Using mixed-methods to investigate student teacher learning outcomes

The Deakin University Faculty of Arts and Education’s Global Experience Program (GEP) aims to “develop the knowledge, cultural sensitivity and skills needed to address diversity within the educational environment” among student teachers (Deakin, 2009). This research aims to investigate the short term student teacher learning outcomes from their participation in the program through their perceptions and real-life international teaching experiences. The data are collected using mixed-methods to get breadth and in-depth insights on learning outcomes. The survey was conducted to investigate student teacher perceptions on their professional and cultural learning using a Likert scale, while an ethnographic case study was intended to reveal the real-life student teachers learning outcomes from their participation in the GEP in Vanuatu.

Changing teacher professional learning : transitioning from train - the trainer to participatory action research

Diffusion-adoption professional learning models which position teachers ascompliant technicians of policy and practices are limited in their long term effects on teacher professionalism. In contrast, co-researching models of professional learning hold the potential to engage teachers and researchers in explorations of mutual concern which impact on professionalism and contribute to development of both theory and practice.

This article describes professional learning within the context of an Australian state department of education during a period of reform. The contextual influences and design of a collaborative, film-driven participatory action research design which explored teacher learning and application of multiliteracies theory are explored. A spiral of cycles of action research incorporated engagentent with multiliteracies theory and collaborative planning; filming of teacher classroom 'action' and reflective interviews; collaborative observation of and reflection on the resultant filmic artefacts.

The filmic artefacts offered rich multimodal examples of teaching practices,
incorporatíng visual, audio, gestural and spatial classroom information, far beyond the purely linguistic recounts and descriptions which characterise many professional development workshops. Incorporation of collaborative filmic research techniques enabled multimodal observation of teaching practices across a number of sites, with observation unrestricted by temporal or physical parameters.

Activating teacher critical moments of learning through reflection

Mathematical modelling is one of the current focuses in the Singapore Mathematics Curriculum Framework. A multi-tiered teaching experiment using design research methodology was conducted to build teachers’ capacity in designing, facilitating, and evaluating learning during mathematical modelling tasks for Primary 5 students (aged 10-11). This paper illustrates the use of the retrospective analysis phase within design research cycles to activate a critical moment of teacher learning involving the interplay between questioning and listening during her first attempt at facilitating a mathematical modelling task. The teacher affirmed her deliberate focuses in the use of questions to (a) refine students’ models, (b) encourage articulation of student ideas in self-evaluation of the models, and (c) clarify and understand student reasoning. However, she also discovered the importance of interpretative listening in conjunction with questioning to promote more sophisticated mathematisation processes in model development. Implications from the use of the retrospective analysis phase on activating critical moments of learning during teacher education will be discussed.

Teacher professional learning in early childhood education: insights from a mentoring program

In Australia, as is the case in other countries around the world, the Early Childhood workforce is in the process of ‘skilling up’ to meet government demands related to quality service provision. This paper sets out to identify what constitutes effective teacher professional learning through mentoring. Guided by critical realism and social practice as theoretical perspectives, the paper uses data drawn from the State-wide Professional Mentoring Program for Early Childhood Teachers (2011–2014), Victoria, Australia. The findings identify four C’s essential to effective professional learning – Context: the association between individual aspirations and systemic requirements; Collegiality: the positioning and importance of collegial relationships; Criticality: critical deliberation in ‘safe’ learning environments; and Change: recognition that teacher learning takes place in the domains of professional dispositions, pedagogical knowledge and social capital. These findings point to the need to consider teachers’ contexts of practice in the design of professional development programs such as mentoring, and to conceptualise learning as a socially situated practice rather than a detached pedagogic event.

Developing self-regulated learning skills in young students

This study generated multiple voices and multiple perspectives on how to develop self-regulated learning skills in young students. It provides schools with an effective professional development model, built around action research and a community of learners, that has a meaningful effect on teacher learning and fosters improvements in classroom practice.

Leading professional learning in an Australian secondary school through school-university partnerships

As the limitations of one‐off and disconnected professional learning programs for teachers are recognised, there is widespread interest in building learning communities and professional learning teams within schools. When considering how to build local learning communities, school and university partnerships are seen as offering rich possibilities for transformative professional action. Set in the context of the international agenda of “Education For All” (UNESCO, 2005) a model of sustained on‐going professional learning, developed in one large secondary school in Australia, is analysed. The social practices that generate action and participation for partnership members are then scrutinised for the legitimacy of school‐university partnerships and the contribution to enhancing teacher learning.

Significance of a multimedia resource in the professional learning of preservice teachers

This phenomenological inquiry seeks to understand the complexity of teacher professional learning through analysis of the use of a multimedia curriculum resource in initial teacher education programs. The study follows seven preservice teachers at three points over the course of an eighteen month period to gain understandings of how they are making meaning of their becoming teacher journeys. For the purposes of this paper only one aspect of the doctoral study is reported on due to the limitations of space. Consequently, this paper focuses on the findings of the significance of using a multimedia curriculum resource, known as QuILT, for professional learning. The qualitative study used questionnaires that included open-ended questions and semi-structured interviews with each of the seven preservice teachers at three points over an eighteen month period; as well as artefacts such as their QuILT related assessment. The paper reports on the findings that the multimedia resource and its pedagogical use provide a rich professional learning environment for preservice teachers.

Internationalising the curriculum: student learning in the global experience program

Outcomes include critical analyses of student teacher learning from teaching practicum in Vanuatu; the intercultural sensitivity and competence; the notion of professional learning in the light of internationalisation of the curriculum, and the potentials and limitations of the GEP for achieving the goals of internationalisation of the curriculum

Managerialist vis-à-vis learning and development goals for EAL teachers: A case study of an in-service professional development provider

Under current Western neoliberal philosophy, promotion of efficiency and resolution of issues are typically expected to result from effective management. The education sector, too, has responded well to these expectations. Amongst such expectations, engagement in professional development activities (PDAs) by teachers of English as an additional language (EAL) is widely encouraged, considered to be essential, and usually conducted with a view to facilitate effective and effortless administration. As such, institutional offerings of PDAs driven by managerialist agendas generally tend to be ad hoc attempts to facilitate administrative decisions rather than opportunities for teachers’ lifelong learning and development. Under such circumstances, providers of in-service PDAs are faced with a conflicting dilemma – that of facilitating an effortless flow of administration and, at the same time, promoting teacher learning and development. We foreground one case of such dilemma surrounding the offering of PDAs derived as interview data from an experienced provider of in-service PDAs for EAL teachers.

EAL teacher-agency: implications for participation in professional development

Teachers construct their practice, education and professionaldevelopment within two domains of professionalism: sponsored andindependent. The association between these two domains, however,is complex; it is overlapping, inseparable and sometimes uneasy. Thecomplexity is further exacerbated by the codependent nature ofassociation between the teacher and employment context in whichteachers’ and institutions’ trajectories for professional developmentmay vary. This situation calls into question the discrete treatmentgiven to and received by sponsored and independent professionalismin conceptualisations of teacher professional development. We arguethat, in both domains, teachers’ agency as learners is crucial for theirprofessional development and institutional efficacies. We critique theostensible disconnect and tensions that exist between the domains ofsponsored and independent professionalism in relation to teachingEnglish as an additional language and discuss how principles ofsponsored and independent professional development initiativescan be harnessed for optimal teacher learning.discuss how principles ofsponsored and independent professional development initiativescan be harnessed for optimal teacher learning.

Renewing assessment practices: literacy teaching and learning in digital environments

Interpretations of “literacy” and approaches to literacy pedagogy and assessment are under renewal as meaning-making and learning are increasingly situated in digitized environments. While the implications of these shifts are in part technological, they are also relational, as students are increasingly positioned as interactive with participatory roles in self-knowledge and increased responsibility for their learning. However, while shifts are occurring in understandings of literacy and approaches to literacy pedagogy, the same cannot be said for the way in which assessments of digital literacies are undertaken. There is a lack of valid, reliable, and practical assessments of new literacies to inform and help students to become better prepared for study, work, and citizenship in digital environments. This article maps five characteristics of effective formative assessment in print-based classrooms with seven affordancesin digital learning and assessment to suggest an analytical framework for examining teacher and student assessment in digital environments. Drawing on data from a research project in which a team of teachers introduced a one-to-one computing program and worked to renew their literacy assessment practices, this article discusses how each of the seven affordances are enacted in the assessment practices in a years five and six primary school classroom. The findings from this research project show that educational technologies have the potential to enable new approaches to teaching, learning, and assessment that better align with the needs of twenty-first century literacy learners. The findings alsosupport approaches to formative assessment that value print and multimodality and engage students in more flexible and differentiated ways. They can enable teachers and students to be re-positioned as designers, knowledge producers, and collaborative learners. The seven affordances provide a framework that holds rich possibilities for teacher learning and planning as prompts to support reflection on formative assessment practices, critique habitual practices, and considernew opportunities.

Multimodality pedagogies : a multiliteracies approach

This paper draws on outcomes of a case study which explored changes in teachers' literacy pedagogies as a result of their participation in a purpose-driven teacher professional learning project. The teachers sought to develop classroom responses which were cognisant of multimodal shifts resulting from an increasingly digitised, networked communications environment. Recognising the powerful influence of the teacher on student outcomes, the study sought to investigate teacher learning as a means for influencing print-based literacy pedagogies to incorporate multimodality literacy practices. Four teachers engaged in participatory action research, researching their literacy pedagogies in light of the New London Group's multiliteracies theory (1996; 2000). Schemas derived from multiliteracies theory acted as stimuli for expanding teachers' multimodality pedagogies, consequently addressing disjunctures between multimodal and print-based literacies. Patterns in teachers' pedagogical choices are illustrated through the analytical use of the 'multimodal schema'.

Reconfiguring the spatial in the pre-service classroom

Teaching and researching through art opens multiple, distinct and/or overlapping understandings with positionings that shift according to the angle of repose of the percipient. The performance of teaching includes both technical skills and professional knowledge that pervade the literature of teacher education and teacher learning. These are strongly linked to the weight of attention teachers give to standards and assessment. Teaching, however, is more than this twodimensional technicist construction. Seventy years ago Dewey (1934) identified the distinction between an assessment based education with narrowly defined objectives, and active, open ended constructivist approaches best exemplified in the arts.