Classroom Practices in Chile, Colombia, and Mexico: A Comparative Analysis of Teaching Standards

• In Event: Inclusive Social Change in Latin American Education

Proposal

Given the relation between teaching and learning, there is a need for research that systematically examines and compares classroom practices across countries in the region. The overarching research purpose of this study was to further our understanding of how classroom practices relate to teaching standards in three Latin American countries: Chile, Colombi, and Mexico. Specific ally, I study how classroom practices vary across countries in ways that may reflect differences in the teaching policies and frameworks in Chile, Colombia, and Mexico.
Chile, Colombia, and Mexico have important similarities including language and culture, high levels socioeconomic and educational inequalities, and centralized educational governance and curricula; but also key differences in educational policies including teaching standards and teacher evaluation systems. Together, these similarities and differences enable closer comparisons across countries, including exploring how classroom practices vary in the region. Moreover, policymakers are additionally interested in understanding why there is a difference in classroom practices, and the implications of these for student learning. However, the measurement of classroom practices in Latin America has been limited to descriptive data about observed teacher characteristics except for a few studies that describe classroom practices in small samples of classrooms (Bruns & Luque, 2014; Jensen et al., 2020). Consequently, there is a need for research that systematically examines classroom practices across and within countries in the region.
In this paper, I use narrative text analysis (Bowen, 2009) to review the federal teaching standards for all three countries and establish the similarities and differences to hypothesize how and why these could be related in observed differences in classroom practices. Then, I systematically compare classroom practices ratings, derived from the TALIS Video Study, across these three Latin American countries using confirmatory factor analysis (Xu & Tracey, 2017). Thus, I investigate the following research questions:
a) What are the factorial structures of measures of classroom practice derived from the TVS classroom observation protocols in Chile, Colombia, and Mexico?
b) What is their relationship with teaching standards across the three countries?
Findings indicate large variations in classroom practices within countries as well as key differences in classroom practices across the three systems. While ratings of classroom practices resulted in three broad domains—classroom management, student engagement and instruction—the characteristics that made-up each domain varied across countries. This suggests that country context and specific standards of teaching may indeed translate into different factorial structures in observation measures of classroom practices (e.g.: Rutkowski & Svetina, 2014, 2017).
I concluded that two specific yet distinct mechanisms could account for differences in the structures of ratings of classroom practices. The first relates to the measurement of classroom practices by externals raters. But the second mechanism relates to policy enactment (Heimans, 2014). It would be reasonable to speculate that differences in the content and explicitness of standards, and other education policies, including those related to teaching standards could influence the relative frequencies, emphases, and co-occurrence of different types of instructional practices that were enacted in classroom across the three countries (McCarty & Castagno, 2017). In turn, teachers’ differential enactment of these teaching standards can shape the frequency or emphasis on different practices, and thus the factorial structure of the constructs derived from measures of instruction.
My research additionally provides key insights into what teaching looks like inside these three Latin American countries. Specifically, I showed that teachers across country samples showed an adequate management of the classroom, but moderate-to-low scores in practices related to student engagement and instruction. Each country sample suggests distinct areas of opportunity for growth within these two last domains of teaching.
Given that some of these scores are related to policies that regard teacher training, recruitment, and retention, ensuring that these and professional development programs, directly and explicitly discuss classrooms practices to improve teachers’ classrooms practices is of absolute relevance.

Author

• Mariana Barragan Torres, University of Illinois