Session Information
31 SES 09 A, Observations of Pedagogical Excellence in Teaching Across Nations (OPETAN): Results from a Four Nation Study
Symposium
Contribution
Drawing from the OPETAN dataset, this paper presents the findings across all 32 observations to examine the standard, “Joint Productive Activity” (Appendix A; Tharp et al., 2000). Understood at the highest level of implementation, Joint Productive Activity (JPA) is when teachers and students produce together. However, across the rubric, the notion of JPA is meaningful collaboration where students jointly produce with either one another or the teacher. By grounding concepts of collaboration in the ideas of joint productivity, our research was able to capture a wide variety of examples of meaningful collaboration that created the context for language development for multilingual students. Across the 32 observations, we found an interesting distribution of scores as it relates to JPA on a five point scale: non-observed, emerging, developing, enacting, and integrating. We only had one instance of JPA not being observed and only three instances of it at the emerging level. However, 19 of our observations were scored at the developing level. The remaining observations were distributed evenly across enacting (4) and integrating (4). In terms of what this means in practice, the bulk of the observations we conducted had examples of “the teacher and students collaborate on a joint produce in a whole-class setting, OR students collaborate on a joint produce in pairs or small groups” (Appendix A). In order for an observed activity to score at enacting or integrating, the difference would be that the teacher was working on a joint product in collaboration with a small group of students. Because our sample of teachers were selected across the four national contexts (Germany, Finland, US and UK) for having a reputation of excellence in working with multilingual students in content classrooms, this concentration and consistent effort towards JPA at high levels illustrates the excellence associated with expansive implementation of meaningful collaboration in the classroom. Our paper will provide snapshots into the classrooms we observed to illustrate the varied ways meaningful collaboration took place as well as how that collaboration created the context for language development in content classrooms. The results of this analysis suggest the value of JPA for multilingual students in content classrooms and the opportunities to further research and implement its nuanced approaches across content classroom internationally.
References
Tharp, R. G., Estrada, P., Dalton, S. S., & Yamauchi, L. A. (2000). Teaching transformed: Achieving excellence, fairness, inclusion, and harmony. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
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