Brad Olsen

Threat Rigidity, School Reform, and How Teachers View Their Work Inside Current Education Policy Contexts

This article reports on a study of teachers at one reforming high school. Though it is not their task to debate No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the authors locate their investigation inside the current policy context to which NCLB is attached. Specifically, they present their analysis through the organizational behavior lens of threat rigidity to discuss the ways that current federal and state policy contexts influence schools and how those affected schools in turn adopt corresponding reforms that influence teachers’ work. The analysis demonstrates that on both levels, such influence occurs in similar ways: by centralizing and restricting the flow of information, by constricting control, by emphasizing routinized and simplified instructional/assessment practices, and by applying strong pressure for school personnel to conform.

Courses of Action A Qualitative Investigation Into Urban Teacher Retention and Career Development

This article reports on a study investigating relationships among the reasons for entry, preparation experiences, workplace conditions, and future career plans of 15 early-career teachers working in urban Los Angeles. Specifically, the authors examine why these teachers stay in, shift from, or consider leaving the urban schools in which they teach. Our analysis highlights the need to reconceptualize teacher retention to acknowledge and support the development of deep, varied, successful careers in urban education. Findings demonstrate that these urban teachers will remain in urban education if they can adopt multiple education roles inside and outside the classroom and receive professional support during the whole of their careers, not just the beginnings of their teaching.

Using sociolinguistic methods to uncover speaker meaning in teacher interview transcripts

Given the current popularity of ethnographic methods of researching teaching and teachers, many investigators commonly confront the task of analyzing interview transcripts in order to uncover speakers’ meaning systems and the embedded perspectives on knowledge and practice upon which those meaning systems rely. Others have written about conducting interviews and transcribing them. Many have written generally about sociolinguistics. Yet, I have found few methodological discussions on concrete ways investigators might actually use sociolinguistic methods to extract speaker meaning from interview transcripts, and fewer still that focus on teachers and teaching. This paper introduces that topic by offering both a practical primer on using pragmatics to uncover speaker meaning and an introduction to ways discourse analysis can prove useful for those studying interview records with teachers. What follows is a pedagogical description of how sociolinguistics was used to uncover meaning in a set of 64 interviews with eight teachers.

Teacher Identity in the Current Teacher Education Landscape

In this chapter we examine the relationship between pre-service teacher identity development and the contemporary policy landscape of teacher education in the United States. More specifically, we utilize sociocultural perspectives on identity to illuminate the holistic process of professional learning of two pre-service teachers undergoing their student teaching practicum. As a complex intersection of often-competing clusters of beliefs and practices from the university side of teacher preparation and the PK-12 school side of practice, the practicum makes visible conflicting contemporary views of teacher learning, teachers’ work, and the future of university teacher education. Pre-service teachers must navigate and negotiate the effects of these competing views as they learn to enact their own personal visions and practices that they are learning in their teacher education program. We use this chapter to reciprocally examine teacher identity as both the process of this complex learning and the dynamic result.