Guskey (1995) - Teacher change and development - PD

Guskey, T., & Huberman, M. (1995). Professional Development in Education: New Paradigms and Practices. New York: Teachers College Press.

Optimal Mix chapter pp 114-131

Guskey (1995) – Teacher change and development is both an individual and organizational process. Teachers are more likely to develop and change in positive ways when the organizational and social contexts are supportive. Focusing on individual change while neglecting organization system level issues can limit success of programs. Organizational changes alone might not result in changes in teachers practices or student learning. [p. 119]

Teacher beliefs are more likely to change after trying out new instructional strategies and experiencing some sort of success.

See also:
Guskey, T. (2002). Professional Development and Teacher Change. Teachers and Teaching, 8(3), 381–391

Guskey, T. (1986). Staff Development and the Process of Teacher Change. Educational Researcher, 15(5), 5–12.

CCSS Math - 4 area of emphasis

The Common Core State Standards (CC) provide guidelines for how to teach mathematics for understanding by focusing on students’ mathematical reasoning and sense making. Here I will only summarize four emphases provided by the CC to describe how mathematics instruction for ELs needs to begin by following CC guidelines and taking these four areas of emphasis seriously.

Emphasis #1 Balancing conceptual understanding and procedural fluency
Instruction should a) balance student activities that address both important conceptual and procedural knowledge related to a mathematical topic and b) connect the two types of knowledge.

Emphasis #2 Maintaining high cognitive demand
Instruction should a) use high-cognitive-demand math tasks and b) maintain the rigor of mathematical tasks throughout lessons and units.

Emphasis #3 Developing beliefs
Instruction should support students in developing beliefs that mathematics is sensible, worthwhile, and doable.

Emphasis #4 Engaging students in mathematical practices
Instruction should provide opportunities for students to engage in eight different mathematical practices: 1) Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them, 2) reason abstractly and quantitatively, 3) construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others, 4) model with mathematics, 5) use appropriate tools strategically, 6) attend to precision, 7) look for and make use of structure, and 8) look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning.

Source: Mathematics, the Common Core, and Language by Judit Moschkovich

Five principles for creating effective second language learning environments

Five principles for creating effective second language learning environments
by Tony Erben

Principle 1: Give ELLs many opportunities to read, to write, to listen to, and to discuss oral and written English expressed in a variety of ways

Principle 2: Draw attention to patterns of English language structure

Principle 3: Give ELLs classroom time to use their English productively

Principle 4: Give ELLs opportunities to notice their errors and to correct their English

Principle 5: Construct activities that maximize opportunities for ELLs to interact with others in English

Source: Erben, T., Ban, R., & Castaneda, M. (2009). Teaching English Language Learners Through Technology. New York: Routledge [Amazon]

Hargreaves, A. (1995). Development and Desire: A Postmodern Perspective.

Hargreaves, A. (1995). Development and Desire:  A Postmodern Perspective.  In Guskey, T. and Huberman, M. (Eds.), Professional Development in Education:  New Paradigms and Practices.  New York:  Teachers’ College Press
http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED372057

Notes: Hargreaves argues that the practice and research of teacher development should address the technical competence of teaching, the place of moral purpose in teaching, political awareness, acuity and adeptness among teachers, and teachers' emotional attachments to and engagement with their work. None of these dimensions alone capture all that is important or all there is to know about teacher development. What really matters is the interactions among and integration between them.

Dimensions of teacher development
Good teaching, for most people, is a matter of teachers mastering the skills of teaching and the knowledge of what to teach and how to teach it. Teacher development, in this view, is about knowledge and skill development. This kind of teacher development is well known and widely practised. It can be neatly packaged in courses, materials, workshops and training programs.

Good teaching, however, also involves issues of moral purpose, emotional investment and political awareness, adeptness and acuity. What teacher development might mean in these terms is much less clear; not nearly so easy to package and plan. It touches on the teacher as a person, has relevance for teachers' long term orientations to their work, and impacts on the settings in which teachers teach. These moral, political and emotional aspects of teacher development are less well understood and less widely practised.

1. Technical Skill
It is obvious and uncontentious that good teaching requires competence in technical skills - be these ones of classroom management, mixed-ability teaching, cooperative learning, direct instruction, or whatever. Less obviously, but just as importantly, the possibilities for good teaching also increase when teachers command a wide repertoire of skills and strategies, and can judge how to select them for and adjust them to the child, the content and the moment (Darling-Hammond & Berry, 1988). How teachers (and indeed other professionals) make such judgements and make them well is more elusive (Schon, 1983) and not addressed at all effectively in most forms of teacher development.

2. Moral Purpose
Attending to the moral dimensions of teaching usually involves distinguishing between better and worse courses of action, rather than right and wrong ones. There are no clear rules of thumb, no useful universal principles for deciding between these options. Unlike university philosophers of education, classroom teachers do not have the ethereal privilege of proclaiming their virtue from the high ground.
...
Teacher development can help teachers articulate and rehearse resolving these moral dilemmas in their work. By reflecting on their own practice, observing and analyzing other teachers' practice or studying case examples of practice, teachers can clarify the dilemmas they face and develop principled, practical and increasingly skillful and thoughtful ways of dealing with them (Groundwater-Smith, 1993). This approach to teacher development elevates the principles of thoughtful, practical judgement above personal prejudice, misleading moral absolutes, or the false certainties of science as a guide to action and improvement (Schön, 1983; Louden, 1991).

3. Political Awareness, Adeptness and Acuity 
First, being a more political and critically reflective teacher means learning about the micropolitical configurations of one's school.
Second, being a more politically aware and developed teacher means empowering and assisting others to reach higher levels of competence and commitment.
Third, being more political means acknowledging and embracing, not avoiding human conflict.
Fourth, for teacher developers themselves, being more political means recognizing that many typical training efforts in knowledge and skill development falsely treat the techniques in which teachers are being trained as universal, generic, neutral and equally applicable to all students irrespective of race, gender and other distinctions.
Fifthly, to return to Liston & Zeichner's (1991) agenda, it is also important to be reflective about the long term political and social consequences of one's classroom work.

4. Emotional Involvement

• most teacher development initiatives, even the most innovative ones, neglect the emotions of teaching
• Much of the writing on and practice of teacher development has tended to emphasize its rational, intellectual, cognitive, deliberative and strategic qualities.
• In one sense, passion, desire and other intense emotions have always been central to teaching.
• Emotions an pivotal to the quality of teaching. Teacher developers ignore them at their peril.
• Emotional awareness and emotional growth in teaching can be fostered and sustained through specific techniques such as personal reflective journals, shared discussions of personal and professional life histories, or establishment of teacher support groups, for example. More generally, the development of collaborative school cultures has been shown to create environments in which successes can be shared, vulnerabilities aired, differences acknowledged and trust and tolerance consolidated (Nias et al,1989; Nias et al, 1992; Fullan and Hargreaves, 1991).

Central tasks of learning to teach

CENTRAL TASKS OF LEARNING TO TEACH

Preservice 
1. Examine beliefs critically in relation to vision of good teaching
2. Develop subject matter knowledge for teaching
3. Develop an understanding of learners, learning, and issues of diversity
4. Develop a beginning repertoire
5. Develop the tools and dispositions to study teaching

Induction
1. Learn the context-students, curriculum, school community
2. Design responsive instructional program
3. Create a classroom learning community
4. Enact a beginning repertoire
5. Develop a professional identity

Continuing Professional Development
1. Extend and deepen subject  matter knowledge for  teaching
2. Extend and refine repertoire in curriculum, instruction, and assessment
3. Strengthen skills and dispositions to study and improve teaching
4. Expand responsibilities and develop leadership skills

Feiman-Nemser, S. (2012). Teachers as Learners. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press. (p.143)

Contextual Teaching and Learning

Four essential assumptions of Contextual Teaching and Learning:

1. Teaching and learning are interactional processes.

2. Individual learners must decide to learn and to engage in the attentional, intellectual, and emotional processes needed to do so.

3. Teaching isn’t happening if learning is not occurring.

4. Learning is a developmental process that takes place throughout life (Sears, 2002, p. 2).


Title: Contextual Teaching and Learning: A Primer for Effective Instruction
Author(s): Susan Sears
Publisher: Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation, Bloomington
ISBN: 0873678419 , Pages: 82, Year: 2002

TCR review

Posner - Toward a theory of conceptual change

Posner, G. J., Strike, K. A., Hewson, P. W. and Gertzog, W. A. (1982), Accommodation of a scientific conception: Toward a theory of conceptual change. Science Education, 66: 211–227. doi: 10.1002/sce.3730660207

Four conditions necessary for accommodation of a scientific conception:
1) intelligibility (ability to understand the concept),
2) plausibility (believability and consistency of the concept),
3) dissatisfaction with existing conceptions, and
4) fruitfulness of the concept for use in external contexts

See Osborne, R. & Freyberg, P. (1985). Learning in science: The implications of children's science. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann

and

Bransford, J. D., Brown, A. L., & Cocking, R. R. (2000). How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.