Implementing A Large-Scale New Curriculum: Educators’ Self–Assessments and Beliefs

Author(s):

Jia Grace Liang(presenting / submitting)James Sottile(presenting)George Watson Xiafei Xue Patrick III Kearns

Conference:

ECER 2016

Network:

01. Continuing Professional Development: Learning for Individuals, Leaders, and Organisations

Format:

Paper

Session Information

01 SES 05 C, Micro, Meso and Macro Perspectives on Professional Development

Paper Session

Time:

2016-08-24

13:30-15:00

Room:

OB-H2.12

Chair:

Karen Sealy

Contribution

Topic/Objectives: Waves of educational reforms have targeted curriculum, teacher quality, and leadership capacity. System–wide undertakings such as the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in the United States and a National Curriculum in England call on our attention to the facets of policy, structure, people, and resources in relation to implementation. Our study focused on the element of people, teachers to be specific, their assessments and beliefs of implementing a large–scale new curriculum. The overall research utilizes a multi–phased mixed methods model, including surveys, interviews, and observations with building–level educators in five West Virginia county school districts. This paper reports the phase one of this research that utilized a survey instrument for data collection and analysis.

As of January 2012, 45 states and the District of Columbia have adopted the CCSS. The state of West Virginia (WV) adopted the CCSS in 2010 and renamed it the Next Generation Content Standards and Objectives (NxGen CSOs) (Achieve, 2010). Started with kindergarten in the school year 2011–12, full implementation was realized in the school year 2014–15 (WVDE, 2012). Nonetheless, repealing the NxGen CSOs has been a pet project of WV Republican house and senate leaders. Actions like the House Bill No. 2934 and the Senate Bill No. 429 have made the political turbulences a constant context under which the implementation of the NxGen has been situated (Gutman, 2015; Speciale, 2015; WV Legislature, 2014).

Studies on the NxGen reform in WV are sparse. Ratliff’s (2014) dissertation study examined kindergarten teachers’ perceptions of teaching one particular content area – informational text. A study conducted by WV Department of Education investigated the prevalence and effectiveness of professional development for teacher trainers, that is, teachers who would provide training back in their home schools and districts (Hammer & Nixson, 2015). The broad literature on common core reform seems to strike a similar pattern, with some focus on implications of CCSS related to particular domains and/or subgroups (e.g., Murphy & Haller, 2015; Zhang, 2014) and others focus on the types of professional development and their effects (e.g., Kim, Erekson, Bunten, & Hinchey, 2014; Xu, Patmor, & Mills, 2012). This research attempted to bring the state of professional development and individual and school contexts under the same analytic frame for a better understanding of the relationship(s) between the two aspects in terms of teachers’ overall sense of preparedness for implementing NxGen CSOs.

The following research questions guided this study.

What are the building–level educators’ perceptions of the NxGen CSOs and their ability to implement?
What differences, if any, exist between the building–level educators’ perceptions based on selected individual and school variables?

Theoretical Framework: Teachers are the key to the success of any educational reform because what and how teachers think and do about the change introduced in educational reform, mediated by teachers’ knowledge, skills, and abilities, affect the reform process and outcomes (e.g., Fullan & Hargreaves, 2013; McLaughlin & Oberman, 1996). To understand the state of mind of teachers toward change, we adopted the Concerns-Based Adoption Model (Hall, George, & Rutherford, 1977) because of its focus on the beliefs, needs, and challenges individuals face in the midst of change. With its roots in Frances Fuller and her colleagues’ work on concerns of teachers about teaching (e.g., Fuller, 1969; Fuller & Bown, 1975), the model notes individuals approach changes as progressing through various concerns in three main areas: self, task, and impact. The model delineated seven Stages of Concern (SoC), namely, awareness, informational, personal, management, consequence, collaboration, and refocusing.

Method

Methodology The survey was conducted in autumn 2015. The questionnaires were distributed in five county school districts where the leading researchers have established working relationship through prior research partnerships, and the districts represented the major variations in school characteristics within the state. The questionnaire contained a demographics section and a Stages of Concern section. The demographics section contains questions related to the participants’ personal and school backgrounds such as gender, total years in teaching, professional development status, and school poverty level. The Stages of Concern section was an adaptation from the 35-item stages of concern instrument developed by Hall, George, and Rutherford (1977), with five items addressing each of the seven stages. All survey items were statements measured in a Likert-scale, with “0” suggesting “completely irrelevant”, “1” and “2” as “not true of me now,” “3” to “5” as “somewhat true of me now,” and “6” and “7” as “very true of me now.” For example, one item measuring consequence was “I am concerned about how the NxGen CSOs will affect my students.” Participants were asked to choose the number that best reflected his or her level of agreement with the statement. The instrument has proved to be reliable, with six of the seven alpha coefficients being above .70 and all range from .64 to .86 (Hall et al., 1977). A total of 150 questionnaires were returned to the researchers, yielding a return rate of 31%. Excluding the questionnaires with incomplete items, 121 were usable and included for data analysis. Descriptive and analytical statistics were calculated. Regression and one-way ANOVA analyses were conducted at a significance level of p <.05. The personal demographics and school context responses served as predictors, and the mean scores of the five survey items on each of the seven stages of concern were the dependent variables. For the purposes of data analysis, collapsing the levels of response categories for some of the demographic variables was used, due to insufficient cell size. For instance, regarding the school poverty level variable, the categories of less than 35% and 35%–50% were combined into a new category of less than 50% to represent the approximate percentage of students receiving free or reduced lunch. And when possible (given the group size), group (e.g., based on district, grade, or subject, etc.) profiling was attempted, using percentile scores (Hall et al., 1977).

Expected Outcomes

The literature on common core indicates that the more knowledge teachers have about the standards, the more supportive they are regarding the standards and the more confident they are implementing them (e.g., CEP, 2012; Lieberman & Mace, 2008; Little, 1993). The researchers found that, in general, the participants’ overall levels of concerns were negatively related to the time they had in implementing the standards. In other words, the earlier the participants received professional development, the less concerned they were regarding implementing the standards. There were significant, negative relationships between total years of teaching and six of the seven stages of concerns. The results seem to suggest that the more experienced the participants were, the less concerned they were about the reform. Some of the other findings are: Females tended to have lower awareness concerns and higher collaboration concerns than males. School SES levels were significantly related to three (out of the seven) stages of concern; the more resources a school had, less concerns were present. The results from the study could help assessing where the individual members of an educational system are in relation to the adoption of a change/reform process. For school districts and professional organizations who provide professional development and curricular support for teachers and administrators, these diagnostic data point them to specific areas for developing a prescription for needed interventions to facilitate the change process. The results shed light on how resources should be allocated to maximize support for building administrators and teachers, and address concerns they have in implementing the NxGen CSOs. The more specific profiling results based on school districts, grades, or subjects may provide policymakers with information to better target areas that need the most assistance with better communication, more appropriate strategies, and a plan for success related to the reform process.

References

Achieve. (2010, August 3). On the road to implementation. Retrieved from http://www.achieve.org/achievingcommoncore_implementation Center on Education Policy [CEP]. (2012). Year two of implementing the Common Core State Standards: States’ progress and challenges. Washington, DC: Center on Education Policy. Fullan, M., & Hargreaves, A. (Eds.). (2013). Teacher development and educational change. New York, NY: Routledge. Fuller, F. F. (1969). Concerns of teachers: A developmental conceptualization. American Educational Research Journal, 6(2), 207-226. Fuller, F. F., & Bown, O. H. (1975). Becoming a teacher. In K. Ryan (Ed.), Teacher education: The 74th yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education (pp. 25-52). Chicago, IL: National Society for Education. Gutman, D. (2015, February 28). House votes to repeal common core. West Virginia Gazette. Retrieved from http://www.wvgazette.com/article/20150228/GZ01/150229231 Hall, G. E., George, A. A., & Rutherford, W. L. (1977). Measuring the stages of concern about an innovation: A manual for use of the stages of concern questionnaire. Austin, TX: Research and Development Center for Teacher Education, Texas University. (ED147342) Hammer, P., & Hixson, N. (2015). Educator enhancement academies evaluation study. Phase 2. Charleston, WV: WVDOE, Office of Research. Kim, Y., Erekson, J., Bunten, B., & Hinchey, P. (2014). Toward sustainable educational change through school-based professional development on ELL assessment for new teachers. Theory into Practice, 53(3), 228-235. Lieberman, A., & Mace, D. H. P. (2008). Teacher learning: The key to educational reform. Journal of Teacher Education, 59(3), 226-234. Little, J. W. (1993). Teachers’ professional development in a climate of educational reform. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 15(2), 129-151. McLaughlin, M. W., & Oberman, I. (1996). Teacher learning: New policies, new practices. The series on school reform. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Murphy, A., & Haller, E. (2015). Teachers’ perceptions of the implementation of the literacy Common Core State Standards for English language learners and students with disabilities. Journal of Research in Childhood Education, 29(4), 510-527. Ratliff, S. A. (2014). A study of kindergarten teachers’ ability to teach the kindergarten information text common core standards in fifteen West Virginia school districts (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from Marshall Digital Scholar. (Paper 887) Speciale, S. (2015, March 12). Common core heads to Senate floor. Charleston Daily Mail. Retrieved from http://www.charlestondailymail.com/article/20150312/DM01/150319582 West Virginia Department of Education [WVDE]. (2012). Next Generation: West Virginia content standards & objectives. History. Retrieved from http://wvnextgen.org/history.html West Virginia Legislature. (2014). Bill status: Senate Bill No. 429. Retrieved from http://www.legis.state.wv.us/Bill_Status/bills_text.cfm?billdoc=sb429%20intr.htm&yr=2014&sesstype=RS&i=429

Author Information

Jia Grace Liang (presenting / submitting)

Kansas State University

Manhattan

James Sottile (presenting)

Missouri State University

College of Education

Springfield

George Watson

Marshall University, USA

Xiafei Xue

Missouri State University, USA

Patrick III Kearns