Teaching and Teacher Education: Leadership and Professional Development最新文献

By administering a self-assessment survey among 288 primary school teachers, we gained detailed insight into the implementation of strategies for differentiated instruction (DI) in mathematics. Besides implementation, we asked about the relative difficulty of each DI strategy, and about the factors helpful and hindering for the development of skills for implementing DI. The findings from the current study are in line with previous research, and provide additional and more detailed insights. Beginning teachers indicate their implementation of DI significantly lower than teachers with more than three years of experience. Strategies that are reported to be implemented more often, are also more often regarded easy to learn. Next to gaining experience and sufficient time for DI, an important factor for developing DI skills seems to lie in the community of practice within schools.

In this case study, we identified how teacher leaders developed a professional learning community (PLC) to support their colleagues’ learning to enhance the fifth-grade students' learning goals setting. Pre- and post-interview data from three teacher leaders and three participating teachers were analyzed. The findings revealed that in the first year of the PLC, all the conditions for a successful PLC implementation were fulfilled – the participants were encouraged by the school leadership team, and shared common vision and goals. Teachers put a lot of effort in learning the theory and based on their common understanding, developed a model to help their students goal-setting. Taking on an inquiry approach, they also monitored the effect of their learning on students. Although the teacher leaders admitted that leading the PLC was sometimes complicated, they found it inevitable to continue in the following year. However, teachers’ self-initiation was not enough to assure the successful functioning of the PLC. The lack of support (e.g. previously set time for collaboration was withdrawn) and interest from the school leadership team impeded the sustainability of the PLC.

This article aims to understand how principals perceive collective competences in their schools’ shared leadership contexts. Collective competences are crucial in shared leadership but have not been widely explored within educational leadership studies. This study investigates collective competences through two intersected models: attribute and relational models. The data comprise interviews conducted with 12 Finnish principals in comprehensive and secondary schools who practiced shared modes of leadership. Due to the Finnish school culture emphasising collaboration, the principals were expected to be able to broadly consider the collective side of competences in their schools. The data were analysed using a hybrid thematic analysis. Consequently, nine collective competence themes were found: shared meaning, sharing accounts, collective mindset, knowledge sharing and creation, developing contexts, broad participation, views of relationships, group collaboration and shared goal-oriented beliefs. These themes provide a fresh understanding of how to develop educational leadership considered in plural terms.

Video-based learning (VBL) aids STEM teacher professional development. In synchronous, in-person settings, researchers have linked changes in teachers’ reflective comments about videos to changes in their beliefs and classroom practices, which are associated with improved student outcomes. However, questions remain about VBL on asynchronous professional development websites, without facilitator support. This study experimentally examined how prompts, mathematical content, camera focus, and motivation for commenting impacted 300 educators’ reflective comments on videos in an online learning community. Results indicated that prompts targeted at specific focal areas (teachers, students, mathematics) produced more reflection on those focal areas, but less reflection in non-focal areas.

Ongoing professional development (PD) enables school teachers to manage rapidly changing social and educational conditions, especially the isolating impacts of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. However, research shows that commonly provided one-size-fits-all models of PD are often ineffective and leave teachers feeling frustrated. Formally structured approaches often overlook self-directed digitally mediated learning, and the innovative practices that some teachers already engage in.

Until now the nature and benefits of professional learning though a personal learning network (PLN) – a system of digital connections between people and resources that an individual constructs using social technologies – has received limited attention. This paper reveals partial findings of a qualitative case study that explored the recent PLN experience of 13 teachers around the world. The five selected vignettes present different ways that teachers connect with peers to share their professional learning needs and interests. These vignettes illustrate the case study's key findings that the nature of teachers’ professional learning through PLNs is individual, social and digitally connected through social technologies. These findings are of significance to researchers, education policy makers, school administrators and practitioners to inform the development of flexible, innovative and remotely accessible approaches to professional learning.

The aim of this study is to get insight into dynamics and complexity of emotions as experiences and reactions and team learning activities at work. Dynamics refers to the changes in the relationships between team learning activities and emotions over time. Complexity refers to the reciprocal relationships between emotions and team learning activities over time. A longitudinal, mixed methods study was conducted in two parts: a three-wave survey (Part I) where the respondents filled out a questionnaire at the beginning, the middle, and the end of one school year, and observations at five times for each team (Part II). A total of 278 members of 67 vocational educator teams completed questionnaires, and six of these teams were observed in team meetings. The findings indicate changes in the relationships between emotions and team learning activities over time (dynamics). Positive emotions predict sharing and team reflection in the first half of the school year, whereas negative emotions prevent team members from sharing knowledge in the second half of school year. Furthermore, a reciprocal relationship between positive emotions and team reflection was found in the first half of the school year. Explanations for the identified relationships are provided based on the qualitative data from the observations. Vocational educator teams should be promoted by their team leaders right at the beginning of the teamwork to commonly reflect on the work tasks, decision processes, and the work behaviours. Further, vocational educators should express positive emotional reactions right from the beginning of teamwork, for example, they should appreciate each other.

This article explores the challenges shared by novice teachers in a year-long series of professional development workshops, which were designed to help novice teachers notice, unpack, and respond to the difficulties they were encountering in the first three years of teaching. The authors analyzed the data generated during the Oral Inquiry Process workshops to identify common challenges shared by the novice teachers who participated in this study and the nuances within them. Findings pointed to two common categories of struggle: reconciling theory and practice in standardized schools and managing relationships with veteran teachers. Nuances within these challenges included tension flowing from standardization, pacing constraints, and navigating complex relationships with veteran teachers. The authors argue that developing a nuanced understanding of the challenges novice teachers encounter is a vital first step in structuring teacher induction programs to respond to the needs of the teachers they serve. Working from the findings of the study, the authors offer recommendations for structuring professional development programs designed to help novice teachers embrace struggle through dialogue about and reflection upon the particular challenges created by their teaching contexts.

This two-wave mixed-methods study used the job demands and resources model to examine the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on school personnel's work well-being (including burnout, work engagement, and sense of belonging) in spring 2020 in Finland in particular with respect to collegial relationships (respectful engagement) and leadership support. A pre-lockdown survey was administered prior to the pandemic (in January–February, n = 437) and a post-lockdown survey was administered after the two-month lockdown (at the end of May, n = 270). At post-lockdown, the school personnel reported, on average, more exhaustion, less work engagement (measured as enthusiasm and energy at work), and a decreased sense of belonging than before lockdown. The period of lockdown was characterized as highly burdening, and many had missed their work communities. On the other hand, work absorption related to work engagement showed an increase, and there was no change in burnout with respect to cynicism; only a few expressed high levels of cynicism, whereas many reported positive experiences. The effects of pre-lockdown interpersonal relationships on school personnel's well-being during lockdown were mediated by pre-lockdown well-being. Respectful engagement was also directly associated with a higher sense of belonging during lockdown over and above the pre-lockdown sense of belonging. Collegial relationships were described as salient and available work resources during lockdown, whereas leadership was often perceived negatively during pandemics. The findings underline the importance of fostering respectful work community interactions and improving supportive school leadership to cope with crises while maintaining high-quality teaching and student support.

Networked professional learning communities (NLCs) have emerged as a promising structure for effective professional development. Drawing from Garet et al's (2001) definition of collective participation as groups of teachers from the same school, department, or grade level engaging in professional learning together, this study uses an embedded case study design to investigate the role of collective participation in promoting teacher learning in a mathematics NLC in the United States comprising three separate learning networks. The first network consisted of only teachers from one school district, while the other two networks served isolated teachers attending without any or only a few school-based colleagues. The varying compositions of these networks enabled us to examine how collective and non-collective participation shaped teachers’ learning experiences and later efforts to implement their learning in their classrooms. Drawing from analyses of participant observation and interview data, our findings emphasize the importance of collective participation in professional learning, while also illustrating how some successful teachers with non-collective NLC participation cultivated unique configurations of communities for supporting instructional change.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused school systems to adapt very quickly to a variety of demands for change, and teachers, as frontline workers in the education system, were tasked with rapidly implementing new teaching practices in ways that promoted student learning while maximizing student safety. The aim of this study is to investigate how Italian teachers experienced the first COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, managing the difficult balance between job demands and personal resources to reduce the negative effects of this condition in terms of stress and burnout. Following the J-D/R model, the study analysed the role of personal resources, such as resilience and self-efficacy as components of Psychological Capital, in the relationship between job demands (work-life interface), job resources (principal's leadership support and participative decision-making), and emotional exhaustion. Participants were 606 Italian teachers working in different educational ranks. Results showed that personal resources play an important role to reduce the effects of job demands on emotional exhaustion and to buffer the effects of job resources on emotional exhaustion