Teacher Perceptions and Implementation of a Content-Area Literacy Professional Development Program

Abstract

The Common Core State Standards recommend that all educators equip students with the literacy skills needed for college and careers. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to examine middle-level content-area teachers’ perspectives on a district-led literacy professional development program and their implementation of the literacy strategies they learned. The conceptual framework included Bruner’s constructivist, Bandura’s self-efficacy, and Knowles’s andragogy theories. These theories informed the investigation of adult learners’ perspectives regarding the way they learn and gain confidence in providing literacy instruction. Eleven English, math, science, and social studies teachers participated in the study through individual interviews. Data were also gathered via classroom observations and lesson plans. The findings of the study indicated that teachers did implement the literacy strategies following the professional development provided despite lacking perceived self-efficacy with these skills. Although teachers saw value in literacy, their perceptions of the professional development were affected by their commitment to content instruction, time constraints, the organization of the professional development, and a forced compliance district mandate.

READ and rehearse: an effective model for professional development in reading

“…This aligns with the research on PD being built from the ground up as opposed to being dictated from the top down (Ekinci & Acar, 2019). Research suggests that teachers are often dissatisfied with PD that is determined by administrators and pushed down on them as it typically does not relate to their needs or interests (DeLuca et al, 2017;Durksen et al, 2017;Smith & Robinson, 2020). Providing teachers with the opportunity to co-create the model for PD in this study helped ensure that the PD met their needs (Syed, 2008).…”

“…Since teaching reading at the elementary requires a vast amount of knowledge on the structure of the English language (Moats, 2020), teachers benefit from focused PD sessions where they select the topic of the PD. Research suggests that teacher PD is more relevant and effective when teachers have the opportunity to select the topic of their learning as (DeLuca et al, 2017;Durksen et al, 2017;Smith & Robinson, 2020;Sokel, 2019). Further, PD sessions that are regularly scheduled into the school day (Haug & Mork, 2021;McElearney et al, 2018;Meyer et al, 2022;Wickhan & Mullen, 2020), attended by groups of grade-level teams (Garet et al, 2001;Ji, 2021;Kindall et al, 2018;McKeown et al, 2019;Powell & Bodur, 2019;Soket, 2019), and led by highly-trained literacy facilitators (Garet et al, 2001;Horn et al, 2017) are effective.…”

“…When school and district leaders include teachers in the decision making, PD is more effective. Teachers report dissatisfaction with forced PD mandates (DeLuca et al, 2017;Durksen et al, 2017;Smith & Robinson, 2020). Research suggests that top-down models of PD mandated by the district are often disconnected to teachers' interests and needs rendering them irrelevant and therefore ineffective (Martinez et al, 2021).…”

“…When practicing something new, it is important that teachers are practicing with all the materials that they will use when they apply the new learning with their students (Haug & Mork, 2021;McKeown et al, 2019). Teachers report that PD is ineffective when it does not equip them with all the materials needed to successfully implement the new learning and when they are not given opportunities to practice and become comfortable implementing new strategies and skills presented during PD (Smith & Robinson, 2020). When teachers leave PD, they should exit with everything needed to apply what was learned during PD to the context of their classroom.…”

“…These findings align with the extant literature. Research suggests that PD is ineffective when teachers are not equipped with the materials they need to apply learning from the training (Smith & Robinson, 2020). Other research suggests that teachers must have opportunities to practice using the materials they will need when implementing the content with students (Haug & Mork, 2021;McKeown et al, 2019).…”