How Beliefs Shape Teacher Engagement in Professional Development

• In Event: Poster session 2

Proposal

Prior research has shown how the sense-making framework influences not only how teachers view themselves, but also how they are able to adapt to new changes and implement criteria (Blignaut, 2008). Understanding teachers’ beliefs and mindsets is critical in relation to knowledge, dispositions, and other resources that affect the way reforms are implemented and shape teacher practice (Knight et al., 2015). This study investigates how teachers make sense of pedagogy and professional development (PD) by analyzing how their prior beliefs influence their engagement in a week-long PD opportunity. We employed a cultural consensus approach (Romney et al., 1987) where teachers, with addition to some administrative faculty (19 teachers and 4 administrators), across six schools were asked to share their thoughts on pedagogy and PD, writing each idea on a separate sticky notes. They were then given the chance to collaborate and come to a consensus on the top five responses that best described their collective thoughts on both prompts. The results of the cultural consensus can help us better understand teachers beliefs regarding pedagogy and PD, informing how they might make sense of novel PD experiences. We coupled this data with various forms of observational data including field notes, engagement scales, and diagrams of interactional patterns between individuals during 20 hours of PD. Our initial data analysis shows that teachers’ beliefs regarding pedagogy and PD as illustrated by the cultural consensus informs the way they make sense of the PD and engage with others. Schools with collective understandings of PD as a malleable and changeable learning opportunity displayed higher levels of overall engagement. During PD, different motivational factors were displayed such as concerns about funding, allocation of resources, relations to teacher-leader program, and more job opportunities. Though each school had different number of participants, each showed similar levels of engagement in PD through collaboration. In addition, individuals’ feedback on PD suggests that participants encourage more training and exhibited higher instances of community learning opportunities and a change in teaching methodology, despite behaviors indicated potential resistance to these learning opportunities such as checking their phones during the sessions. This research adds to the existent literature on rural educator development which focuses on the relatively understudies region of Central American where opportunities for professional development are limited. A deeper understanding of how teachers make sense of PD through their lens of prior beliefs and experiences, can provide insight into how to structure those experiences to be most effective, as well as inform how to measure and support fidelity of changes in teacher praxis. We are interested in receiving feedback on our initial typology of teacher beliefs and our measures for collecting teacher engagement data during PD as our interests extend to understanding change over time and following these same teachers through a two-year professional development cycle.

Authors

• Nikolemae De La Rosa, University of California, San Diego

• Maxie Gluckman, University of California, San Diego

• Katharine Summers, Students Helping Honduras