“Teachers Are Actually Listening”: Teacher Professional Development Design That Promotes Youth Agency

• In Event: Designing Professional Development Contexts for Teacher Agentic Identity Exploration, Motivation, and Learning of Instructional Practice

Abstract

Purpose
Given the rarity in which youth expertise is utilized to support novice teachers’ development (Petrone & Rink, 2020), our PD design included inviting (and compensating) middle- and high-school students to participate alongside teachers as co-investigators of teaching dilemmas around facilitating discussions. This paper investigates how the PD design promoted youth identity exploration and agency.

Theoretical Framework
The Dynamic Systems Model of Role Identity (DSMRI; Garner & Kaplan, 2019) guided our investigation of youth’s situationally negotiated role-identity as “PD Participant,” compared to their role-identity as “school student.” The DSMRI views role-identity as comprising the complex and dynamic interrelations of four components: (a) ontological and epistemological beliefs (a mental model of the lived reality); (b) purposes and goals; (c) self-perceptions and self-definitions, and (d) perceived action possibilities.

Methods
Participants were 82 students from an urban district. This paper focuses on two sub-groups: 13 students (in Maddie’s room) and 14 students (in Kelly’s room). (Table 1 presents demographics.) Data included: (1) Pre- and post-surveys of students’ self-conceptions, beliefs about teaching and learning, and agency as students; (2) end-of-day individual reflections on their role, participation, and impact on teachers; and (3) end of PD room-level focus groups reflecting on their experience. Video recordings and ethnographic fieldnotes enabled triangulation of findings.


Results
The youth’s initial PD Participant role identities included ontological beliefs that teachers were not open to listening to students and that providing feedback to teachers was not a viable action possibility. The PD activities challenged youths’ epistemological beliefs of certainty about these convictions, and on a post-PD survey asking what they learned from participating, 10 participants (48%) indicated that they learned that teachers cared about their opinions. A Black female student observed that Kelly and her colleagues “wanted to hear from the students and what they think about certain stuff,” adding, “usually the students don’t really have a say in what they learn in the classroom.”

These changing epistemological beliefs aligned with change in providing teachers with feedback as a perceived action possibility. The PD designed activities facilitated this; an Asian male student highlighted how Maddie and their peers “are actually listening to my ideas and making space and time to learn and improve their teaching skills.” Several other students noted that the experience increased their likelihood of giving feedback to teachers in the future. A multiracial female student reported feeling “more obligated to share my opinion on certain things,” compared to the previous year, where, “I would just keep my opinions to myself as I felt it would not make a difference.”

Scholarly Significance
Despite being the “ultimate stakeholders” in public education, Black, Latinx, Asian American, and other marginalized youth rarely have their voices heard with regard to their instruction (Alonso et al., 2009). This study’s results suggest that designing teacher PD contexts in which youth serve as experts can open a valuable reservoir of student knowledge with radical possibilities for improving novices’ teaching, students’ agency, and the reciprocal trust needed for classrooms and schools to truly work for all students.

Authors

• Andrew J. Schiera, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Andrew del Calvo, University of Pennsylvania

• Laurie Shirley Esposito, Independent Contractor

• Carmen Delgado, University of Pennsylvania

• Tiferet Ani, University of Pennsylvania

• Francisco Villa, Temple University

• Jessica Hadid, Temple University

• Amani Rush, Temple University