Instructional Quality and Teacher-Student Interaction Across Contexts: A Mixed-Method Classroom Observation Study

• In Event: Teaching Quality, Teacher-Student Interactions, and Reflections-in-Action: Evidence From Different Educational Sectors in China

Abstract

Objectives
This study aimed to compare the instructional quality and teacher-student interactions in the observed teaching practices when a western pedagogy was introduced to primary schools in two contrastive districts (city/urban vs county/rural) of a remote and economically weaker province in China. Challenges in promoting a western pedagogy to teach English to achieve ‘quality education for all’ are expected to provide insights to measures in pedagogical improvement.

Theoretical framework
Unequal gaps between urban and rural schools were well-documented (e.g., Hannum, 1999; Rao, Chi & Cheng, 2010; Wang, 2011; Wang et al., 2017). Building stronger school-wide professional learning communities in rural schools can narrow the rural-urban teaching and learning gaps (Wang et al., 2017). However, changing classroom practices from traditional pedagogy that relies on whole-class instruction to a student-centred western pedagogy was considered an alternative important for theory and practice in this study.

Methods
This study adopted a mixed-method research strategy with concurrent qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis. Lesson observations with classroom videos were used to explore teachers’ instructional quality and teacher-student interactions. TEACH (World Bank, 2019), a validated classroom observation instrument with high inter-rater reliability (Molina et al., 2018), was employed to evaluate instructional quality. In TEACH, descriptors on twenty-eight behavioral indicators are provided for evaluating teaching practices in a ‘low’, ‘middle’, or ‘high’ rating. These indicators are nested in nine 5-point Likert scaled teaching dimensions of three domains (i.e., classroom culture, instruction, and socioemotional skills). Exemplary high-quality lessons were selected for conducting in-depth qualitative dialogue analyses (e.g., Hennessy et al., 2015) to illustrate how teacher-student interactions may contribute to the instructional quality.

Data sources
The sample of this study consisted of seventy-eight elementary school English teachers/lessons (one teacher per lesson) from thirty-six schools in two different districts (one city/urban, and one county/rural) of an inland province in the west of China.

Results and conclusions
Of three teaching domains, a significant difference found in Domain 2: the Instruction () suggests that the lessons in the city/urban were significantly better than the county/rural in teacher instruction regardless of pedagogy, but not necessarily in classroom culture and socioemotional skills. More in-depth analyses at the dimension level indicated that significant differences were evident between urban and rural schools in three out of four instruction aspects (i.e., lesson facilitation, ; feedback, critical thinking,In contrast, among the three dimensions in the socioemotional skills domain, autonomy was the only dimension that showed a significant urban-rural difference ().
In-depth teacher-student interaction analysis (Table 1) also showed that traditional pedagogy enhanced teacher-student interactions that encouraged cognitive activities (Table 2), while western-style pedagogy facilitated teacher-student interactions that promoted classroom culture and socioemotional skills domains (Table 3).

Significance
This study contributes to our understanding of teaching practices in the contrastive differences between urban and rural learning environments in instructional quality. This study also illustrated that the urban and rural difference would not be easily resolved by introducing a western pedagogy because the traditional pedagogy is not necessarily inferior to the western one.

Authors

• Celia Jieyan Lei, The Education University of Hong Kong

• Lisa Chen, Bridge International Academies

• Rainbow Yuan, The Education University of Hong Kong