The Effects of Online Professional Development on Fourth Grade English Language Arts Teachers' Knowledge and Instructional Practices

2010 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 355-375 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Masters ◽  
Raquel Magidin De Kramer ◽  
Laura M. O'Dwyer ◽  
Sheralyn Dash ◽  
Michael Russell
2020 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 125
Author(s):  
Serena J. Salloum ◽  
Emily M. Hodge ◽  
Susanna L. Benko

Rapid adoption of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), the Race to the Top (RTTT) competition, and backlash around these policies created widespread uncertainty among state educational agencies (SEAs). SEAs may have not had a clear direction about how to support standards implementation in a new context, and therefore, may have looked to their professional networks, their geographic neighbors or other highly regarded SEAs, or other sources for information and resources to guide their decisions about where to send teachers for information about standards. Drawing on institutional theory (Meyer Rowan, 1977) and isomorphism specifically (DiMaggio Powell, 1983), we posit that coercive forces (primarily due to RTTT application and CCSS status) as compared to mimetic and normative forces influenced the organizations to which SEAs turn for curriculum materials. Using Multiple Regression Quadratic Assignment Procedure and a data set of over 2,000 state-provided resources for secondary English Language Arts teachers from all 50 states and Washington, D.C., we indeed found that coercive forces had a relationship with shared organizational ties, demonstrating that RTTT application and CCSS adoption influenced resource provision.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. p61
Author(s):  
E.A. Gamini Fonseka, PhD

As language is the medium of an art or a configuration of arts focused on communication, it is indispensable to realize the materiality of language with its potential to interpret the numerous phenomena in the environment. Our individual microcosms filled with messages on various complex situations received through our sensory channels exist in terms of strings of verbal language that help to re-create them for communication in whatever fashion we want. We experience language in meaningful utterances that function in singles or clusters to represent the life world in numerous registers. Our expressions inspired by our experiences of the life world are communicated through words orchestrated in grammatically patterned sentences. Like in other forms of art, in English language arts, teachers and learners can behave with confidence, when they realize the substance they deal with as oral sounds that gradually evolve into syllables, morphemes, signs, symbols, metaphors, and images, which creatively represent the life world. Against this background, I intend to demonstrate here the relevance of perceiving the materiality of language under the framework of a multifaceted unity of several disciplines, namely, phonology, morphology, semiotics, rhetoric, and stylistics that altogether contribute to a holistic approach to language. A concrete perception of language achieved in this manner helps to recover the learning process not only from inhibition and anxiety but also from fossilization and ephemerality.


2016 ◽  
Vol 118 (12) ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Sarah Schneider Kavanagh

Background/Context As states and districts have begun adopting texts inclusive of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people, debates about how LGBTQ issues should be represented in the curricular canon have emerged. While existing research investigates curricular questions that are arising as a result of LGBTQ curricular inclusion, scholarship has been slow to address the instructional questions presented by the introduction of inclusive curricula. Purpose This study explored how seven secondary English Language Arts teachers facilitated student engagement with LGBTQ-related topics. Analysis of data on teachers’ instructional practice and related decision-making sought to (a) determine what instructional dilemmas arose for teachers as they taught LGBTQ-inclusive content and (b) analyze the instructional decisions that teachers made to address these dilemmas. Participants Participants in this study were seven secondary English Language Arts teachers who (a) held strong reputations in their professional communities for supporting LGBTQ students and (b) had strong intentions to support LGBTQ students through LGBTQ curricular inclusion, reducing student prejudice, and advocating for and with LGBTQ students. Research Design This comparative case study was embedded in a larger qualitative study that investigated the instructional practice of LGBTQ-supportive teachers. This article reports on findings from an analysis of all data from this project that pertained to how teachers engaged students when teaching LGBTQ content. Data was collected over a six-month period and includes 22 teacher interviews, 28 observations of classroom instruction, 70 teacher log entries, and 25 teacher questionnaires. Findings/Results Analysis showed that participants felt a tension between a desire to make LGBTQ identity visible and a desire to offer LGBTQ students privacy. Participants employed two different approaches to navigating the visibility–privacy tension. Some created parallel engagement strategies for students, some public and some private, while others simultaneously allowed for privacy and visibility through the use of anonymity. Conclusions/Recommendations As conceptions of diversity expand to include sexual diversity, this study has implications for teacher preparation and professional development aimed at supporting teachers to attend to the unique needs of LGBTQ students within instructional practice.


Author(s):  
Luke Rodesiler ◽  
Barbara G. Pace

In this chapter, the authors present the framework and methods they employ to integrate online learning opportunities into an English teacher education program at a large, public university in the southeastern United States. The authors focus on their efforts to extend pre-service secondary English language arts teachers’ understandings of what constitutes literacy and what counts as text in the secondary English language arts classroom in a blended technology- and media literacy-focused methods course, a required component of a three-semester English Education Master’s degree program. Specifically, the authors document the ways they nudge pre-service teachers to consider the kinds of literacy events they might design and the types of literacy practices they might promote to support literacy learning with interactive online technologies and popular media in English language arts classrooms.


2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (24) ◽  
pp. 77-96
Author(s):  
Juan J. Araujo ◽  
Carol D. Wickstrom

This paper presents the actions of two high school English language arts teachers as they engage in writing instruction with adolescent English learners. Using a naturalistic, qualitative methodology we investigate the actions two high school English language arts teachers engage in to meet the needs of their students. Findings suggest that embracing the students’ resources, building on linguistic knowledge, taking time to choose the right books and activities, being explicit about writer’s workshop and accepting its frenetic pace because it meets the students’ needs, and using the act of writing as a thinking activity, were the actions that made a difference to promote student success.


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