Responsive Teaching Professional Development: Using Teaching Journals to Examine Graduate Student Teaching Assistants’ Interactions with Student Thinking
Simon, Matthew R.
2021
-
Journaling is often used as part of teacher professional development to give teachers an opportunity to reflect on their experiences in instruction. We used teaching journals in a professional development course for biology graduate student teaching assistants to give the participants practice at noticing moments of students’ disciplinary thinking – a core aspect of responsive teaching. The teaching ... read moreassistants were tasked with keeping a weekly journal in which they wrote about moments from their class that stood out to them involving their students. In this paper we used these journals to examine the TAs’ noticing patterns. We found that TAs frequently noticed instances of student thinking and ideas. In these instances, we studied how they interpreted and responded to those ideas according to what they wrote in their journals. We found that TAs were often affectively positive about the ideas that their students had and that as the semester progressed, they more frequently responded to those ideas in ways that encouraged further thinking on the part of the students. We discuss conjectures about how the professional development course design influenced what TAs wrote about in their journals and also how differences among the TAs attitudes towards the journal assignment may have influenced their writing. These findings imply that responsive teaching can be encouraged through professional development and that graduate student teaching assistants are open to adopting and implementing such techniques. Ultimately, the findings of our investigation indicate that teaching journals can be a useful source of information for researchers trying to understand the nature of what teachers are noticing in the classroom. In particular, we find that these journals can be used to get a sense of how instructors take up responsive teaching professional development.
A qualifying paper submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Education.
Committee: Dr. Julia Gouvea, Dr. David Hammer, Dr. Kristen Wendell.read less - ID:
- v118rv63c
- To Cite:
- TARC Citation Guide EndNote
- Usage:
- Detailed Rights