Search results for: Professional identity

The purpose of this study is to better understand teacher professional development in a paired-placement context. It focuses specifically on how two teacher students (STs) in Vietnam, Hien and Chinh, develop their professional identities in the collaborative setting, and how factors specific to pair-work mediate this process. Findings from this study suggest that an individual teacher’s identity influences her/his cognitive and affective perception of an event. Paired-placement created an environment whereby the student teachers’ conflicting identities, associated with different cognitive and affective perceptions of the experience, were challenged, leading to contradictions. However, within the framework of planned and supervised collaboration, the STs resolved most of their conflicts constructively and experienced qualitative development in their teaching identities.

In this study, the author sought to contribute to the scholarly discourse of understanding how North American elementary pre-service teachers experienced evaluation via teacher performance assessments. Through extensive interviews and thematic data analysis, this study generally supported the contention that the process of completing edTPA deepened student teachers’ understanding of their educational experience in a number of domains, which in turn suggested a broader awareness and appreciation of the complexities of learning to teach.

The purpose of this study was to understand how a group of pre-service English language teachers constructed and negotiated their identities as teachers during a teaching practicum. The results of this study suggest that the identity work is an essential feature of student teachers’ experiences of a teaching practicum as they attempt to position themselves as particular types of teachers, not only within their placement schools, but also in relation to their understandings of what it means to be a language teacher, both within Hong Kong and beyond. However, the study also highlighted the potential for identity conflict that can arise if there is a mismatch between the subject positions offered to pre-service teachers within teacher education programmes and practicum placement schools and the student teachers own self-positioning as teachers.

The purpose of this case study was to document the development of a beginning elementary teacher identity for science teaching at the elementary school. In doing so, this study traces the experiences throughout her life in various contexts and examines how those impacted the development of her identity for science teaching. As revealed in the findings, the beginning teacher did not have a strong science identity as a young learner of science. She articulated no enthusiasm about science and was unable to share many critical experiences with science across her schooling years. A shift in her identity occurred when she went to university and gained an interest in science because she was provided with opportunities to think and do science in contemporary ways.