Education Commons^™

Literacy Instructional Coaching Practices In Writing And Writing Instruction: An Exploration Of K–6 Teachers' Perspectives, Jadelyn Abbott, Katherine Landau Wright, Hannah Carter

Literacy, Language, and Culture Faculty Publications and Presentations

Purpose

The purpose of this study was to identify if and how K–6 teachers perceive that their literacy instructional coaches influence their writing teaching.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors employed a parallel convergent mixed-methods design with survey data. The authors used thematic analysis to identify patterns within short-answer responses.

Findings

K–6 teachers receive little literacy coaching specific to writing. However, when they do receive coaching, they believe it benefits their writing instruction. Sustained coaching through the coaching cycle, frequent collaborations, and support with writing instructional resources and strategies were reported as the most influential writing coaching practices.

Research limitations/implications

Sample size was …

Fish In A Tree Book Study Assignment Description, David Wolff

Open Educational Resources - Teaching and Learning

Individuals lead storied lives, and everyone has a story to tell. Our stories can be shared orally and documented in print. Often, learners are exposed to stories through novels and other trade books. Teacher educators may benefit from using the stories in novels and trade books as case studies in preservice teacher preparation course. This assignment description outlines how to use the novel, Fish in a Tree by Lynda Mullaly Hunt, as a case study to contextualize and understand the lived story of an individual living and learning with dyslexia. Through the novel, preservice teachers experience the dilemmas faced and …

Home Of The Brave Book Study Assignment Description, David Wolff

Open Educational Resources - Teaching and Learning

Individuals lead storied lives, and everyone has a story to tell. Our stories can be shared orally and documented in print. Often, learners are exposed to stories through novels and other trade books. Teacher educators may benefit from using the stories in novels and trade books as case studies in preservice teacher preparation course. This assignment description outlines how to use the novel, Home of the Brave by Katherine Applegate, as a case study to contextualize and understand the lived story of an individual learning a second language and living in a new country. Through the novel, preservice teachers experience …

Adaptive Instruction Through Reflection: How Preservice Teachers Create And Implement Individualized Literacy Lessons In A University Reading Center, Jennifer Marie Lennon

Dissertations

Modern classrooms are increasingly diverse. Students vary in their academic abilities, personal interests, cultural and linguistic backgrounds, and previous experiences (Allen et al., 2013). To meet the varied needs of students, educators must adapt their instruction so all are able to find success. Modifying lesson plans and changing instruction based on student needs are forms of adaptive instruction (Hoffman & Duffy, 2016; Vaughn, 2019). This study explored the metacognitive processes of preservice teachers (PSTs) as they implemented adaptive instruction within their literacy lessons in a university reading center tutoring program. Adaptive instruction was examined through two lenses: first, as PSTs …

Meeting The Needs Of Multilingual Students: Using Teacher-Reported Challenges And Successes For Teacher Preparation, Vanessa Z. Mari, Steve Hayden

Northwest Journal of Teacher Education

Preparing teachers to meet the needs of multilingual students is the goal of TESOL and Bilingual education programs in higher education. What these programs use to determine what these needs are can vary by location, faculty, and population of learners. This qualitative study surveyed in-service teachers applying for their TESOL or Bilingual endorsements in a college in the southwest United States. Research questions asked about the challenges and successes teachers face in meeting the needs of multilingual students and used this data to determine themes. The data showed that teachers encounter challenges meeting the needs of multilingual students in the …

Navigating The Chasms Between Real And Ideal Literacy Professional Development, Poonam Arya, Kathryn L. Roberts

Reading Horizons: A Journal of Literacy and Language Arts

In this study, we examine the supportive and hindering factors that influenced 26 teachers’ implementation of pedagogy learned through a research-based, resource-intensive literacy PD initiative (100+ hours). Through post-intervention interviews, we explore the space between learning and enactment of new practices for literacy teaching and learning. Specifically, we ask, What are teachers’ perceptions of the contextual factors that support and hinder their moving from learning to implementation of literacy PD? Results indicate four primary supportive factors (PD facilitators, communities of practice, schools/administrators, and student affective responses) and three primary hindering factors (circumstantial factors, lack of resources, and mismatches between school …

Ungifted: Teacher Candidates’ Understanding Of Giftedness Through Literature Circles, Sharryn Larsen Walker, Wendie Lappin Castillo

Literacy Practice and Research

The purpose of this qualitative study was to analyze the reflective comments made by teacher candidates (TCs) after they participated in weekly discussions about the tween novel Ungifted by Korman (2012). The TCs attended at a regional Pacific Northwest university, majoring or minoring in various educational fields. After reading and discussing the topic of giftedness as it related to their engagement with the novel, the TCs wrote a reflective essay about their new understandings of teaching the gifted. Using the constant-comparative method, the essays from three sections of the course over a three-year period were read and reread for identifiable …

Committing To Anti-Bias Anti-Racist Teaching: From Activity To Habits Of Mind, Tierney B. Hinman, Elizabeth Y. Stevens, Tess M. Dussling, Nance S. Wilson, Amy Tondreau, Wendy Gardiner, Kristen White, Sophie Degener

Excelsior: Leadership in Teaching and Learning

With the need to prepare teacher candidates to work with an increasingly diverse student body in U.S. schools, a multi-institutional collaborative self-study group was formed to examine ways in which teacher educators could expand beyond practice-based literacy preparation to support candidates’ understanding and implementation of critical pedagogies. The self-study served as a catalyst for interrogating the identities the teacher educators brought to their practice and began a journey that transformed a focus on critical literacies into a commitment to action for change through anti-bias anti-racist work. This paper draws from group dialogue and reflective journals to examine specific practices implemented …

Learning To Lead Group Discussions: Teacher Education At The Intersection Of Content, Pedagogy, And Equity, Catherine M. Kelly, Elizabeth A. Fogarty, Suzanne Kabach, Kristi G. Tamte, Amy F. Smith

The Reading Professor

In this paper, five teacher educators explore the integration of practice-based teacher education pedagogies to support preservice teacher learning and enactment of large group discussion in fieldwork settings. We discuss our own insights into the shifts in our instruction as we focus more acutely on teaching high leverage practices through practice-based teacher education pedagogies. We share the units we taught with specific focus on the intersecting and overlapping knowledge related to content, pedagogy, and equity necessary for effective teaching through large group discussions. We discuss tensions that arose in our own practice and offer implications for teacher educators interested in …

Student With Twice-Exceptionalities Iep Meeting Assignment Description, David Wolff

Open Educational Resources - Teaching and Learning

General education teachers should remember that all students are general education students, first. We need to be prepared to work with students of all abilities in our classrooms. As general education teachers, we have an active role on a child’s IEP team and an active role during the IEP meeting. This assignment asked preservice teachers to develop a script of what they would say at an IEP meeting of one character from four different novels that would be considered a child with twice-exceptionalities.

Teaching Culture In The Argentinian Efl Classroom: Beliefs, Practice And Challenges, María Mercedes Sempé

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

The need to address culture in EFL/ESL classrooms has been stressed by scholars in the SLA field for decades (see Kramsch, 1993, 2009, 2011; Byram, 1988; Liddicoat & Scarino, 2013). The original intention of working with culture in the English classes as a means to develop language proficiency –sociocultural competence– was expanded, and nowadays, the focus is on the role culture instruction has in developing empathy and respect for other ways of living and in promoting reflection about learners’ own lifestyle –intercultural competence (Byram, 1988, 2008; Deardoff, 2006). This new focus on cultural instruction is reflected in national curriculums around …

Disciplinary Literacy In Practice: Examining How English Teachers Read Literary Texts, Matt Cantrell

Literacy Practice and Research

This study investigates the viability of disciplinary literacy by (1) examining whether English teachers can use disciplinary methods to read a disciplinary text and (2) identifying possible relationships between teacher training and the use of disciplinary approaches. In total, 21 English instructors thought-aloud as they read an unfamiliar poem, and two independent raters evaluated each transcribed response as either “Disciplinary” or “General” depending on the types of reading strategies demonstrated using a rubric generated from previous expert-novice studies in literary reading. This study found that ten (10) of the 21 participants used at least one disciplinary method to make sense …

Imagining The Possible: Reflections On Teaching A Writing Methods Course For Pre-Service Undergraduate Secondary English/Language Arts Teachers, Emily S. Meixner

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

What's possible in a teaching writing methods class? In this essay, the author provides a descriptive portrait of the undergraduate secondary writing methods course she teaches, focusing on five specific learning outcomes: teacher writing identities, knowledge of writer's craft, grammatical awareness and an understanding of linguistic justice/injustice, writing workshop methodology, and genre-based unit and lesson planning. Course readings, assignments, and work samples are included.

Preservice Teachers’ Perceptions And Knowledge Of Response To Intervention/Multitiered Systems Of Support, Alexandra J. Taylor, Tommy Wells, Amy E. Lein

Kentucky Teacher Education Journal: The Journal of the Teacher Education Division of the Kentucky Council for Exceptional Children

There has been considerable research that establishes the need to improve teachers’ knowledge of and ability to effectively implement response to intervention (RtI)/multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS), and there is a scarcity of research examining interventions addressing these concerns. In a mixed methods study, we examined the perceptions and knowledge of the RtI/MTSS frameworks of undergraduate preservice teaching candidates enrolled in a dual certification program at a small, private Catholic university in Kentucky, before and after participating in a semester-long, experiential learning project. The project involved monitoring both the reading and mathematics progress of struggling elementary or middle school-aged students …

Linguistically Inclusive Tesol Course Design And Its Effect On Pre-Service Teacher Education, Dylan Thibaut, Irina Mclaughlin

Northwest Journal of Teacher Education

Lack of linguistic awareness prevents teachers from catering to English learners. This study proposed a new linguistically inclusive course and compared pre-service teacher knowledge of the linguistic features of five frequently spoken languages in the course versus standard courses. Odds of a correct answer on linguistic questions increased significantly in 28% of the areas tested. The inclusive course showed increased linguistic awareness compared to standard courses.

Needed: Hits In Teacher Education Programs, Joseph Sanacore

The Reading Professor

From kindergarten children to graduate-level students, critical thinking is vitally important for personal and academic growth. Because today's world is saturated with all types of information, people--young and old--need the tools for determining what is true, "fake," or biased. Especially needed are teacher education programs that support higher interactive thinking skills (HITS) for undergraduate and graduate students. Whether they are preparing for student teaching or engaged in classroom practice, education majors benefit from gaining insights about critical thinking so they can nurture this growth in the children and adolescents who are entrusted to them. Fortunately, professional literature and evidence-based practices …

Generating Reflections Through Professional Collaborative Storytelling, Anne Keary, Narelle Wood, Karina Barley, Kelly Carabott

Australian Journal of Teacher Education

For teachers, storytelling is a way of making sense of everyday pedagogical practices and connecting with colleagues. In this paper, we explore how storytelling contributed to a collaborative culture indicative of our professional journey as four teacher educators. We examine six online weekly Zoom conversations we participated in as a teaching group to share our pedagogical ideas for enhancing an English education unit of work. During this storytelling, we discussed how we engaged with the teaching of, teaching about and teaching through the teaching and learning curriculum cycle to a first-year cohort of preservice teachers (PSTs). Importantly, we deliberated on …

Linguistic Awareness And Dyslexia Beliefs Among Teachers Of Students Who Are Blind Or Visually Impaired., Nosheen Gul, Lindsay N. Harris, Alicia Larouech, Gracie Strohm

CISLL Publications

US students who are blind or have visual impairments do not read at the level of a third-grader with typical sight until, on average, halfway through the seventh grade. As a first step toward narrowing that gap, we investigated levels of linguistic awareness among teachers of students who are blind or visually impaired (TSBVIs) because research with general education teachers has demonstrated a link between teacher linguistic awareness and student literacy outcomes. We also examined the accuracy of dyslexia beliefs among TSBVIs and whether TSBVI linguistic aware- ness and dyslexia beliefs are associated with training and experience variables. A survey …

Justice Through Practice: Inquiry On The Development Of Preservice Teachers’ Teaching For Social Justice, Bethany Silva, Elyse L. Hambacher, Ruth Wharton-Mcdonald

Journal of Practitioner Research

This article reports on a collaboration among three teacher educators to facilitate pre-service teacher (PST)s’ equity literacy through a social-justice themed afterschool program for elementary-aged children that was embedded in PSTs’ coursework. The teacher educators engaged in practitioner inquiry (e.g., Anderson, Herr, & Nihlen, 2007; Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009), posing the question, “What happens when preservice teachers use justice-oriented children’s literature to facilitate discussions about inequity with young children?” We used inductive analysis (Miles, Huberman, & Saldaña, 2014) to observe themes across 17 PSTs’ written and videotaped reflections, collected over two semesters. Reflections pointed to a fear of the unknown …

Reflections On The Politics Of Professionalism: Critical Autoethnographies Of Anti-Blackness In The Ela Classroom, Stephanie P. Jones, Robert P. Robinson

Northwest Journal of Teacher Education

As Black educators, we are implanted with testimonies of how our pedagogies remained in close proximity to whiteness. We employ antiblackness and critical race theory frameworks. Through what we call vignettes of repair we address ourselves and our students to first, repair the harm we caused and second, to engage in collective witnessing that makes room for (re)claiming and (re)membering our own knowledge. From our critical reflection, we propose that teacher educators engage in a similar practice for their prospective teachers.

Critical Awareness For Literacy Teachers And Educators In Troubling Times, Patriann Smith, S. Joel Warrican

Literacy Practice and Research

The field of literacy remains assailed by a persisting discrepancy between an increasing body of literacy research that honors the diversity in students’ practices juxtaposed against a persistent system of schooling and high-stakes assessment that has not been designed to draw from underrepresented students’ literate assets. This discrepancy has created a situation where teachers often receive well-intentioned instruction from literacy educators about how to address diverse literacy needs, but then, struggle to enact this instruction in the high-stakes testing environment of classrooms and schools where they have little autonomy. We argue in this essay that critical multilingual, critical multicultural and …

Are Student Teachers Ready To Teach? What Do Different Stakeholders Think?, Erdem Aksoy, Belgin Aydin

University of South Florida (USF) M3 Publishing

Teaching practice is one of the most important components of teacher education programs, yet (it) has been frequently criticized for including various problems. The curriculum change in 2018 included significant changes improving the applications in Turkey. These changes - ranging from limiting the number of student teachers to having a centralized evaluation system - had significant effects. Yet, how the system change impacted the applications and how this is perceived by the stakeholders have not been studied much. This study aims to identify the perspectives of three stakeholders. Opinions of 63 academics, 24 mentor teachers and 56 student teachers stated …

"It Opened My Eyes...": The Potential Of An Embedded Clinical Experience In Teacher Preparation, Danielle M. Hilaski, Nicole Maxwell, Jennie Jones

Reading Horizons: A Journal of Literacy and Language Arts

Teacher candidates (TCs) often feel underprepared for their first teaching positions. Teacher education programs are, at least partially, responsible for the level of readiness of their graduating TCs. Fortunately, teacher educators have the capacity to positively change teacher education, creating a more effective, better prepared teaching force. Embedded clinical experiences connected to university literacy courses are one innovative approach to create more purposeful and engaging learning opportunities for TCs. TCs in an early childhood and special education program participated in an embedded clinical experience focused on reading and assessment, which allowed them to implement course content directly with elementary students, …

Policies, Practices, Places, And People: How Elementary Preservice Teachers Learned Literacy Teaching, Chad H. Waldron

Michigan Reading Journal

This article features cases of how elementary education preservice teachers made sense of teaching literacy. Their contexts for teaching varied in policies, curricula, and demands for their literacy teaching, shaped their learning and understanding of literacy instruction and assessment as beginning teachers. The research featured in this article pushes upon conceptualizations of "good" literacy teaching and how mentor teachers serve a critical role in preparing the next generation of elementary literacy teachers. Recommendations are made on how to best support elementary preservice teachers in literacy instruction and assessment.

The Impact Of Attending Second Language Teaching Conferences, Jay Tanaka, María Díez-Ortega

MITESOL Journal: An Online Publication of MITESOL

Attending a second language (L2) teaching conference is assumed to have a positive impact on teaching practice. Currently, however, there are very few studies that examine empirical evidence of such impacts. Given the substantial cost and effort involved in attending a conference, it is important to clarify the nature of conference impacts, so that both language teachers and conference administrators can reflect on how to best generate meaningful improvements in L2 teaching. Questionnaire and interview data were used to examine L2 teaching conference attendees’ perceived impacts on their teaching practice and beliefs. Results reveal generally positive impacts, in the form …

Training Adaptive Teachers, Emily Wender

New Jersey English Journal

This article discusses how to develop adaptability in teacher candidates. The author required teacher candidates to adapt a face to face lesson plan for a virtual setting and concludes that candidates need more opportunities in their coursework to identify reasons to change instruction and reflect on adaptability.

A Local Historic Village Goes Online: Transforming English And Social Studies Methods Courses For A Virtual Setting, Helen Michelle Kreamer, Toby Daspit

New Jersey English Journal

In this article, two teacher-educators share their experience of navigating the shift of a service learning project from being an in-person project to an entirely remote learning experience caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. We discuss instructional adjustments, provide student samples, and consider lessons learned.

Exploring Language, Culture And Identity: Perspectives From Non-Native Arabic University Teachers In The Us, Brahim Oulbeid

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores how six non-native (NN) university Arabic teachers make sense of language, culture, and identity. Specifically, it aims to understand how their experiences as Arabic language learners, preservice teachers, and classroom practitioners shape their classroom work, especially as they relate to their conceptions of teaching culture and the negotiation of their personal and professional identities. Four questions guide this study: how NN Arabic teachers perceive culture, what their culture teaching practices are, what identities they enact, and what their contributions to the teaching of Arabic as foreign language (TAFL) field are. To address these issues, the study draws …

A Teacher's Guide To Plurilingual Pedagogy, Elisabeth Wichser-Krajcik

MA TESOL Collection

Language teaching practices have been dominated by monolingual, deficit approaches in which students are expected to compartmentalize languages, ignore prior knowledge, and emulate how natives speak the target language—though there have also been many teachers who have challenged these approaches through the years. Plurilingualism and plurilingual pedagogy reject such ideas and practices and instead seek to cultivate linguistic repertoires (including partial or uneven skills across languages), engage prior knowledge and lived experience, and develop metalinguistic and metacognitive competencies. Drawing on decades of research in applied linguistics and associated fields, plurilingual pedagogy aims to teach language in a way that is …

“So, How Real Can I Get?": Opportunities And Obstacles For Teacher Learners Enacting Culturally Responsive Pedagogy., Jonathan P Baize

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This qualitative study examines the experiences of three alternative certification teachers (teachers who begin teaching as they worked to complete teacher education courses for initial certification) whom I call “teacher learners” (Jacobs & Low, 2017) as they try to enact culturally responsive practices while navigating their first-year of teaching. The teacher learners worked to develop their understanding and capacities to enact a culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP) even as they were faced with the obstacles inherent to shifting teaching practices in K-12 schools. Through these challenges, they still furthered their conceptualization of CRP, as evidenced by, and in some ways guided …