Kimberley Gomez

Connecting Teacher Efficacy Beliefs in Promoting Resilience to Support of Latino Students.

This article explores the connection of teacher self-efficacy beliefs in promoting student resilience to teaching practice and support of Latino students. Results suggest that efficacy beliefs related to resilience are linked to building important relationships through connecting with students, building on their experiences and knowledge, and understanding the issues they confront. In particular, important to strengthening the academic resilience of Latino students are teachers’ views of their use of Spanish as an asset in their learning as well as the sensitivity teachers displayed around the added stressors Latino students face, such as discrimination and immigrant status.

Positioning Urban Teachers as Effective: Their Discourse on Students

This article focuses on the accounts by teachers who are positioned and who position themselves as “effective.” It draws on the relational aspects of positioning theory with respect to a determination of how the “effective teacher” position necessarily positions students. Findings suggest that students are positioned as (a) individuals within a sociocultural context, (b) fully capable of academic achievement, and (c) responsible for their school success. The third position of students suggests the presence of a seemingly disjointed belief and understanding of students. This work moves beyond simplistic explanations of how this belief may reinforce a competitive and individualistic ideology, suggesting that the presence of seemingly disjointed beliefs and understandings are important to consider in relation to who holds those views, the purpose of such views, and the social context in which those views are advanced.

We Modify Each Other's Lessons: The Role of Literacy Work Circles in Developing Professional Community.

To address teacher isolation in schools, more reform leaders are finding hope in establishing professional communities as a way to promote continuous school improvement. This case study presents one approach for developing teacher professional community: a teacher work circle. Using the characteristics of professional community created by Kruse, Louis, and Bryk, this case study describes a sixth-grade, middle school, teacher work circle addressing the problem of students reading in the content areas. This case suggests that the work circle approach may productively support professional community among teachers focused on instruction. This paper discusses implications for professional development and further supporting a social infrastructure of teaching colleagues.

Situated cognition and learning environments: implications for teachers on- and offline in the new digital media age

John Seely Brown suggested that learning environments should be spaces in which all work is public, is subject to iterative critique by instructors and peers, and in which social interaction is primary. In such spaces, students and teachers engage in a situated cognition approach to teaching and learning where “cognitive accomplishments rely in part on structures and processes outside the individual”. Here we describe a qualitative analysis of a socially situated learning setting that aimed to develop children who can design, analyze, critique, and transform media, subjecting existing social media, their designs, and their peers’ designs to public and iterative critique. In this setting, adult mentors supported children’s self-expression, self-reflection, and skillbuilding through authentic, socially situated reading, writing, and discussion, and media production. Creating and leveraging such spaces is essential for preparing all children for successful experiences in the new knowledge economy in formal and informal educational settings.

Embedding Language Support in Developmental Mathematics Lessons Exploring the Value of Design as Professional Development for Community College Mathematics Instructors

Three community college faculty members used improvement science techniques to design, develop, and refine contextualized developmental mathematics lessons, where language and literacy pedagogy and related supports figured prominently in these instructional materials. This article reports on the role that their design experiences played in professional learning. The article uses a model of professional learning developed by Clarke and Hollingsworth (2002) as the lens to describe and analyze their experiences. Results indicated theoretically noteworthy variation among the faculty. The results highlight a strong connection between faculty willingness to experiment, during trial enactment of these lessons, in their classrooms and faculty growth in knowledge and belief structures about the importance of language and literacy to mathematics teaching and learning. Implications for design-based development, as an important ongoing professional development activity for mathematics instructors, are discussed.

Redressing Science Learning Through Supporting Language: The Biology Credit Recovery Course

Annually, thousands of U.S. students fail high school introductory biology. The language demands of biology are large, and science teachers are often unprepared to support students’ language needs. Here, we describe a 4-week summer high school introductory biology course executed in a large West Coast city. Our aim was to help 33 students recover their biology credit. A centerpiece of the 4-week course was the embedding of metacognitive language support tools in class lectures and assessments. Of 29 regular attendees, 28 passed with a C or better. Student science learning was reliably associated with use of the language support tools.