Developing Linguistically Responsive Content Teachers Through e-Workshops

• In Event: 32.046 - Teacher Education Partnerships That Prepare Educators to Support English Learners to Learn Mathematics and Science

Abstract

Objectives:
The purpose of this paper is to report the findings of a study examining the outcomes and impact of in-service teacher participation in online professional learning eWorkshops. The eWorkshops were designed guided by research on impactful professional learning (Desimone, Porter, Garet, Yoon, & Birman, 2002; Desimone, 2009), perspectives on professional learning communities (DuFour, 2004; Stoll, Bolam, McMahon, Wallace, & Thomas, 2006) and inquiry as stance (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009). As such the eWorkshops contain six units with each unit following the same three-part learning cycle: Explore, Make It Work, and Share. This study utilizes the digital documents generated from participation in the eWorkshops to examine the learning that occurred within eWorkshop participation in relationship to the eWorkshop learning goals: to support the development of linguistically responsive teachers.

Theoretical Framework:
The eWorkshops under investigation in this study were developed to assist in-service teachers in implementing critical sociocultural instructional practices as operationalized by the six standards of effective pedagogy (Tharp, Estrada, Dalton, & Yamauchi, 2000; Teemant, Leland & Berghoff, 2014) and the linguistically responsive teaching framework (Lucas & Villegas, 2010, 2011). In combination, the two frameworks provide research-based conceptualizations of the pedagogy, orientations, and knowledge/skills linguistically responsive content teacher should have.

Methods:
Qualitative thematic content analysis was selected for this research for how Weber (1990) describes content analysis: “Content analysis is a research method that uses a set of procedures to make valid inferences from text” (p. 9). Krippendorff (2004) also describes why this research approach is appropriate for this study suggesting that content analysis makes, “replicable and valid inferences from texts (or other meaningful matter) to the contexts of their use” (p. 18). This content analysis mirrored what Hsieh and Shannon (2005) described, namely, “the systematic classification process of coding and identifying themes or patterns” (p. 1278). An a-priori coding scheme was utilized based on the frameworks listed above to code the digital documents and develop assertions and findings. Digital documents were organized and analyzed chronologically by participant into order to account for growth and change over the course of the six unit eWorkshop.

Data Sources:
Data were drawn from ten different eWorkshops that strive to promote similar learning outcomes, from Spring 2013-Summer 2015, 24 groups of teachers participated (n = 160) and contributed digital documents for analysis (~600 digital documents).

Results:
The majority of participants exhibited improvement in understandings of one or more aspects of linguistically responsive teaching as operationalized above. Some participants did not provide evidence of substantial growth, though overwhelmingly the participants demonstrated an affection for the eWorkshop and the professional learning approach. The aspects of linguistically responsive teaching that were most frequently illustrated by participants were in scaffolding language learning and getting to know their multilingual students.

Scholarly Significance:
The eWorkshops provide a unique model of professional learning that appears to be having impact on the pedagogy, orientations, knowledge and skills of content teachers of multilingual students. Further research is necessary.

Authors

• Kara Mitchell Viesca, University of Nebraska - Lincoln

• Barbara J. Dray, Transforming Practices in Education, LLC

• Nancy L. Leech, University of Colorado - Denver