Pedagogical Alignment in Equity-Focused Professional Learning: Measure Development and Initial Validation

• In Event: Scale Development and Validation Across Diverse Educational Contexts

Abstract

To support teachers in adopting equity-supportive beliefs and practices, U.S. schools spend billions of dollars on equity-focused professional learning (PL). Although educational equity remains a pressing issue, these PL opportunities are often met with resistance or intransigence. The current research examines one factor underlying this resistance: pedagogical alignment (PA), the extent to which educators perceive equity-focused PL as being compatible with their existing teaching philosophies and practices. Across three studies (N = 1,681) with local and national samples of educators, we generated internal reliability and convergent validity evidence for retrospective and prospective versions of a 3-factor scale assessing PA with equity-focused PL. Study 3 also demonstrated that greater PA predicted greater engagement with equity-focused PL.

Authors

• Laura Brady, American Institutes for Research

• Cong Wang, Northwestern University

• Kate McPhee, American Institutes for Research