Education Commons^™

Digital Literacies And Competencies: Examining Teacher Candidates’ Achievement, Engagement, Attitudes, And Personalized Learning In Technology Enhanced Environments, Stefano Vacca

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Teachers and students are increasingly operating in classrooms where the presence of digital technology impacts both parties across numerous facets related to teaching and learning. In an attempt to comprehend this dynamic, the current research aimed to understand the relationship from the perspective of the educator, acknowledging that today’s teachers are tasked with guiding students to become global, 21st century citizens who are capable of appropriately engaging with the opportunities and challenges put forth by digital technology. Therefore, this research aimed to examine teacher candidates’ (TCs’) a) attitudes towards digital technology, b) ability to manifest personalized learning experiences, and c) …

Predictive Measures Of Teacher Effectiveness During Student Teaching, Kristen M. Carlson

The Interactive Journal of Global Leadership and Learning

The student teaching semester of a teacher candidates career is performative in the need to impress a university supervisor, cooperating teacher, and pass any licensure required assessments. Two data collection points during this semester are from a required performance assessment (edTPA) and a perception survey (CM Exit). This article reviews the predictive validity of the two tools based on three years worth of data from one mid-sized, Midwestern teacher preparation program.

Teacher Recruitment: Highs School Students' And Parents' Perceptions Of The Teaching Profession, Steven Scot Christensen

Theses and Dissertations

Concern over teacher shortages has become a perplexing and persistent problem in schools. Teachers are constantly leaving the profession and new entrants into the teaching profession have decreased in recent years, creating a need for recruiting qualified individuals to become teachers and to retain those who are already in classrooms. The purpose of this study was to identify factors that best predict whether high school students are considering teaching as a career and factors that predict whether students' parents would encourage their children to become teachers. A review of the literature revealed potentially influential factors on teacher recruitment and a …

Building Excitement For Reading And Building New Friendships: Using Book Bistro With Pre-Service Teachers And Middle School Students, Erinn Bentley

Georgia Journal of Literacy

This article describes a collaborative Book Bistro event between middle school students and pre-service English educators. Book Bistro is a strategy that promotes independent reading by gathering students in a café-like setting to discuss texts and perceptions through casual conversations. The purpose of this collaborative Bistro was two-fold: 1) To spark middle school students’ interest in self-selecting texts and engaging in independent reading, and 2) To allow pre-service teachers the opportunity to practice this strategy within an actual classroom. Responses from both the students and pre-service teachers indicated that this event positively impacted their interest toward reading and their relationships …

Technology Of Story: Documenting Culturally Sustaining Anti-Racist Teaching, Frances Vitali

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Our education system, an extension of our society, has created a monster of historical sociocultural and linguistic inequities, traumas, structural racism, and oppressions. Culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogy honor students’ funds of knowledge as their authentic power and voice. The oral family stories became vehicles to navigate and facilitate educational partnerships in becoming more culturally responsive for these teacher candidates. Oral stories, as documents, became the content within the context of the writing workshop process. These documented stories became the technological bridge that supported students’ home experiences with academic language and content to meet curricular goals.

During the writing process, …

On Resisting Rape Culture With Teachers-To-Be: A Research Poem, Amber Moore

Intersections: Critical Issues in Education

No abstract provided.

Teaching Teachers How To Teach Hope, René Roselle

Education Faculty Publications

Can teachers teach hope? This article considers Synder’s hope theory as a rationale for the importance of teaching hope to students and teachers. Through a low and high hope example, the idea of agency and pathway thinking are explored. Resources and ideas are shared on how teacher preparation programs might take up teaching hope.

Teaching Responsively During Covid-19: Learning How To Model, Modeling How To Learn, Lindsay M. Keazer

Education Faculty Publications

A teacher educator describes learning to teach responsively through the Covid-19 pandemic; shifting focus from secretly struggling to manage the upset of work/life balance, to living out the challenges in community with her students. By sharing struggles transparently rather than concealing, she found opportunities to connect with students about the complex challenges they were facing. This process was one of learning how to model empathetic education, and simultaneously modeling to future teachers how to learn to enact responsive pedagogies through unexpected challenges in teaching.

Cultivating Teachers When The School Doors Are Shut: Two Teacher-Educators Reflect On Supervision, Instruction, Change And Opportunity During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Crystal C. Loose, Michael G. Ryan

Early & Middle Grades Education Faculty Publications

Seven weeks into our Spring 2020 semester, the Covid-19 pandemic was wreaking havoc on the world. The pandemic caused immediate shutdowns to schools and universities fundamentally changing how we plan for, teach, guide, and work with students. This paper explores how two first-year Assistant Professors navigated the challenges we faced and the learning opportunities we embraced while continuing our work as teacher educators amid a pandemic-induced shutdown. We employed collective self-study to examine our experiences while transitioning to remote learning with pre-service teachers using Moore's (2012, 1993, 1989) transactional distance theory as an analytical framework to review our work as …

If I Knew Then What I Do Now: Fostering Pre-Service Teachers’ Capacity To Promote Expansive And Critical Conversations With Children’S Literature, Stephen Adam Crawley

Occasional Paper Series

In this article, I reflect on my practices as a teacher educator and respond to the following questions: How do I foster the capacity of pre-service teachers to use children’s literature to promote expansive and critical conversations in the classroom? How do pre-service teachers report their stances and sense of preparedness when reflecting on the course? To address these questions, I share two strategies I employed in my undergraduate course for elementary education majors: 1) emphasizing children's literature as windows and mirrors and 2) considering stakeholder responses. For each strategy, I include preservice teachers’ (PTs’) statements that reflect how the …

What Do You Do When You Don't Know How To Respond? Supporting Pre-Service Teachers To Use Picture Books To Facilitate Difficult Conversations, Kathryn Struthers Ahmed, Nida Ali

Occasional Paper Series

In this paper, the authors – a preservice teacher (PST) and a teacher educator – consider how teacher education might better prepare PSTs to use picture books to facilitate difficult conversations in elementary classrooms. They share missed opportunities from their own experiences in a fourth-grade fieldwork classroom and in a graduate-level elementary literacy methods course where they felt unprepared to respond to students’ comments about “controversial” topics. They reimagine how these experiences might have been transformed to be more educative for PSTs, first by considering how they could have responded more thoughtfully in the moment and then by thinking about …

Angry Like Me, Catherine-Laura Dunnington, Shoshana Magnet

Occasional Paper Series

In this article we take on a challenging picture book, The Heart and the Bottle written and illustrated by Oliver Jeffers, and how one preschool boy’s response changed us. As part of a three-center initiative to discuss hard feelings and grief with preschool learners, we teamed with six preschool teachers to read and work through this text. We explore how both the preschoolers’ and the teachers’ responses challenged us to look at how the disjoint between pedagogy (literature that says we should teach these types of texts) and practice (how this classroom experience actually unfolds) leaves much room for continued …

The Dimensions Of Teachers Who Write And The Essence Of A Writing Life, Shari L. Daniels, Pamela Beck

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

The purpose of this grounded theory case study was to explore the perceptions among ten K-12 teachers who teach writing and also write themselves. What are the key essentials for teachers to sustain a writing life? What habits of mind or attitudes are necessary for teachers to sustain a writing life? Interviews served as the primary data source along with writing artifacts from the participants’ own writing life. Findings indicate that teacher-writers committed to a writing life do so for the purpose of 1) discovering meaning, 2) connections to others 3) commitment to learning and 4) well-being, with an overall …

Assessment Of Pre-Service Teacher Dispositions, Elizabeth Bradley, Patricia Isaac, Joseph King

Excelsior: Leadership in Teaching and Learning

Measurement of pre-service teacher dispositions is an important part of teacher preparation programs. A strong correlation exists between dispositions of teachers and the quality of their student’s learning. Teachers, in addition to sharing content knowledge, are responsible for demonstrating and sharing core values relating to virtues such as honesty, justice, fairness, care, empathy, integrity, courage, respect, and responsibility, and these values must guide their own conduct and interpersonal relations. As teachers serve pupils who are minors, their conduct and potential to serve effectively and ethically in the profession must be evaluated. However, a thorough faculty-led instrument to assess pre-service teacher …

Enacting Rhetorical Listening: A Process To Support Students’ Engagement With Challenging Course Readings, Jessica Rivera-Mueller

Journal on Empowering Teaching Excellence

Many educators assign course readings to purposefully enlarge students’ perspectives. In doing so, though, educators may face a range of behaviors—reluctance, resistance, avoidance, disengagement—from students who feel that such readings negatively press upon their prior knowledge, belief systems, or educational goals. This teaching challenge is often present for social justice educators. However, “rhetorical listening,” a rhetorical theory developed by Ratcliffe (2005), is a pedagogical tool that can help shift students’ understandings of and expectations for the activity of reading, thereby creating a learning environment that supports meaningful engagement with challenging course readings. In this article, the author outlines a process …

Full Issue: Journal On Empowering Teaching Excellence, Volume 4, Issue 2

Journal on Empowering Teaching Excellence

The full Fall 2020 issue (Volume 4, Issue 2) of the Journal on Empowering Teaching Excellence.

Reexamining Faculty Roles In The Supervision Of Pre-Service Teachers: Responding To The Call For Clinically-Rich Teacher Education, Sarah Capello

Journal of Educational Supervision

In an effort to integrate university coursework with field-site experiences and bolster pre-service teacher learning, national teacher education organizations have charged teacher education programs with embedding teacher preparation within clinically-rich experiences. These reforms have resulted in expanded and increasingly complex conceptions of pre-service teacher supervision and the university supervisor, which have affected not only traditional supervisors but all university-based teacher educators. This paper presents a framework that maps the shifting roles of four university-based teacher educators: program administrators, research faculty, teaching faculty, and adjunct faculty due to changing notions of clinically-rich pre-service teacher supervision. This framework demonstrates how faculty roles …

The Power And Purpose Of Choice In Digital Teacher Education, Aimee M. Cribbs

Georgia Educational Research Association Conference

With the call for critical thinkers and problem-solvers, primary and secondary educators are encouraged to use student-driven instruction and performance-based assessment. At the same time, teacher education programs often include lecture-based delivery with formal papers as the primary form of assessment. The changing landscape of virtual learning in the era of Covid-19 provides an opportunity to refine teacher education to mirror the same research-based practices suggested for primary and secondary classrooms. Within a participatory action research model, this author shares the experience of delivering an online graduate-level curriculum design course framed in student choice. Education Specialist candidates chose content and …

Impact Of Oer In Teacher Education, Denise Cummings-Clay

Publications and Research

The purpose of this research study, which employed a quantitative research design, was to determine if there was a difference in the grades achieved by students who were enrolled in an entry-level Foundations of Education course using Open Educational Resources (OER) versus the grades achieved by students who used textbooks in other course sections. The goal was to find out whether OER was of the same or higher quality as textbooks in our minority-serving higher education institution. The outcomes revealed that there was no significant difference in grades for course sections that used OER when compared to course sections that …

Evaluating Preservice Special Education Candidates’ Comfort Level Implementing High Leverage Practices, Cindy Clemson, Sarah N. Merimee

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

Special education teachers are presented with numerous demands within the classroom and must have a specific skill set to adequately address diverse needs. Therefore, 22 high leverage practices (HLPs) for special education teachers were established. This study assessed the impact of a semester of teaching the HLPs, including a final project requirement, on senior teacher candidates’ comfort level implementing the HLPs. Results indicate that the explicit teaching of the HLPs, required project, and practicum led to the students’ increased comfort implementing the HLPs. Additionally, the authors reviewed data gathered and used it to explore their university’s current curriculum to determine …

In This Spirit: Helping Preservice Teachers Thrive During The Pandemic Through Adaptation And Change, Novea Mcintosh, Rochonda Nenonene

COVID-19 and Catholic Schools

“New times demand new methods”, William Joseph Chaminade. These words reflect the lived experiences of two faculty women of color, identified as Afro Caribbean and African American scholar practitioners in education at a Marianist university. We share our different narratives of the experience from the dual lens of social emotional learning and culturally responsive pedagogy with our classes and students as they thrived during a pandemic. Included in these narratives will be a discussion of the continued community building process, exploration of efforts to learn more about the teaching profession, social justice and advocacy as we learn about others, and …

The Learner Profiles Of Novice Literacy Coaches, Lisa L. Ortmann, Katherine Brodeur, Susan Massey

Reading Horizons: A Journal of Literacy and Language Arts

Literacy coaches need support developing their professional capacities for coaching (Kern et al., 2018). This study explored the ways novice literacy coaches developed literacy coaching discourses during coursework in two reading specialist master’s degree programs. Through qualitative and discourse analysis of transcribed coaching videos and assignments, novice literacy coaching discourse was compared to professional literacy coaching discourse. Findings revealed candidates used coaching language and stances with varying degrees of success, but the discourse of novice and professional differed greatly. Five learner profiles of novice literacy coaching are presented: the interviewer, the role-player, the curious learner, the cheerleader, and the natural …

In This Spirit: Helping Preservice Teachers Thrive During The Pandemic Through Adaptation And Change, Novea A. Mcintosh Ed.D, Rochonda L. Nenonene Ph.D.

Journal of Catholic Education

“New times demand new methods”, William Joseph Chaminade. These words reflect the lived experiences of two faculty women of color, identified as Afro Caribbean and African American scholar practitioners in education at a Marianist university. We share our different narratives of the experience from the dual lens of social emotional learning and culturally responsive pedagogy with our classes and students as they thrived during a pandemic. Included in these narratives will be a discussion of the continued community building process, exploration of efforts to learn more about the teaching profession, social justice and advocacy as we learn about others, and …

Exploring Career Change Transitions Through A Dialogic Conceptualization Of Science Teacher Identity, Lara Smetana, Ali Kushki

Education: School of Education Faculty Publications and Other Works

Research into the construct of science teacher identity has gained momentum over the past decade in an effort to achieve a more comprehensive, holistic understanding of teacher learning and development. As yet few studies have examined the unique identity challenges of science teacher career changers. Akkerman and Meijer’s (2011) dialogical approach to the conceptualization of teacher identity informed this longitudinal, qualitative study exploring the different identity aspects, or I-positions, of two individuals who had changed careers to teach high-school biology. The study identified moments of disequilibrium experienced by the participants and explored how they each eventually restored equilibrium. Analysis included …

Dispositions And Dis/Ability In Teacher Education: Teacher Educator Perspectives, Katie Roquemore

Dissertations - ALL

This qualitative study explores the connection of dis/ability and dispositions in teacher education. Although dispositions have been part of contemporary teacher education discourse for over thirty years, their continued ambiguity is a source of debate and contestation (e.g., Diez, 2007; Katz & Rath, 1985; Osguthorpe, 2013; Warren, 2018). Existing literature examining dispositions and dis/ability focuses on the dispositions and attitudes teachers have and/or need to teach students with disabilities (e.g., Campbell et. al., 2003; Castello & Boyle, 2013; De Boer et. al., 2011; Killoran et. al., 2014; McCray & McHatton, 2011; Mueller & Hindin, 2011; Taylor & Ringlaben, 2012; Woodcock, …

The Emergence Of Teacher Self In The Elementary Classroom, Chelsea Cole

Theses and Dissertations

Significant research and ongoing inquiry highlight the importance of understanding and recognizing the development of identities and beliefs among teachers. These studies use techniques of reflection on the past or present to elucidate the developmental process of teacher identities and beliefs and their impact on the profession. The development of teacher identities and beliefs commence during childhood. A dearth of research exists that addresses the emerging developments of teacher identities and beliefs from the perspective of young children. This study uses qualitative methods through focus groups and individual interviews to examine the identities and beliefs held by fifth-grade students who …

The Emergence Of Teacher Self In The Elementary Classroom, Chelsea Cole

Theses and Dissertations

Significant research and ongoing inquiry highlight the importance of understanding and recognizing the development of identities and beliefs among teachers. These studies use techniques of reflection on the past or present to elucidate the developmental process of teacher identities and beliefs and their impact on the profession. The development of teacher identities and beliefs commence during childhood. A dearth of research exists that addresses the emerging developments of teacher identities and beliefs from the perspective of young children. This study uses qualitative methods through focus groups and individual interviews to examine the identities and beliefs held by fifth-grade students who …

Exploring Chinese Efl Teachers' Knowledge And Beliefs Relating To The Teaching Of English Reading In Public Primary Schools In China, Meina Luo, Susan Main, Graeme Lock, R. Malatesha Joshi, Chenyin Zhong

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

© 2019 The Authors. Dyslexia published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd The present study explored knowledge and beliefs about reading instruction of Chinese teachers teaching English as a foreign language (EFL). Theoretical Orientation to Reading Profile and the Survey of Basic Language Constructs Related to Literacy Acquisition were administered to 262 EFL teachers in the south-eastern part of China. Additionally, three teachers were interviewed, and their instructional practices were observed. The results showed that there was no correlation between teachers' self-efficacy beliefs and the performance on the knowledge of basic language construct survey. However, it was found that teachers' …

Predicting And Perceiving Teacher Effectiveness Of Novice Teachers, Kristen Carlson

Dissertations, Theses, and Projects

“What makes a good teacher” is a question that many people interested in education try to answer, whether they are school administrators, education faculty, parents of a K-12 student, or politicians. For several decades, policy makers have been searching for ways to measure teacher effectiveness, primarily through student standardized assessments. Recently, there has been a resurgence of interested educators and education researchers who are working to find alternative ways to measure teacher effectiveness instead of relying solely on the individual students’ standardized assessment scores. This study sought to predict novice teacher effectiveness through performance assessment and to determine how novice …

Encounter And Counter: Critical Media Literacy In Teacher Education, Rick Marlatt

Journal of Media Literacy Education

This practitioner article describes the recent implementation of critical media literacy (CML) activities in secondary teacher education at a large university in the Southwestern United States. Preservice teachers in a content area literacy course analyzed a variety of media coverage of events that occurred near their university. Using an analytical framework for approaching texts, images, and messages, preservice teachers practiced critical exploration of media sources and motivations while articulating hidden figures of power and authority behind the dissemination of content for public consumption. Highlighting the pursuit of independent media and the cultivation of intellectual self-defense, this “Voices from the Field” …