Understanding Teacher Change and Teachers as Learners in K-12 Classrooms

Overview

<p>The inaugural call for pre-proposals is focused on supporting team based research addressing the topic teachers learning to facilitate communication in the classroom (e.g., eliciting student explanations, guiding collaborative discussions, making effective use of questions). To help advance science of the understanding of teachers as learners, JSMF is inaugurating a program supporting research at the interface of cognitive science and educational practice that, over the next decade, will elucidate actionable knowledge from the study of teacher change across the trajectory of teaching careers, and teachers as learners. Although widely acknowledged that teachers are critical agents in the national efforts to improve students’ educational success, educational innovations aimed at improving student learning and performance rarely consider how teachers will learn to implement these new practices or even whether or not new practices can or should be incorporated into existing practices. Decades ago, cognitive scientists realized that effective educational interventions must be informed by scientific research on student learning and development. There is a need to apply this insight to teachers: To effect real and lasting change, educational interventions must be informed by scientific research on teaching and teachers as learners. A recent review by Goldsmith Doerr and Lewis (2014) concluded that “relatively little of the current literature focuses primarily on understanding teachers’ learning; instead, teachers’ learning is often treated as a black box.”</p> <p>The JSMF program will focus on supporting research that builds from a cognitive science perspective on teachers as learners – including a focus on the aspects of cognition (attention, working memory, motivation, reward) that guide teacher thinking and change in attitudes, knowledge, skills and the adoption of evidence­-based practices in classroom contexts. In particular JSMF is interested in research that can be characterized as translational, needs­-driven education research that identifies malleable factors that promote teachers learning to improve their use of evidence­-based practice.</p> <p>The use of the term communication in this solicitation includes verbal, gestural, digital, and written modes of interaction and discourse. Improving communication, such as orchestrating whole class discussion and facilitating high­-quality explanations, is universally identified as an evidence-­based practice for improving classroom instruction that is not being supported sufficiently in classrooms (corepracticeconsortium.com/core­practice).</p>