The Development of Ambitious Instruction: How Beginning Elementary Teachers' Personal Characteristics and Preparation Experiences Are Associated With Their Mathematics and Reading Practices

• In Event: How Novice Elementary Teachers Learn to Teach Mathematics and Reading/Language Arts in Ambitious Ways

Abstract

Objective. This study examined how elementary teaching candidates’ characteristics and opportunities to learn (OTL) in coursework work and clinical placements at five universities were associated with the quality of their mathematics and reading/language arts instruction during their first two years of teaching. Our longitudinal design helps untangle the ways in which and the degree to which teacher characteristics and features of teacher preparation support the development of ambitious instruction.
Theoretical Framework. This study is grounded in activity theory (Engeström, 1999), which views learning as a collective activity that occurs through social interaction in particular settings and is mediated by conceptual and practical tools. Activity theory calls attention to the interaction between beginning teachers’ conceptions of teaching and learning and the tools and social practices available in university courses and elementary classrooms (Grossman, Smagorinsky, & Valencia, 1999). Several studies use activity theory to examine the processes through which beginning teachers do or do not appropriate the practices of ambitious instruction in their early years of teaching (Grossman, Smagorinsky, & Valencia, 1999; Leko & Brownell, 2011; Thompson, Windschitl, & Braaten, 2013).
Data Sources and Methods. In 2015-16 and 2016-17, we invited 904 elementary teaching candidates who were in their final year at five universities to participate in the study; 502 (55.5%) of these candidates completed surveys. Of these, 75 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 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 their scores on the four PLATO domains: instructional strategies, disciplinary demand, representations of content, and classroom environment.
Findings. Our findings indicate that elementary candidates’ OTL mathematics instructional strategies during student teaching and instructional strategies for diverse students were significantly associated with the quality of their mathematics instruction. In addition, we found that candidates’ OTL general principles of instruction and instructional strategies for working with students with disabilities were significantly associated with the quality of their reading/language arts instruction.
Significance. Given the long tail of their potential effects (Chetty et al., 2014), elementary teachers’ instructional practices are an important lever for improving student outcomes. In addition, elementary teachers 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

• Spyros Konstantopoulos, Michigan State University

• Julie Jackson Cohen, University of Virginia

• Corey Drake, Michigan State University