Examining Teacher Educator Decision-Making Through the Lens of Role-Identity Development in a Professional Development Context

• In Event: Designing Professional Development Contexts for Teacher Agentic Identity Exploration, Motivation, and Learning of Instructional Practice

Abstract

Purpose
Many scholars of teacher education have embraced a turn to practice, arguing that novices ought to grapple with the complexity of instructional decision-making in mediated and scaffolded approximations of practice (Ghousseini et al., 2015; Grossman et al., 2009). Less theorized is the role of the teacher educator (TE) and their decision-making as they mediate novices’ experiences. This study investigates the identity, motivation and learning of teacher educators as they facilitated a teacher PD context designed to promote participants’ agency in identity exploration around discussion facilitation. We ask: How did the design of the PD context frame teacher educators’ role-identity exploration and motivation?

Theoretical Framework
We use the Dynamic Systems Model of Role Identity (DSMRI; Kaplan & Garner, 2017) to extend existing models of pedagogical reasoning that posit teacher action as grounded in rational, albeit dynamically adaptive to context, decisions-making (Loughran, 2019; Tiilikainen et al, 2019). DSMRI, instead, views teacher action (a) as emerging from the individual’s situated role-identity (e.g., teacher educator) and (b) through a dynamic process of enacting (mostly implicitly) an action possibility that is aligned with one's goals, perceived reality, and shifting self-perceptions (Garner & Kaplan, 2019).

Method
We focused our analysis on two TEs, Arlo and Jamie (from Teams 1 and 2 in Paper 1), each facilitating a participant group in the PD. Data sources included videotaped recordings of all team planning and enactment, as well as retrospective video stimulated recall interviews (SRI) probing TE’s decision-making about intervening while facilitating the PD. We cataloged all interventions for content and action and then analyzed the SRI following the DSMRI Manual for narrative analysis (Kaplan & Garner, 2022).

Findings
Despite sharing the designed PD context and structures for Activities to Co-investigate Teaching, each TE developed a distinct TE role-identity that incorporated their salient goals for the participants, ontological beliefs about their group’s needs, self-perceptions about their added value to the participants’ experience, and action possibilities for effective interventions. Jamie, whose scholarship and teaching role identities involve commitments to social justice and attention to classroom power dynamics, was cognizant when teachers in her room were speaking more than the students, but experienced tensions about pausing the activities and adding her voice. She limited her interventions to planning sessions and to joining teachers’ “huddles,” and reserved her interventions for key instances when she perceived teachers to miss obvious opportunities to elicit or attend to students’ contributions.
By contrast, Arlo intervened much more extensively. As the key architect of the PD structure and activities, Arlo’s role identity included goals of showcasing the range of ways that TEs can serve as resources to participants without infringing on their agency. As teachers struggled to design instruction that engaged students in historical thinking, Arlo intervened to offer explicit suggestions and even modeled an annotation activity with students at his participants’ request.

Scholarly Significance
These findings highlight the crucial role TEs play in mediating teachers’ experiences in Learning Labs and underscore the need for greater attention to TE identity exploration and formation when facilitating approximations of practice.

Authors

• Abby Reisman, University of Pennsylvania

• Andrew J. Schiera, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Lightning Jay, Binghamton University - SUNY

• Joseph Eisman, Purdue University