Improving, Inquiring, and Innovating a Linguistically and Culturally Responsive Teaching Community: Is It Possible?

• In Event: 52.049 - Improving, Inquiring, and Innovating (3 Is) Teacher Educators and Teachers Through an Ever-Evolving Professional Learning Community

Abstract

The presentation will discuss the arc of learning by the UMSL QTEL team regarding the structure of professional development and their transformational journey. The goals of the professional development sessions were to improve instructional strategies, introduce coping strategies, and develop responsible behaviors and attitudes of teachers toward ELLs (Author). The presentation will use both process and outcome evaluation findings. The presenters will share the deliberate efforts undertaken to develop a discourse community among the K-5 teacher candidates, in which they learned to prepare and implement inquiry-based and innovating teaching practice and reflection with intentional instructional teaching and learning cycles (Anders, Hoffman, & Duffy, 2000). The LCRT framework is a conceptual model that leads the participating teachers to their “socially and culturally constructed realm of interpretation in which particular characters and actors are recognized, significance is assigned to certain acts, and particular outcomes are valued over others” (Gee, 2001, p. 52) (Table 1). Within this community, the LCR teachers negotiate “the meanings of our experience of memberships in social communities” (Wenger, 1991, p. 145). The main challenge has been how to build a coherent learning community, in which the cohort team members can develop discourse identities (Gee, 2001), so they are capable of incorporating linguistic, pedagogical, and sociocultural competences by demonstrating their depth of knowledge, expanding their reasoning and teaching spaces, and examining their beliefs and values (Commins & Maramontes, 2006) even after they graduated from the program.
Mixed methods of assessment were used, including collection of both quantitative and qualitative data. Data from 5 years of professional development session assessments will be reviewed in the presentation. One research question leads this summative assessment session, “What has inquiry-based PDs impacted on teaching practices with ELLs?” Related to the research question, we examine the data records from QTEL cohort groups for shifts in how teachers evolve. Data sources for assessment include guided noticings, individual and focus group interviews, participant evaluations, inquiry into my practice transcriptions, pre-post quizzes, observations, and interviews.
The QTEL team learned to balance subject content, e.g., Mathematics, with ELL context in structuring professional development as the grant period progressed. The PD component of the project required engaging partners, collaborators and experts to supplement the capacity of the QTEL team in both content and context. Evaluation findings regarding the importance of vetting the teaching skills of content experts, the value of reflecting in the process of teacher learning, and establishing rubrics for both content learning and context appreciation will be discussed in the presentation. There is robust literature, which addresses TESOL pedagogy in the academic curriculum, but there has been sparse examination of applied professional development. This presentation will fill a gap in the literature by discussing the role of, the challenges of and the contributions of professional development in QTEL projects.

Authors

• Mark Tranel, University of Missouri - St. Louis

• Kim Hyunsook Song, University of Missouri - St. Louis