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To provide an understanding of how video recording can be used to mediate university level teacher development for language learning in diverse classrooms.

This study draws on cultural historical activity theory (Engeström, 1999) and the subsequent professional development literature to conceptualize video as a tool for self-reflection and critique to further learning. This chapter outlines how video analysis can be used in inservice teacher education to investigate the micro- and macro-interactions with English learners.

We found that utilizing various forms of analysis on a single video from the classroom can help teachers build connections between the micro and macro processes and implications of language in classrooms with English learners. Additionally, by studying videos of classroom activities, teachers learn how linguistic theories and particular instructional and assessment tools can be implemented in their own classrooms.

Videos can be a powerful tool for teacher educators and professional development experts because they allow for the analysis and reflection of a variety of analytic levels. Additionally, this study provides evidence that videos can be used to anchor otherwise discrete university coursework and bring cohesion and collaboration throughout the curriculum.

While bilinguals frequently mix languages in everyday conversation, these hybrid language practices have often been viewed from a deficit perspective, particularly in classroom contexts. However, an emerging literature documents the complexity of hybrid language practices and their usefulness as an academic and social resource for bilingual students. This chapter examines hybrid language practices among English- and Spanish-speaking high school students in an astronomy/oceanography classroom in southern Arizona. Microethnography, or fine-grained analysis of video recordings from long-term ethnographic observation, is used to reveal what bilingual students accomplished with hybrid language practices in the classroom and to outline implications for teachers who want to engage their students’ hybrid repertoires. Specifically, the analyses reveal that careful attention to hybrid language practices can provide teachers with insights into students’ academic learning across linguistic codes, their use of language mixing for particular functions, and their beliefs about language and identity. The research is necessarily limited in scope because such in-depth analysis can only be done with a very small amount of data. Nevertheless, the findings affirm that hybrid language practices can enrich classroom discourse, academic learning, and social interaction for emergent bilinguals. The chapter highlights a teacher’s story in order to offer practical guidance to other teachers who seek to capitalize on the promise of hybrid language practices in their own classrooms.

This chapter examines the role that video has played since its introduction to teacher education in the 1960s. The chapter first reviews several leading innovations that have been popular across the last forty years. I then argue that in the past, teacher education has not always capitalized on the features of video that make it particularly useful for teachers. To address this issue, I introduce three affordances of video that should be considered when designing video-based activities for teachers. To conclude, I point to several programs that leverage these affordances and that I recommend we investigate for the future.

The researchers developed a model of mentoring student teachers, known as Shared Mentoring in Learning Environments (SMILE), to provide opportunities for classroom teachers to build shared understanding with university field supervisors. The purpose of this paper is to compare teaching efficacy of those student teachers who matriculated through the SMILE approach with mentoring student teachers who matriculated through a traditional approach to mentoring and identifying aspects of SMILE that may have contributed to the development of teacher efficacy.

A total of 29 student teachers participated in the SMILE model of supporting student teaching, and 29 student teachers (comparison group) were provided with a traditional support structure. At the start and end of their one-year post-baccalaureate credential program, all student teachers completed a teaching efficacy questionnaire. During the last month of the teacher-credential program, all student teachers were interviewed in focus groups regarding the quality of their student-teaching mentoring. In addition, the researchers asked classroom teachers in the SMILE cohort to complete a questionnaire, identifying specific strengths and weaknesses of the SMILE model of mentoring student teachers.

Student teachers in the SMILE cohort improved their teaching efficacy in comparison with student teachers in a traditional model of support. SMILE student teachers appreciated critical feedback, while the comparison group participants focused on whether feedback was positive or negative. In addition, SMILE student teachers attributed their development of instructional skills to the mentoring process from classroom teachers and university supervisors, while comparison group participants attributed their development as teachers mainly to their classroom teachers who modeled effective instructional strategies. SMILE classroom teachers made reference to how particular aspects of the model (e.g. sequencing and lesson study) contributed to both student- and mentor-teacher development.

The SMILE approach to mentoring student teachers facilitated collaboration between university field supervisors and classroom teachers in joint mentoring of future teachers into their profession, a rare occurrence in teacher education programs. Joint mentoring led to improved teaching efficacy among student teachers.

The aim of this study is to understand classroom settings desired by high school students and teachers in an active learning classroom. The research question is whether students and teachers will differ from each other when designing an active learning classroom.

In an effort to design a learning environment for an advanced placement programme, action research methodology was followed by conducting a participatory workshop in a real active learning classroom with future users. Working in isolation from one another, students and teachers designed their own classrooms by forming different learning centres. During the study, two groups, made up of ten high school students and seven teachers, respectively, were asked to arrange the furniture in an active learning classroom. The groups were free to form as many furniture arrangement configurations as they wished and were asked to write about their workshop experiences afterwards. Once they had completed both tasks, their plan layouts were examined.

All of the plan layouts were found to fall into one of three categories: a traditional layout, a small group layout or a single large group layout. The written texts were also analysed, which revealed different perspectives of each participating group. As students and teachers explore different learning opportunities, they appear to be driven by different kinds of experiences when they endeavour to organize their classrooms.

Never before has an active learning classroom been the site for a participatory furniture arrangement workshop that employs teachers and students.

This chapter is focused on a 3-year, privately funded project. Dean David England, the dean of our College of Education at Western Michigan University from 2000 to 2002, worked in collaboration with Elizabeth Binda, the chairperson of the board of directors for the Guido A. and Elizabeth H. Binda Foundation, to develop a project that would contribute in substantive ways to the improvement of teacher education. As a veteran K-12 teacher and teacher educator, Elizabeth Binda has long taken great interest in contributing to the profession where she has invested a good deal of her life.

Literacy research exploring multimodal composition and justice-oriented children’s literature each have rich landscapes and histories. This paper aims to add to both of these bodies of scholarship through the emerging assemblage of Studio F, a fifth-grade classroom. The authors share poststructural analytic encounters with attention to the unexpected multimodal relationships and the justice-oriented talk and texts that emerged, as well as the classroom conditions that produce them.

The authors think with assemblage theory to examine the newness that emerged as one small group of students wrestled with the emerging instances of racism present in Freedom Summer by Deborah Wiles.

Together, the living arrangement of bodies, materials and discourses created openings for students’ explorations of race and racism.

This paper offers teachers and researchers space to rethink what is possible in the literacy classroom when the authors re-envision classrooms as vibrant assemblages, support emergent multimodal composing processes and follow students’ critical encounters toward justice-oriented literacies.

Social studies educators have displayed an interest in student-created multimedia, including digital documentaries. The research community has responded with a small but growing body of studies, but the literature to date has not explored students‘ perspectives on these assignments. This study combined classroom observations, document analysis, and student interviews to examine students‘ views of technology, the curriculum, and their final products. The findings reveal that students come to technology-based, content-driven assignments with prior conceptions of both the technology and the content. These expectations shape student actions and transform the assignment, in some cases surpassing curricular expectations. Evidence from students‘ products, classroom observations, and interview data, however, also suggest that student agency was limited by the classroom reality of mimetic learning. The results of this study have various implications for teacher educators and educational researchers interested in leveraging technology to improve learning. They must acknowledge the dynamic nature of classroom interaction and the impact student choices have on Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK). Technology integration occurs in the operational curriculum, often in unpredictable ways. Based on our study we know that student preconceptions and desires impact the learning goals. By better under-standing the role of student agency, teachers can plan for instruction that uses digital history to effectively teach content.

Translating motivational research to classroom instruction may be so difficult because the two enterprises of psychological research and teaching are inherently different in goals and assumptions. Whereas psychological theory is meant to be broad and generalizable, educational practice must attend to individual and situational differences. For instance, a great deal of research suggests that mastery goal structures are related to desirable beliefs and behaviors. However, knowing that this is so does not help teachers know how to foster mastery goals in their classrooms and whether or how practices might vary given differences among students, developmental levels, and content areas. As Patrick (2004) noted, the theoretical notion of mastery goal structure as it is currently conceptualized was not developed in classrooms and does not address how a mastery goal structure is either manifested or communicated to students. Although it makes theoretical sense to provide “appropriate challenge” to students, how a teacher adapts that principle to students with a range of abilities and attitudes, from challenge seekers to avoiders, is not obvious. Research can provide only a general theoretical heuristic for understanding tendencies and does not necessarily explain individuals' behavior over time (Turner & Patrick, 2004). For motivational research to be meaningful and useful to educators, it needs to help them interpret student behavior as specific responses to specific sets of circumstances. Pajares (2007) expressed this well when he noted:Research findings … drawn from educational psychology broadly, and motivation theory and research in particular are bounded by a host of situated, cultural factors that must be attended to if the constructs themselves are to have any, as William James (1907/1975) termed it, practical, or cash, value. (p. 30)Therefore, in its present form, theory may not appear useful to teachers because of its seeming lack of specificity. These issues apply to all current theories of motivation.

The purpose of this paper is to extend the understanding of distributed leadership to the school district level as the authors examine how leadership for twenty-first century learning is distributed within public schools and school districts as they strive to transform their school classrooms from primarily teacher-directed toward more student-centered and technology-enhanced. It contributes to a growing understanding of the inherent distribution of school and school district leadership and helps elucidate how existing leadership machinations can be adapted to facilitate the transformation of public school classrooms from being primarily teacher-directed, to predominately student-centered, technology-enhanced learning environments.

This is a qualitative study conducted in all school districts in one Canadian province. Data were gathered through interviews of all district technology leaders and principals of two schools (per district) deemed exemplary in their use of technology for classroom learning; focus group sessions with stratified samples of teachers and all district-level program professionals in each district, and semi-structured observations of district-selected technology-savvy classrooms in two schools per district.

The paper provides insights into the challenges of leading classroom innovation, including costs associated with technology acquisition and the provision of quality professional development. It reaffirms the continued relevance of the school principal while concomitantly confirming the inherent existence of distributed leadership within and across organizational boundaries that can facilitate or impede complex change. Finally, findings from this study serve as yet another reminder that the accumulated, rich evidence base regarding the process of leading and implementing complex innovation appears to be largely ignored by practitioners.

Because the research approach is qualitative and restricted to one defined population, the generalizability of this study may be limited.

This paper draws attention to practical importance of fostering leadership from multiple sources and the need for reflection on how research evidence in education can better directed toward improved practice.

Given the major public expenditures in the acquisition of new and emerging technology for public school classrooms, this paper may foster reflection for improved leadership and implementation practices. The paper anticipates that this work will contribute to a growing understanding of the distributed nature of school and school district leadership. Also, the paper believes it will help elucidate how current machinations of leadership might be adapted to facilitate the transformation of public school classrooms from primarily teacher-directed to predominately student-centered, technology-enhanced learning environments.