New Articles
| TI: Teacher Learning: the Key to Educational Reform | |
| AU: Lieberman, Ann; Pointer Mace, Deslree SO: Journal of Teacher Education, 2008 VOL. 59 NO. 3 ,pp.226-234 AB: This letter to the next president of the United States recommends the transformation of teacher in-service learning as a powerful means of education reform. Too often, professional development is perceived by teachers as being idiosyncratic and irrelevant. The authors recommend a reconceptualization of professional learning for practicing teachers, in which educators are involved in learning communities, these communities evolve over time, and they revolve around norms of openness, scholarly rigor, and collaborative construction of professional knowledge. The authors describe three such environments of professional learning—the National Writing Proje ct, the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, and the Quest Project for Signature Pedagogies in Teacher Education—and recommend that the incoming chief executive should capitalize on the strengths of such programs and extend them to many more teachers nationwide. KW: teacher learning • communities of practice • professional development • online networks |
| TI: Teacher learning through reciprocal peer coaching: An analysis of activity sequences | |
| AU: Zwart, R.C.; Wubbels, Th.; Bolhuis, S. SO: Teaching and Teacher Education, 2008 VOL. 24 NO. 4 ,pp.982-1002 AB: Just what and how eight experienced teachers in four coaching dyads learned during a 1-year reciprocal peer coaching trajectory was examined in the present study. The learning processes were mapped by providing a detailed description of reported learning activities, reported learning outcomes, and the relations between these two. The sequences of learning activities associated with a particular type of learning outcome were next selected, coded, and analyzed using a variety of quantitative methods. The different activity sequences undertaken by the teachers during a reciprocal peer coaching trajectory were found to trigger different aspects of their professional development KW: Learning process; Learning activity; Activity sequence; Reciprocal peer coaching; Professional development |
| TI: Interaction in Online Courses for Teacher Education: Subject Matter and Pedagogy | |
| AU: McCrory, R.; Putnam, R.; Jansen, A. SO: Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, 2008 VOL. 16 NO. 2 ,pp.155-180 AB: This article explores results from a research project studying teacher learning and faculty teaching in two online courses for teachers in a master’s degree program. We focus on the interactions among students in online small-group discussions. We argue that three aspects of the online cours es impact the way students enter into discussions online, and consequently, what they have opportunities to learn: (a) the subject matter itself, (b) the representations and media through which the subject matter is engaged, and (c) the tasks students are asked to carry out online. In addition, we argue that students’ disposition to engage in constructive discourse (or not) is an important and only partly controll :able factor in what happens in online discussion. KW: Educational Technology; Collaboration; eLearning;Professional Development;Teaching Methods;Multimedia |
| TI: ‘That’s not treating you as a professional’: teachers constructing complex professional identities through talk | |
| AU: Cohen, Jennifer L. SO: Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 2008 VOL. 14 NO. 2 ,pp.79 – 93 AB: Public debates about the role of teachers and teacher performance place teachers at the center of a range of national and local discourses. The notion of teacher professional identity, therefore, framed in a variety of ways, engages people across social contexts, whether as educators, parents, students, taxpayers, voters or consumers of news and popular media. These highly contested discourses about teachers’ roles and responsibilities constitute an important context for research on teachers and teaching, as researchers and educators ask how changes to the teaching profession affect teacher professional identity. This article investigates the identity talk of three mid-career teachers in an urban, public school in the USA, to better understand how the teachers used language to accomplish complex professional identities. Research approaches to teacher identity often focus on teacher narrative as a key tool in identity formation. The analysis presented here extend s our understanding of language as a resource in teacher identity construction by using discourse analysis to investigate how speakers use implicit meaning to accomplish the role identity of teacher. The analytical lens draws on an interdisciplinary framework that combines a sociological approach to teacher as a role identity with an investigation of language as a cultural practice, grounded in the ethnography of communication. The analysis focuses on how teachers use specific discourse strategies – reported speech, mimicked speech, pronoun shifts, oppositional portraits, and juxtaposition of explicit claims – to construct implicit identity claims that, while they are not stated directly, are central to accomplishing teacher as a role identity. The analysis presented here focuses on the particular implicit role claim of teacher as collaborator. Findings show that, in their identity talk, the teachers strategically positioned themselves in relation to others and to institutio nal practices, actively negotiating competing discourses about teacher identity by engaging in a counter discourse emphasizing teachers’ professional role as knowledge producers rather than information deliverers, collaborative, rather than isolated, and as agents of change engaged in critical analysis to plan action. Awareness of how these counter discourses operate in the teachers’ conversation helps us better understand the cultural significance of identity talk as a site for the negotiation of the significances for the role identity of teacher. In addition, the notions of role identity and implicit identity claims offer an accessible way to talk about the complexity of teacher identity, which can be helpful for increasing awareness of the importance of teacher identity in teacher education and professional development, and in bringing teachers’ voices more prominently into the debates over education KW: discourse analysis; id entity talk; secondary school teachers; urban schools; teacher characteristics; role identity |
| TI: Teachers reflecting on their work: articulating what is said about what is done | |
| AU: Marcos, Juan Jos; Snchez, Emilio; Tillema, Harm SO: Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 2008 VOL. 14 NO. 2 ,pp.95 – 114 AB: Teachers’ written reflections on their work, which report on a change in their practice, were the object of this research. Taking teachers’ articulation of their plans and actions in teacher journals as our source, this s tudy’s aim is twofold: (1) to describe how teacher reflect in a self-initiated and non-framed way on their own practice, and (2) to review teacher self generated reflections in reference to models of reflection. In this way, we tried to disclose what precisely teachers write (said) when reflecting on their work (did) in order to appreciate their way of describing what matters in their work; and position this in reference to models that conceptualise (“talk”) on how to actualise (’walk’) reflection. This ‘double’ articulation of reflection is gauged in two ways, i.e., on: a) completeness, that is, whether it includes relevant components of reflection (models) to be found in the literature, and on b) recursiveness, that is, whether the written account gives evidence of an integrated cyclical, i.e., recursive process of re-view, which appraises and looks back on what has been accomplished. The results show that teachers do not work along the lines identified in current refl ection models (i.e. providing clear problem definition, searching for evidence, planning for change, and reviewing plans). Instead, many teachers use a narrative and valuing appraisal of their accomplishments; not so much cautiously reviewing their actions but prospectively commenting on plans and solutions for future action. The data lead us to be cautious about the prominence of reflection models as advocated in the literature to be applied to teachers’ written accounts of their practice. KW: teacher reflection; action research; teacher research; self-studies; reflective action; professional development |
| TI: Making Connections: Grounding Professional Development in the Developmental Theories of Vygotsky | |
| AU: Eun, Barohny < SPAN class=”heading abbreviation”>SO: The Teacher Educator, 2008 VOL. 43 NO. 2 ,pp.134 – 155 AB: Professional development is grounded in the developmental theories of Vygotsky in an attempt to better understand the mechanism underlying teacher development. The rationale for the use of Vygotskian framework is provided in the context of describing the various models of professional development. Within this theoretical framework, it is argued that concepts formulated by Vygotsky that are relevant to the education of students in school settings are also applicable to the professional growth of teachers in their work places. Various implications for effective professional development are presented by linking the developmental aspects of professional development and major tenets of Vygotsky’s developmental theori es. |
| TI: Fitting the Methodology with the Research: An exploration of narrative, self-study and auto-ethnography | |
| AU: Hamilton, Mary Lynn; Smith, Laura; Worthington, Kristen SO: Studying Teacher Education, 2008 VOL. 4 NO. 1 ,pp.17 – 28 AB: Sharpening our approaches to methodology in self-study research can strengthen our work and clarify questions that arise for readers unfamiliar with this research genre. Our article considers three methodologies – narrative, auto-ethnography and self-study – that privilege self in the research design, believing that addressing self can contribute to our understandings about teaching and teacher education. We address two questions: In what ways, if any, does the methodological choice affect the inquiry of the researchers? When, if ever, might self-study be the best choice for inquiry? For this, we use one selected work to explore the critical elements of these methodologies to determine usefulness. This is not a discussion to determine which approach is better; rather it is a discussion to explore w hen one method might be privileged over another and why KW: methodology; research design; self-study; narrative inquiry; auto-ethnography |
| TI: Balancing Acts: Negotiating authenticity and authority in shared reflection | |
| AU: Calderwood, Patricia E.; D’Amico, Kathleen M. SO: Studying Teacher Education, 2008 VOL. 4 NO. 1 ,pp.47 – 59 AB: In this self-study, a teacher educator and an experienced teacher analyze an unexpected shared opportunity to mentor pre-service elementary educators. Our partnership arose during a graduate course on literacy development for elementary students, serendipitously captured during an extended electronic conversation with the pre-service candidates. We uncovered an interplay between authenticity and authority that generated enhanced professional development for each of us and for the teac her candidates who were enrolled in the course. As well as reflections on our own practices, implications for teacher education development and pedagogy are noted. KW: teacher education; professional development; collaboration |
Information from the Israeli Macam center
