Transitioning Professional Development within Classes through Coteaching

Author(s):

Kathryn Scantlebury(presenting / submitting)Elizabeth Soslau

Conference:

ECER 2015

Network:

10. Teacher Education Research

Format:

Paper

Session Information

10 SES 04 E,

Paper Session

Time:

2015-09-09

09:00-10:30

Room:

101.Oktatóterem [C]

Chair:

Peter Gray

Contribution

An increasing number of European universities are using coteaching as a model for student teaching, this paper will discuss how coteaching can provide professional development for supervising teachers.

What are the professional development opportunities for teachers when they supervise student teachers’ practicum?

Method

The research team included supervisory teachers, student teachers, teacher educators, program administrators and clinical field supervisors. The research team met weekly to discuss the study. In the first year, six of the cooperating teachers participated in the coteaching study working with seven student teachers. Two additional cooperating teachers joined the study in the second year with nine student teachers. The primary analysis for this study is based upon a total of twenty-four interviews comprising about twenty-one hours of interview data with conducted with the eight cooperating teachers during the first two years. Researchers conducted semi-structured interviews using protocols but participants directed the conversations. Interviews were analyzed and coded, questions that specifically provided information about cooperating teacher learning included: 1. Do you feel that working with the student teachers has enhanced your own understanding/way you think about our approach teaching/planning? 2. Have you tried out any new activities, labs, etc.? If you did co-teaching last year and developed/tried new things, have you used those things again? 3. Did you get anything out of this experience? Try anything new? Anything that might carry over into next year? Anything from last year that has carried over to this year? In addition to teacher interviews, other data collected included videos of coteaching and coplanning sessions, interviews with department chairs and principal and textual artifacts such as lesson plans, assessments and other materials. Data analysis focused primarily on cooperating teacher interviews and examined their perceptions of how coteaching impacted practice. The analysis used grounded theory approaches (Strauss & Corbin, 1998). Researchers used HyperResearch Software © to code the cooperating teachers comments’ about their teaching practice and their work with student teachers. Drawing upon the participants’ language, researchers created open codes and labeled textual data. Themes later emerged from these codes. For example, one theme that emerged was curriculum development opportunities. This theme was developed from the following open codes: coteaching leads to curricular/unit changes, coplanning leads to new teaching activities, and exposure to new ideas. Findings were triangulated across research participants and time, then member-checked with research participants.

Expected Outcomes

All cooperating teachers reported that the coteaching and coplanning experiences brought new ideas to their instructional repertoire through the development of new teaching perspectives and curricular ideas. The cooperating teachers reported and were observed developing new hands-on activities, developing new scientific demonstrations for concepts taught, and creating and implementing new laboratory activities for students. They noted that the coteaching approach provided “refreshing” exchange of ideas, an opportunity to study their students for evidence of understanding science through their verbal and non-verbal cues, in situ classroom support to differentiate instruction, and establishing a daily practice of reflecting and discussing their teaching and curriculum enactment. Together the cooperating teachers and student teachers had daily professional discussions related to curriculum planning and enactment, selecting pedagogical strategies to enhance student learning and share their expertise in these areas, as well as the managerial aspects of teaching. While some of these conversations occurred outside of class time as in traditional student teaching models, many of these exchanges also occurred in situ while the coteachers were teaching the students. The cooperating teachers all noted that their ongoing work with teaching student teachers supported their own professional development. The types of learning experience varied by participant; yet, every cooperating teacher described ways that their practice was changed as they continued to learn by working alongside the student teachers and by continually engaging in authentic practice (Webster-Wright, 2009). Models for teachers’ professional development suggest that teachers need to collaborate with each other, experience and implement new instructional strategies, and have time to reflect on their practice (Hewson, 2007).

References

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Author Information

Kathryn Scantlebury (presenting / submitting)

University of Delaware, United States of America

Elizabeth Soslau