinary tasks and student autonomy, as well as a situated view of teacher learning, researchers examined surveys, reflective writing and teacher work samples to explore the relationship between developing capacity for both student and teacher inquiry. Teachers reported satisfaction with their learning about teacher and student inquiry while exhibiting capacity at mostly beginning levels. Ultimately, these results led to discussion of the practical and conceptual dilemmas for facilitating teacher learning when the two inquiry processes for teachers and students are developed in tandem. While conceptual shifts in planning and assessment were noted, practical capacities of both were limited. Most teachers, however, evidenced interest in inquiry for engagement and no shift in embracing more self-directed views of their own learning in spite of professional development interventions.

This qualitative study explores a cohort professional development experience that brought new teachers together every few weeks from across an urban school district. Observation data were analyzed through Wenger's (1998) "Communities of Practice" social learning framework. The purpose was to examine how a cohort can be a valuable resource of new teacher support, particularly in areas where novices, who are being prepared largely through alternative routes, start their careers in some of the most challenging teaching assignments. Key theoretical insights resulting from the analysis include (a) the importance of interactivity of the Wenger elements, (b) the centrality of the community component, and (c) the implications of what legitimate peripheral participation looks like for a solely novice community of practice. Implications of these theoretical considerations are discussed and then linked to possibilities for practice and research to supplement current, traditional induction and mentoring practices. (Contains 1 note and 3 tables.)

A review of theoretical or conceptual writing on teacher education reveals numerous examples of the term "social justice" in discussions of preservice preparation. Despite this widespread use, little research documents if and how teacher education programs utilize the concept in their programs. This study examines how institutions that included "social justice" within their NCATE accreditation documents used the term in their articulation of program practices, goals, and values. Based on an extensive qualitative content analysis of NCATE conceptual frameworks, the authors assert that the social justice reform agenda is only weakly represented in accreditation artifacts and that there is little consensus on the enactment of social justice in teacher education, even among those programs that invoke the terminology. (Contains 1 figure and 4 notes.)

The authors of this study document one middle school classroom in an attempt to understand how inquiry learning, supported with technological tools, can provide students with opportunities to develop ownership of science content knowledge. Case study and collaborative teacher researcher methods were utilized to document the implementation of a year-long science curriculum based on backwards design (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005). Drawing upon sociocultural theories (Vygotsky, 1978; Wetsch, 1998), the authors utilized observations, examination of student work, and interview and survey data from students to articulate the conceptual and practical tools (Grossman, Smagorinsky, & Valencia, 1999) of nurturing ownership among middle school students in these high-stakes times. Results include the developmental nature of nurturing ownership among middle school students, the need for deliberate inclusion of authorship opportunities supported by technology, the reciprocal relationship of developing ownership of content and building a shared investment in the classroom environment, and the documentation of class chats as a deliberate effort to prepare, challenge, and reinforce student learning. Implications build a case for a practical inquiry where the instructional methods used are as important as the classroom conversations teachers and students engage in, where the goal is not inquiry learning but promoting a kind of shared ownership of the learning environment itself. (Contains 1 table and 1 figure.)

This article examines the career trajectories and biographies of three women who completed the same graduate preservice program in elementary education. While two have become successful teacher leaders, the third has moved in and out of teaching. This inquiry draws on a ten-year longitudinal study of one of these teachers, positioning that teacher's story in the context of two others from the same program in order to describe the layered process of socialization as a continuous reconstruction of personal and professional knowledge through the years encompassing teacher education and into the early years of teaching. Such an approach seeks specifically to understand what holds academically oriented students in a profession fraught with high dropout rates, especially among their peers who have graduated from top public and private universities with a strong demonstration of academic skills and content area knowledge. A focus on the retention of academically able teachers offers insight into the larger and well-documented crisis of teacher retention among a specific population of teachers who may have the capacity to become "transformative intellectuals". Understanding the recursive and non-linear reconstruction of personal and professional knowledge required a qualitative documentary analysis that was guided by the constant comparative method. As a result of this analysis, the article presents both teacher portraits and emergent themes across the three teachers. Four prominent themes are discussed in relation to these teachers (collaborating with other teachers, belonging to the profession, engaging in leadership and creating supportive school cultures) to offer insight regarding the practices and structures to prepare, support and retain academically able teachers who may also be able to contribute in particular ways to the reform of schools and teaching. (Contains 2 notes.)

This qualitative case study presents three novices in urban schools who enacted curricular projects as participants in a university-based professional development program. This experience created an opportunity for practical risk taking, enabling them to consider the consequences of curricular choices in personal terms. Such professional development pivoted on epistemological inquiry grounded in three critical tension areas: management of relationships, curricular ownership, and the sources of classroom knowledge. In these cases, practical risk taking seemed to precede conceptual changes in the teachers' thinking about curriculum itself, raising concerns about how novices learn during an accountability era where such risk taking is often discouraged. (Contains 2 tables.)