Associations Between Candidates' Opportunity to Learn and the Quality of Their Instruction as Beginning Teachers

• In Event: 34.096 - MTCC Roundtable Session 12
  In Roundtable Session: 34.096-1 - Conceptualizing and Measuring Opportunity to Learn in Teacher Education

Abstract

Objective. This study examined how elementary candidates’ opportunity to learn in courses and student teaching at five universities was associated with the quality of their mathematics and reading/language arts instruction during their first two years of teaching. Such cross-institutional work, with classroom observation data collected from beginning teachers, enables us to identify effective strategies, including indicators of coursework and field experiences, for preparing novices.

Theoretical Framework. Our study is grounded in cultural historical activity theory (CHAT; Sannino, Daniels, & Gutierrez, 2009). CHAT views learning as a collective activity that occurs through social interaction in particular settings and is mediated both by individual and institutional histories and by conceptual and material tools (Engeström, 1999; Wenger, 1998). We drew on CHAT to examine how elementary candidates’ OTL in methods courses and student teaching shaped their development of instructional practices. Consistent with CHAT, we see beginning teachers’ characteristics as dynamic and changing over time as they engage in a range of experiences and contexts. Moreover, we view subject matter as a key factor for understanding this engagement (Hill, Rowan, & Ball, 2005; Spillane & Hopkins, 2013).

Data Sources and Methods. In 2015-16 and 2016-17, we invited 910 elementary teaching candidates who were in their final year at five universities to participate in the study; 554 (60.9%) of these candidates completed surveys. Of these, 90 participated in classroom observations of their mathematics and/or reading instruction during their first two years of teaching. We used the Protocol for Language Arts Observation (PLATO: Grossman, Loeb, Cohen, & Wyckoff, 2013) classroom observation tool to assess the quality of the beginning teachers’ instruction in mathematics and reading-language arts.

We used multiple regression to study the main outcomes as a function of several independent variables (including individual teacher characteristics and OTL in methods courses and student teaching) and interactions among these variables. Our primary outcomes were the quality of beginning teachers’ instructional practices in mathematics and reading/language arts as measured by novices’ scores on the four PLATO domains: instructional strategies, disciplinary demand, representations of content, and classroom environment.

Findings. Our findings indicate that elementary candidates’ exposure to decompositions of practice (e.g., OTL different ways students solve math problems, OTL different ways students interpret text) and their opportunities to engage in approximations of practice were significantly associated with the quality of their instruction in both subjects.

Significance. Elementary teachers’ instructional practices, given the long tail of their potential effects (Chetty et al., 2011), are an important lever for improving student outcomes. Elementary teachers are also key in understanding the role of content in learning to teach. They teach multiple subjects, but often have divergent experiences both in learning to teach and in teaching different subjects. By studying how beginning teachers’ preparation experiences and instructional practices in mathematics and reading/language arts vary across the same sample of teachers, we can better understand how content mediates the effects of preparation.

Authors

• Peter A. Youngs, University of Virginia

• Dorothea M. Anagnostopoulos, The University of Connecticut

• Jillian M. Cavanna, University of Hartford

• Lauren Molloy Elreda, University of Virginia