Instructional Decision Making in an English Language Learner Endorsement Program: Centralizing Knowledge About Students

• In Event: 73.025 - Access for All? Preservice Teachers' Sources of Knowledge and Instructional Decisions for English Language Learners

Abstract

Objective:
Our objective is to shed light on how elementary teachers’ knowledge of English Language Learners (ELLs) informs their instructional decision-making, and how their participation in our ELL endorsement program helped them gain knowledge of their students.

These questions guide our work:
- How do elementary teachers in an ELL endorsement program gain knowledge of students over time? How does this knowledge impact their instructional decision-making?
- How do programmatic critical learning experiences help teachers to gain knowledge of students and refine their instruction?

Perspective:
Drawing from sociocultural theories of learning and teaching (Vygotsky, 1978) focused on teacher learning instead of only professional development design (Webster-Wright, 2009), we examine artifacts of teacher learning to determine how teachers shift from focusing on teaching strategies toward teaching responsively to ELLs’ thinking in 2014-2015. Because researchers have noted that instructional protocols and strategies can lead teachers to focus on their own actions instead of student thinking (Coffey, Hammer, Levin, & Grant, 2011), a central aim of our work is helping teachers to make instructional decisions based on knowledge of students.

Methods:
Using design-based research methods (Cobb, Confrey, diSessa, Lehrer, & Schauble, 2003), we examined teacher learning within ecologies of their schools and our program to identify aspects of our endorsement program that were working and how we could improve. Using the sensitizing constructs (Berg, 2009) of teacher knowledge of students, linguistics, methods, and curriculum, we analyzed videos of teachers’ instruction, our field notes from weekly, one-on-one mentoring, and their assignments, including linguistic case studies of learners, community investigations, SIOP-based lesson plans, teaching philosophies, and reflections on videos of their instruction. We used constant comparative methods, axial coding, and researcher memos (Corbin & Strauss, 2008) to analyze data across 18 teachers.

Results:
Based on our findings from the first two years, we added video reflections of instruction and research on students’ communities in this third year of implementation. Results indicate that these assignments – as opposed to only curriculum adaptations, strategies, and lesson planning – helped teachers to leverage students’ cultural and linguistic strengths in instruction. Artifacts of teacher learning will be presented with successes, challenges, and plans for improving teacher knowledge of students.
Significance:
The trend toward practice-based teacher education focused on core practices (Ball & Forzani, 2009; Grossman, Hammerness, & McDonald, 2009) has helped teacher education researchers to problematize the gap between teacher learning in university-based coursework and teachers’ enactment of ambitious practice in the classroom (Thompson, Windschitl, & Braaten, 2013; Zeichner, 2010). Concurrently, the field has identified the need to help all teachers learn to support ELLs (de Jong, Harper, & Coady, 2013). In this paper, we discuss how we support teachers in bridging their university-based learning in an ELL endorsement program with their daily classroom practice. We provide an instantiation of a practice-based cycle of enactment (McDonald, Kazemi, & Kavanagh, 2013) that slightly shifts the focus from core practices (Grossman, Hammerness, & McDonald, 2009) toward responsiveness to ELLs’ perspectives.

Authors

• Lisa Pray, Vanderbilt University

• Shannon Mary Daniel, Vanderbilt University - Peabody College