Research as a Catalyst for Change

Highlights of the Current Issue

The articles that comprise this issue represent the diversity that characterizes the JTE readership. Topics include video-case analysis, mentoring of novice teachers, preservice teachers’ responses to cyber bullying, preparation of teachers for urban settings, recruitment of special education teachers, and professional development in online settings. All have well-developed implications for policy, practice, and research. The contexts are varied with focus on international, national, and local settings. Both quantitative and qualitative methodologies are represented, including studies using mixed methods.

In the first article—“Formal and Informal Mentoring: Complementary, Compensatory, or Consistent?”—Desimone, Hochberg, Porter, Polikoff, Schwartz, and Johnson investigate the roles of mentors in the learning of 57 novice middle school math teachers in 11 school districts. They extend the study of mentoring of novice teachers to include informal as well as formal mentors. The authors explore differences between the characteristics of the two types and their respective interactions with mentees, discussing how manipulable policy variables shape these interactions. Findings indicate that being in the same school with time set aside to meet was related to more time being spent with both types of mentors. Beginning teachers reported spending more time with their formal mentors if they were experiencing challenging classes or if their mentors had math teaching experience. The two types of mentors serve complementary roles, with informal mentors addressing more personal needs and formal mentors addressing professional needs.

Arya, Christ, and Chiu, “Facilitation and Teacher Behaviors: An Analysis of Literacy Teachers’ Video-Case Discussions,” investigate the relationship between peer and professor facilitation and teacher behavior during video-case discussions. The researchers extended research in this area through their use of Statistical Discourse Analysis, an approach that addresses many of the problems inherent in other methodological approaches to analyzing discourse. Findings depict multistep facilitation processes that occurred in professor–teacher and teacher–teacher discussions and provide implications for facilitating teachers’ critical thinking, connection-making, and determination of instructional challenges during discussions.

The third article, “Unpacking the ‘Urban’ in Urban Teacher Education,” by Kavita Matsko and Karen Hammerness, provides an argument for context-specific teacher preparation rather than preparation for generic settings as is typically the case. The authors conducted a descriptive, theory-building study of the University of Chicago Urban Teacher Education Program to examine how features of the urban context were addressed at this site. They illustrate how teacher education can move beyond a generic focus to extend understanding of context beyond the immediate surroundings (classroom) to encompass the school, the neighborhood, the school district, and the state and federal policy context. The authors maintain that while teachers must be grounded in practice, they also must maintain a focus on the specific, multilayer setting where those practices are enacted.

In the next article, “A Comparison of Pre-Service Teachers’ Responses to Cyber Versus Traditional Bullying Scenarios: Similarities and Differences and Implications for Practice” by Boulton, Hardcastle, Down, Simmonds, and Fowles, the authors compare preservice teachers’ behavioral intentions related to physical, verbal, relational, and cyber bullying. They investigate three variables found to influence intentions to intervene in bullying situations: self-efficacy for intervening, perceived seriousness of the situation, and empathy for the victim. Using vignettes followed by Likert-type scales for each of the three variables, the researchers found that preservice teachers would most readily intervene in physical bullying and less readily with relational bullying. Intentions for intervention in verbal and cyber bullying were similar, falling between the other two types. The authors suggest activities and resources for teacher educators that might equip teachers to deal with cyber bullying.

The article that follows “An Examination of Pre-Service Teachers’ Intentions to Pursue a Career in Special Education” by Zhang, Wang, Qui, Losinski, and Katsiyannis, highlights the persistent shortage of special education teachers and investigates several reasons why teachers may not pursue or persist in special education careers, including low teaching efficacy, inadequate preparation, and negative career outcome expectations. The authors extend the literature on verbal report intentions by proposing and testing a model to investigate how preservice teachers form career intentions prior to making decisions about a career in special education. They found that interest and commitment to individuals with special needs and their career outcome expectations directly influence their intentions, while their efficacy for special education teaching impacted their intentions indirectly.

The final article in this issue, “Beyond Comparisons of Online Versus Face-to-Face PD: Commentary in Response to Fishman et al., ‘Comparing the Impact of Online and Face-to-Face Professional Development in the Context of Curriculum Implementation’” is a response by Jean Moon, Cynthia Passmore, Brian Reiser, and Sarah Michaels to the article by Fishman and his colleagues that appeared in the previous issue of JTE (65:1). The authors highlight the need for effective professional development given the demands of recent reform to further the complex learning of K-12 students in science. In their commentary, they acknowledge the significant contribution of the Fishman et al. study that compares three critical measures for online and face-to-face modalities in a randomized control study. However, they suggest that the professional development itself was underspecified in the study and that the design principles of the professional development need to be examined in relation to the learning goals to further our understanding about how the different modalities interact with the design features of each type of professional development. They use a model developed for professional development for the Next Generation Science Standards to illustrate how this might be accomplished.

We hope that the articles in this issue stimulate your thinking about how research in general, and your own research in particular, can act as a catalyst in the effort to “take charge of change” in preservice and inservice teacher education. We invite you to participate in conversations about the implications of the findings of these studies for research and practice and for education policy. We look forward to receiving manuscripts from you in the future as well as your ideas directed toward improvement of the JTE. We also invite you to register and participate as an ad hoc reviewer for JTE with the possibility of joining the JTE Editorial Review Board in the future.