Continuity and Change in Teachers’ Developmental Trajectories as Discussion Facilitators

• In Event: Portraits of Growth: How Novice Social Studies Teachers Develop as Discussion Facilitators

Abstract

Objectives
This analysis, focusing on a subset of teachers from Paper 1, investigates how teachers who facilitated more or less dialogic discussions as preservice teachers develop as discussion facilitators through their second year. Using mixed methods, we explore changes in the quality of their discussions and how discussion quality relates to teachers’ goals and beliefs about students, school context, and the value and purpose of discussion.

Method
Data for this analysis focus on discussions from a sample of teachers (N=8) who began as part of a larger cohort from one of the university certification programs. A cluster analysis on the SSDI scores (centered on CO-CONSTRUCT scores) of the initial pool of 60 scored videos from 15 preservice teachers (4 per teacher) identified three clusters of teachers whose preservice discussions, on average, differed in the extent of student dialogicity. The 8 teachers sampled include 3 from the high cluster, 2 from the middle, and 3 from the low cluster.
We conducted growth and time series analyses to compare these 8 teachers, who each contributed 6 additional videos through their second year teaching. We then used the typology generated by the latent profile analysis (see Paper 1), to identify cases for in-depth DSMRI analysis to explore how role-identity may explain aberrant and typical discussions for each teacher (Kaplan & Garner, 2022).

Findings
We found significant growth for all teachers across all dimensions. Analysis of teacher growth by dimension found significant change for ASK, CO-CONSTRUCT, and CRITIQUE, again suggesting that teachers improved in how they structured, but not necessarily facilitated, discussion. The growth rates between teachers from each cluster were not significantly different but we found consistent differences in average scores between clustered teachers. However, each teacher presented their own developmental case and individual time series lines showed great variation within teachers. This variation was confirmed by the latent profile analysis, as the discussions facilitated by teachers in each cluster were distributed across discussion profiles. Although teachers who had been in high and low clusters continued to facilitate categorically different discussions, there was notable overlap between the types of discussions facilitated by teachers in the low and mid clusters, and teachers in the mid and high clusters.

We present DSMRI analysis on three cases to illustrate how teachers’ goals and beliefs about students, context, and discussion shed light on instructional practice in discussions that both conform and deviate from the broader patterns. For example, one teacher was initially in the high cluster when she student-taught in a magnet school, but her facilitation scores dropped as she began teaching in a neighborhood school and her beliefs about her students’ comfort and interest in the content (African American history) led her to structure student-led discussions where she rarely pressed them to elaborate.

Significance
Our findings illuminate the ways in which context, interactions with students, and teachers’ role identities shape teachers’ discussion facilitation. They suggest that discussion facilitation in pre-service teaching is not necessarily predictive of teachers’ practice as they enter the classroom.

Authors

• Abby Reisman, University of Pennsylvania

• Wendy Chan, University of Pennsylvania

• Lindsey Graham, University of Pennsylvania

• Jenni Conrad, Oregon State University

• Lightning Jay, Binghamton University - SUNY