Role Identity, Motivation, and Moment-by-Moment Decisions About Instructional Moves During Discussion Facilitation

• In Event: Identity, Motivation, and Situated Action in Educational Contexts

Abstract

Purpose
Teacher motivation plays a central role in instructional practice. Research over the past couple of decades has established patterns of relations between constructs such as teachers’ self-efficacy, task value, personal achievement goals, and autonomous vs. controlling orientations with teachers’ preferred instructional strategies (Richardson, Karabenick & Watt, 2014). However, such research provides little insight into the motivational processes underlying specific decisions and actions that teachers enact moment-by-moment under the myriad circumstances of diverse classroom situations (Nolen, Horn, & Ward, 2015). This study investigated the motivational processes undergirding the emergence of moment-by-moment teacher actions while facilitating a discussion in a high school history classroom.

Theoretical Framework
The theoretical framework—the Dynamic Systems Model of Role Identity (DSMRI; Kaplan & Garner, 2017, 2018)—conceptualizes situated action as emerging from the person’s situated role identity (e.g., “discussion facilitator”). This role identity reflects the dynamic interplay among four interdependent role-related factors: perceived reality of the situation (ontological and epistemological beliefs), purpose and goals, self-perceptions and self-definitions, and perceived action possibilities. The DSMRI conceptualizes these four factors and their relations as continuously emerging within the confluence of four control parameters: cultural mediating means, social context and interactions, subject domain, and implicit personal dispositions.

Methods
Data in this single-case study included (1) a video segment (12:30 min.) of a pre-service teacher (PST) facilitating a classroom discussion in a secondary history classroom on a historical document from 1878 pertaining to immigration from China to the USA; and (2) a 2.5-page single-space memo in which the PST reflected on the segment, focusing in particular on explicating the basis for her actions in three salient decision moments during the discussion facilitation. We conducted a DSMRI-guided analysis on each data source separately, and then triangulated these to a description of the role identity and motivational processes undergirding the PST's moment-by-moment actions.

Findings
Our analysis highlighted transitions between activity-types that involved shifts in the PST’s role identity (RI) from “recitation facilitator” to “discussion facilitator” to “ending class.” The RI shifts corresponded with shifts in types of actions reflective of those normative roles. Within the “discussion facilitator” RI, instructional moves—including discussion facilitation strategies taught in teacher education courses and other actions—emerged from a dynamic interplay among the PST's perceptions of students’ classroom management norms, the nature of students’ momentary interactions, the PST’s goals at specific moments during the unfolding of the discussion, self-perceptions of efficacy in discussion facilitation, and the consideration of a relatively narrow set of specific action possibilities in each situation.

Significance
The findings highlight the complex, dynamic, situated, and socially oriented nature of the meaning-making process that undergirds the PST’s unfolding decisions about specific instructional actions. The findings complement motivational research focused on patterns of relations between motivational constructs and categories of instructional practice, but also emphasizes the need for theory and methodologies that can capture the integration of personal, contextual, and situational characteristics in order to understand the situated and emergent nature of teacher identity, motivation, and action.

Authors

• Joseph Eisman, Temple University

• Avi Kaplan, Temple University

• Lightning Jay, Binghamton University - SUNY

• Abby Reisman, University of Pennsylvania

• Timothy Patterson, Temple University

• Wendy Chan, The University of Pennsylvania

• Jenni Conrad, Temple University