Evaluating Socio-Cultural Pedagogy in a Distance Teacher Education Program

Teacher Education Quarterly, Summer 2005 by Teemant, Annela

This is the first time I have ever seen a text modification assignment. Wow! It's the hands-on part of it [the program]. That whole ' looking at student work' is something I hadn't done in my Linguistics program at all.

From their perspectives, the Master's degree programs they completed had not prepared them adequately for the content or the socio-cultural practices advocated. They reported it was challenging to pilot new courses, content, and CD-ROM materials. A facilitator said:

I was surprised to find out what the teachers were expecting....They want to be told what to do, step by step.... 'Tell me this. Tell me that. Give me the lesson plans to teach. ' It just surprised me.... They want answers and they want the right answer.

Another facilitator offered this explanation:

They are shifting from their teacher-person to a student-person, and they're saying, 'As a student, I've always learned this other way.... As a student, there was always a right and a wrong. Okay, I'm a student now.' They have never experienced it from the student perspective.... It is uncomfortable.

Concept Learning

The Foundations of Bilingual Education course teaches content related to the program's Inclusive Pedagogy framework (Teemant, in press), which has five characteristics: Collaboration, Guiding Principles, Essential Policy, Critical Learning Domains, and Classroom Strategies. Participants self-assessed their pre- and post-course beliefs in these five areas by using a Likert scale of agreement ( 1 = strongly disagree; 7 = strongly agree). Table 1 displays the means and standard deviations for participants' pre-/post-course change scores, as well as the ANOVA results comparing pre-service and in-service groups.

Participants indicated stronger agreement with key course concepts as a result of course experiences, and pre-service and in-service group differences were statistically significant. Pre-service teachers changed more in their beliefs than their in-service peers. Pre-service teachers changed the most in beliefs about Collaboration while in-service teachers changedmostintheareaof Guiding Principles (i.e., multiple perspectives, high expectations, knowledge-based practice, and accountability). Pre- and in-service educators felt more positive about collaborating with peers, more morally and educationally responsible for ESL students, more aware of educational policy, more aware of student development, and more aware of teaching strategies. These learning outcomes show changes in participants' attitudes toward teaching ESL students.

Concept Learning in a Single Cohort

The cohort of 26 teachers provided self-assessment data on their use of sociocultural practices and written portfolio reflections about their learning. Cohort participants generally reported that the CREDE pedagogy standards for language and literacy development, contextualization, and cognitive challenge were typical of their current thinking and practice, rating these items in the five range of a 7-point likert scale (1 = not very typical; 7 = very typical). However, less typical of their pedagogy was student collaboration on a shared product (M = 4.89; SD = 1.43), regular goal-directed instructional conversations (M = 4.66; SD = 1.36), and small group classroom organization (M=4.88;SD=1.28). These results suggest the BEEDEpmgram needs to improve its focus on the use of these socio-cultural elements of practices.