Teacher Decision-Making in Guided Reading

Guided reading provides teachers the opportunity to support students in literacy learning. When planning for and implementing this instructional approach, teachers are required to make various in-advance and in-the-moment decisions that involve responding to students’ instructional needs through adaptive teaching. Grounded in sociocultural and social constructivist theories, this study was designed to understand teacher decision-making within the context of guided reading instruction. Several questions were considered for this study: How do teachers make decisions about guided reading instruction? How do teachers make in-advance decisions about grouping, planning, and assessing? How do teachers make in-the-moment decisions about (a) feedback and support for students, and (b) adjusting plans to better meet students’ needs? This research was a collective case study aimed at providing a better understanding of the various decisions teachers make when teaching in a guided reading context. The qualitative case study included video recorded observations, post observation interviews, and a collection of guided reading lesson plans. Qualitative data analysis included open and axial coding as well as an organization of the codes, according to the data, in their respective category of in-advance decision or in-the-moment decision. This methodology enabled a comprehensive analysis of teacher decision-making within guided reading. Findings pertaining to in-advanced decisions that emerged from the data can be categorized into three overarching themes: teachers used formal and informal assessment data to group students for guided reading and to make instructional plans based on students’ needs, teachers utilized a program-influenced structural framework to make decisions about planning for guided reading instruction and lastly, teachers made instructional connections between whole group instruction and guided reading, and also between students and their interests. Although teachers made various in-advance decisions when creating their lessons plans, these decisions were not always grounded in considering students’ instructional needs. Findings from the observations and interviews concerning in-the-moment decisions can be categorized under four overarching themes: teachers responded to students by scaffolding instruction, teachers confirmed students’ reading and writing behaviors, teachers made thoughtful decisions about instruction, and teachers felt time restrictions. Although the data exhibited variation across the three teachers, they all showed similarities with in-the-moment decision-making across these four themes. Implications of this study include more focus on supporting teachers’ instructional planning, a refinement of teachers’ skills in helping them understand how to best scaffold instruction, and raising awareness to educators, administrators, and stakeholders on how guided reading can provide supportive instruction to meet students’ individualized needs. Teachers are faced with an unlimited number of decisions and understanding their decision-making process is important when considering how teachers best meet the instructional needs of all students

Trainer talk:structures of interaction in teacher training classrooms

The subject of this research is interaction and language use in an institutional context, the teacher training classroom. Trainer talk is an interactional accomplishment and the research question is: what structures of talk-in-interaction characterise trainer talk in this institutional setting? While there has been research into other kinds of classroom and into other kinds of institutional talk, this study is the first on trainer discourse. The study takes a Conversation Analysis approach to studying institutional interaction and aims to identify the main structures of sequential organization that characterize teacher trainer talk as well as the tasks and identities that are accomplished in it. The research identifies three main interactional contexts in which trainer talk is done: expository, exploratory and experiential. It describes the main characteristics of each and how they relate to each other. Expository sequences are the predominant interactional contexts for trainer talk. But the research findings show that these contexts are flexible and open to the embedding of the other two contexts. All three contexts contribute to the main institutional goal of teaching teachers how to teach. Trainer identity is related to the different sequential contexts. Three main forms of identity in interaction are evidenced in the interactional contexts: the trainer as trainer, the trainer as teacher and the trainer as colleague. Each of them play an important role in teacher trainer pedagogy. The main features of trainer talk as a form of institutional talk are characterised by the following interactional properties: 1. Professional discourse is both the vehicle and object of instruction - the articulation of reflection on experience. 2. There is a reflexive relationship between pedagogy and interaction. 3. The professional discourse that is produced by trainees is not evaluated by trainers but, rather, reformulated to give it relevant precision in terms of accuracy and appropriacy

Exploring The Use Of Mixed-Reality Simulations As a Tool In Teacher Training To Support Language For Academic Purposes

Applying a three-paper structure, this dissertation explores three ways in which mixed- reality simulations were used as a tool in teacher training to support the development of language for academic purposes. This dissertation explores how teachers reflect, reason, and notice their practice when integrating academic language with content using mixed-reality simulations. This is taken up through analyzing trends that emerge in debrief conversations after instructional activities are enacted in mixed-reality simulations (MRS). Learning through the activity of teaching has potential to help teachers integrate their understandings of rigorous content instruction with equitable English Learner instruction (Von Esch & Kavanagh, 2018). Framed by practice based professional education (Ball & Forzani, 2009; Grossman et al., 2009; McDonald, Kazemi, & Kavanagh, 2013), this research is situated within professional learning contexts that focus on developing teachers who can integrate English Learner instructional practices into content area teaching (Kahmi-Stein et al., 2020; Von Esch & Kavanagh, 2018). This work examines teachers debrief conversations after mixed-reality simulations to gain insights into the knowledge and perspectives they gained from the experience, and how it shapes their pedagogical practices. Paper one examines teacher and coach topical episode functions to learn how reflection is activated in a virtual coaching context. Paper two examines problems of practice through episodes of pedagogical reasoning focused on English Learner instruction from a disciplinary literacy perspective, and paper three explores what teachers’ notice about English Learner instruction across connected simulations, and how their noticings shift over time

Content Area Teaching in Linguistically Diverse Classrooms

Educators and teacher educators in the United States have worked for decades to provide English language learners (ELLs) and other linguistically diverse students access to education. While ELLs’ rising high school graduation rates suggest that efforts have helped ELLs access schools, classrooms, and scholastic tasks, more steps need to be taken toward ensuring that linguistically diverse students can also meaningfully access college or 21st century careers. This qualitative study is at the nexus of language, culture, academic content, literacy, teaching, and teacher education and uses a bricolage approach to examine the teaching of four secondary science and mathematics teachers recognized as “successful” teachers of ELLs. The results show that the content constructed in the teaching went beyond the teaching of the facts, topics, and concepts of the school curriculum to also include the accepted and expected ways of thinking and communicating used in the discipline. This suggests that the teaching was preparing all students to access both the school curriculum as well as disciplinary spaces such as college or careers. Findings are presented in two chapters. The first findings chapter offers a complex and multifaceted way to view content, including the facets of academics, logos, and expectations. The second findings chapter focuses on teaching and documents how the teaching observed deconstructed disciplinary knowledge to teach students to notice and use content as a language. Together, these two chapters outline what I call PARALEXICAL teaching, or teaching that pays purposeful attention to realizing academics, logos, and expectations integral to content as a language. I argue that PARALEXICAL teaching, through its explicit attention to disciplinary language, can unveil aspects of the hidden curriculum in ways that more equitably prepare all students, especially ELLs, to graduate from high school and enter disciplinary spaces like college or careers

“Yo Soy Su Mama”: Latinx Mothers Raising Emergent Bilinguals Labeled as Dis/abled

Parental involvement in the United States has been identified in both academic and mainstream literature as a defining marker in academic achievement. Yet most of the literature regarding parents and schools are written about them without including their voice or their stories. Through the use of ethnographic case studies, this dissertation presents the experiences of immigrant, monolingual Spanish-speaking Latinx women raising emergent bilingual children who are labeled as dis/abled. This research is guided by an intersectional framework and the following questions: 1. What are the mothering experiences of Spanish-speaking Latinx mothers of emergent bilingual children labeled dis/abled? 2. What values, perspectives and ideologies do mothers hold about bilingualism and dis/abilities and how are those reflected in their lives at home and at school? This study uses the participants’ testimonios to reveal the myriad of ways in which they support, love and care for their children through means that may not be in keeping with traditional values but are no less meaningful. These include, but are not limited to, hiring tutors, enrolling them in afterschool programs and religious education, using technology, and engaging in direct home language instruction. This study also showcases the ways in which school-based decisions regarding the language of instruction impact family dynamics. Additionally, the challenges that mothers undertake as caregivers, wives, daughters, sisters and women are shared. Some of these challenges range from limited English proficiency and work-life balance to domestic abuse and long-term separation from other children. This study brings to light the complex lives mothers’ lead and the ways in which they strive to meet the needs of their children regardless of the financial, physical and emotional costs to them. This dissertation concludes with recommendations on how to better support these mothers and their children within schools. Particular attention is given to the expansion of educational settings that address students learning needs alongside family language needs. Lastly, recommendations are made as to how to engage mothers more directly within schools in ways that are mutually beneficial

Teaching for Whose America?: Corporate Education Reform and Students Labeled as Disabled

Today’s education reform movement is funded heavily by a network of wealthy elite that often prize neoliberal and free-market interests. Within this network, Teach for America (TFA) is at the nexus of overlapping interests in an educational marketplace where corporate values become the norm for defining both progress and success. Students labeled as disabled and placed in special education have generally not been well-served by neoliberal, free-market reforms yet TFA overwhelmingly places corps members in urban special education classrooms. Because TFA has a large network of alumni that go on to lead schools, educational organizations and influence policy, this study is interested in the flow of knowledge between macro-level neoliberal education organizations and the micro-level discursive strategies of special education corps. In order to track the flow and change of knowledge through institutions (like TFA) and actors (like Special Education Corps Members) into new spaces (like special education classrooms and education policies, this study used Dispositive Analysis (a strand of Critical Discourse Analysis), to ask the following: 1) What corporate discourses and discourses of disability do Teach for America Special Education Corps Members draw on to talk about their experience as corps members, their students and classroom practice? 2) What corporate discourses and discourses of disability do Teach for America Special Education Corps Members draw on in their classroom practices? 3) How do these discursive strategies materialize and enable circuits that dispossess, cultivate or preserve equitable educational resources for students labeled as disabled? After identifying the structures of corporate discourses and discourses of disability common to special education corps members’ discursive strategies, a detailed analysis examines how these discursive strategies materialize in ways that enable circuits that dispossess, cultivate or preserve equitable educational resources for students labeled as disabled. In addition to identifying these circuits, the findings of this study suggest a relationship between membership and agency, distance and adoption, and a protection of elite exceptionalism that inform the recommendations for future research, policy and practice

Translanguaging Design in a Mandarin/English Dual Language Bilingual Education Program: A Researcher-Teacher Collaboration

Thesis advisor: C. Patrick ProctorTraditionally strict language separation policies in dual language bilingual education (DLBE) programs reflect parallel monolingualism and have been criticized as failing to recognize the sociolinguistic realities of bilingual students (García & Lin, 2017). To leverage bilingual learners’ full linguistic repertoires as resources, this study explored how Sánchez, García, and Solorza’s (2018) translanguaging allocation policy could be strategically and purposefully designed in a third grade Mandarin/English DLBE classroom where the majority of the students were English-dominant speakers. Taking the form of participatory design research (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016), I (as a researcher) and a Mandarin teacher worked together to co-design translanguaging documentation, translanguaging rings, and translanguaging transformation spaces across different content areas – Chinese Language Arts, Science, and Social Studies. During the process, we also engaged in equitable forms of dialogue and listening to openly discuss, negotiate, and develop our translanguaging co-stance in iterative ways. Data collection included classroom and design meeting recordings, observational field notes, and teacher and students’ artifacts and interviews throughout the school year of 2018-19. Inductive and deductive coding were adopted for data analysis. Findings revealed that translanguaging pedagogies took many shapes based on contextual factors, such as the different pedagogical purposes and curricular demands across content areas. Students were able to develop deeper content understandings, build cross-linguistic connections, and develop their bi/multilingual identities and critical consciousness in those flexible bilingual spaces. Findings also demonstrated that the ideological (re)negotiation between the researcher and the teacher was a bumpy and discursive journey, replete with tensions, confusions, and difficult conversations. Overall, it was a balancing act to create translanguaging spaces while maintaining the language-minoritized (Mandarin) space and privileging students’ use of Mandarin given the societal dominance of English. This study provides implications for new theoretical and pedagogical understandings of translanguaging, and suggests that researcher-teacher collaboration provides a promising way to generate evidence-based, practitioner-informed, and context-appropriate knowledge for DLBE curricular and pedagogical improvements.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2020.Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education.Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction

One Teacher\u27s Transformation of Practice Through the Development of Covariational Thinking and Reasoning in Algebra : A Self-Study

CCSSM (2010) describes quantitative reasoning as expertise that mathematics educators should seek to develop in their students. Researchers must then understand how to develop covariational reasoning. The problem is that researchers draw from students’ dialogue as the data for understanding quantitative relationships. As a result, the researcher can only conceive the students’ reasoning. The objective of using the self-study research methodology is to examine and improve existing teaching practices. To improve my practice, I reflected upon the implementation of my algebra curriculum through a hermeneutics cycle of my personal history and living educational theory. The critical friend provoked through dialogues and narratives the reconceptualization of my smooth covariational reasoning from a “transformational perspective” to a “solving algebraic equations” perspective. This study showed that by creating images in motion, graphs, or algebraic representation, I recognized the importance of students’ cognitive development in the conceptual embodied and proceptual symbolic worlds. The results presented the transformation of my teaching practices by building new algebraic connections. By using these findings, researchers can gain additional understanding as to how they can transform their teaching practices

Designing critical, humanizing writing instruction : exploring possibilities for positioning writers as designers

The purpose of this study was to better understand how teachers across elementary, middle, and secondary grade-levels (re)imagine possibilities and translate them into critical, humanizing writing instruction. Across the study, I drew on sociocultural theories of identity, learning, and language while considering perspectives on interdisciplinary design, humanizing pedagogies, and teachers as curriculum-makers. Following multicase study and participatory design research traditions, I met with four teachers in a cross grade-level inquiry group and followed them into classrooms for one academic year. I generated data through recording conversations and teaching, creating fieldnotes, collecting artifacts, and conducting interviews with teachers and students. I analyzed data using inductive qualitative analysis and then, using theory alongside emerging findings, selected examples to closely examine using discourse analytic methods. The following questions guided this study’s design and analysis: How do teachers in a cross grade-level inquiry group (re)design humanizing writing instruction together? What aspects of writing and writing instruction are most visible in teachers' discussion about design and writing? And how do teachers’ discussions of design and writing translate into their classroom practice? Analysis revealed that teachers’ inquiry group discussions explored connections between design and writing while reflecting on current writing instruction and ways teachers and students were positioned within schools. Co-constructing this “figured world” made space to reimagine possibilities and reframe constraints as design conditions. As teachers took up design work, they also appropriated narratives of students that illustrated the “love, faith, and humility” Freire (1970/2005, p. 91) noted as necessary for collective effort towards humanization. The findings also highlighted the emergence of purpose and audience as central concepts for rethinking writing and writing instruction. These terms were redefined within the group space to include embedded subject positions for students as active designers. In classrooms, one teacher used these tools to transform units to center purpose and audience for writers; another used them as entry points into new practices and subject positions within her growing critical, humanizing writing pedagogy. Overall, findings contribute to understandings of generative, humanizing teacher learning experiences for teachers and for researchers/teacher educators. Additionally, findings suggest tenets for enacting critical, humanizing writing instruction.Curriculum and Instructio