Editors’ Notes

Abstract

Issue 42(3) presents six articles that probe into important topics in teacher education: the effectiveness of teacher education programs and professional development for teaching English learners, novice teacher expertise in core practices of teaching English learners, mentoring novice special educators, student teacher-cooperating teacher relationships, and STEAM questioning strategies in K-12 classes. Each article extends possible ways to build on actionable teaching practices that inform teacher learning and preparation. Taken together, these articles demonstrate theoretically sound and methodologically rigorous research that contributes to the advancement of research and practice in teaching and teacher education. Nationally, the number of students who are English learners (ELs) or speakers of nonstandard variants of English is significant and growing (9.6 percent, or about 5 million nationwide in 2016 [NCES, 2019]). Influenced by developments in learning theory, many teacher education programs and teacher professional development programs have attempted to prepare teachers using intentional learning opportunities to analyze and critique their assumptions about these students that can translate to probable instruction to meet their learning needs. However, assumption analysis does not automatically lead to transformed actions. Therefore, to study the effectiveness of teacher education programs, teacher educators need to not only investigate teacher candidates’ assumptions about Els, but also their classroom teaching practice— “how [they] do the actual tasks of teaching” (Cochran-Smith et al., 2015, p. 117)—grounding these investigations on classroom observation data that goes beyond teacher candidates’ self-reported reflections on their teaching practice (Anderson & Stillman, 2013). We begin this issue with three articles that provide approaches to address this need. Our first article, “Studying Program Effectiveness in Preparing Effective Teachers for English Learners” by Dubetz and Collet, investigates how teacher candidates experience the preparation they receive to teach Els. The authors collected data from multiple sources including candidates’ planning and teaching artifacts from their preservice preparation as well as post-graduation observations of their instruction during the first two years of teaching and the English language proficiency scores of ELs in their classrooms. The authors found that the most frequently used practice for both preservice and inservice periods was frequent checking for understanding during instruction, while the least used practices were designing assessments by English proficiency level, and assessing content learning in a learner’s home language. Once teacher candidates became full-time teachers, they increased the practice of frontloading and reinforcing academic language in a given lesson; surprisingly, however, they decreased the practice of using learners’ prior knowledge to scaffold instruction. Statistical analysis of the data based on contextual variables such as participants’ career path choices, content area instruction, and grade level found significant differences between bilingual-certified and non-bilingual certified teachers. For example, bilingual-certified preservice participants used students’ prior knowledge of the content to scaffold new learning significantly more often than nonbilingual certified students. On the basis of this statistical analysis, Dubetz and Collet urge teacher education programs to carefully design content and practices for teacher candidates in both career paths to learn to effectively prepare them to teach ELs. In the second article, “Experts at Being Novices: What New Teachers Can Add to Practice-Based Teacher Education Efforts,” Peercy, Kidwell, Lawyer, Tigert, Fredricks, Feagin, and Stump explored