This study analyzes a 5-week interdisciplinary summer course designed for synchronous face-to-face learning and asynchronous online learning, which was first offered in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. During the course, students explored coastal ecosystem flora and fauna, analyzed local environmental issues, and used these experiences to develop web-based products that feature K-12 integrated lesson plans. The authors collected pre- and post-reflection data from students spanning 2020-2024 and have developed three research questions: (1) Does students’ knowledge of science content change when placed in an outdoor face-to-face vs asynchronous online setting? (2) Does students’ knowledge of instructional pedagogy change when placed in an outdoor face-to-face vs asynchronous online setting? (3) What qualities and characteristics are more pronounced in student perceptions of outdoor face-to-face vs asynchronous online learning modalities? While there are some differences in science content knowledge and instructional pedagogy between face-to-face and asynchronous students, the authors assert that offering both modalities provides students with academic opportunities and perspectives. Based on this data and their own experiences, the authors share a collaborative model that benefits student learning and faculty instructional design when converging modalities, including integrating new mobile technologies.

District-led Professional Development (DLPD) holds great promise for cost-effective and sustained PD for K-12 faculty but is often enacted as whole-group, one-shot meetings on topics (e.g., 21st-century learning) non-specific to teachers’ grade levels and content areas. Alternatively, Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) provide on-site and ongoing collaborative support to teachers by common grade levels or content areas. To best leverage DLPD and PLCs, an exploratory multiple case study was conducted to examine how three separate high schools’ biology PLCs had received and enacted DLPD in teaching 21st-century skills. Desimone and Pak’s five core features of effective PD were used as the theoretical framework to explore teachers’ perceptions of the semester-long DLPD through interviews, lesson plans, PLC agendas, and classroom observations. Case analyses found that participating biology teachers perceived that the coherence and content focus was the greatest affordances of having 21st century focused DLPD in their PLC. Collective participation, active learning, and duration were revealed respectively. Results suggested teachers had incorporated the 21st-century skill of communication the most and creativity the least in their practice. Findings suggest that DLPD embedded within PLCs provide contextualized PD opportunities to high school biology teachers when there is sufficient time and opportunities for translating knowledge into practice.

Culturally responsive instruction scholarship often presents a binary standard that teachers either satisfy or do not, a determination largely based on perceptions of observed practice. Yet, conclusions about teachers’ cultural responsiveness are dubious when researchers do not account for teachers’ intent. Conceptualizing cultural responsiveness as a continuum of dispositions, knowledges, and skills, this study asks: are certain culturally responsive characteristics more easily embodied and acted upon than others, and what accounts for these incongruences? Drawing on five months of data collection, this case study follows Margaret, a decorated English language arts teacher, and uncovers her culturally responsive characteristics based on her articulated instructional intent. Analysis reveals that Margaret more readily embodied and enacted certain culturally responsive characteristics than others. Although she worked to promote student success and create a classroom environment embracing all students, Margaret insisted her provocative pedagogical choices–such as melding conversations of canonical literature with patriarchal critique–were not intended to foster students’ sociopolitical consciousness or reflect her commitment to modifying curricula for equity. Tensions between Margaret’s culturally responsive characteristics lie in her belief that “good” teachers assume ideological neutrality. Margaret’s case asks stakeholders to centralize teachers’ instructional intent and, in doing so, complicate culturally responsive teaching.

About the Journal The Journal of Interdisciplinary Teacher Leadership (Online ISSN 2474-7432) is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal aimed at educators, administrators, and researchers both formal and informal of all disciplines. We welcome original articles on: action research case studies analyses literary reviews We seek articles that explore a variety of topics in education and contribute

This mixed-methods study employed a typological approach and an Expectancy-Value framework to understand nontraditional prospective teachers’ motivational beliefs, teaching motivations, and goals for choosing a teaching career. All participants (N=88) were nontraditional prospective teachers, graduate students enrolled in a Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) program in the United States. Data were collected in three phases, including quantitative (survey, pre-and posttest assessments), and qualitative (interviews). Analyses revealed three distinct typologies of teachers based on their motivational beliefs, and further differences among the identified groups based on other variables. The qualitative data showed general themes across participants about their teaching efficacy, motivation for teaching and quality of teacher preparation. Implications for teacher education programs are discussed.

Teacher leaders are often responsible for providing professional development to improve teacher effectiveness and student learning. Leading professional development for teachers can be highly effective when the focus is on student learning in on-going and relevant contexts. This article describes a school-based, teacher-led collaborative process conceptualized and facilitated by two teacher leaders using a modified protocol for examining students work in mathematics. The focus of the professional development aligned with a school-wide initiative of increasing the quality of students’ mathematical work across a kindergarten through eighth-grade school. This paper shares the structure of the professional development, the nature of the protocol, and how it was implemented followed by a discussion for teacher leaders who are interested in facilitating a similar type of collaborative professional development experience within their own schools. Findings suggest that the use of a well-developed protocol helped focus teachers’ attention to specific attributes expected in quality work and served as a reference point for considering how important structures of learning such as whole-class discourse could be evident in individual students’ quality work.

Low enrollment of Latino, African American, Native American, and Southeast Asian American students in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) classes, via advanced placement (AP) courses, remains a problem for high schools, and education leaders across the United States. More than just examining the factors behind this enrollment issue, we wanted to understand the focal factors underpinning success in AP courses of those few who do enroll. For that purpose, we grounded this case study on social cognitive theory’s central variable of self-efficacy. We found that teacher facilitated experience plays a pivotal function in students’ success in STEM education, more specifically, AP math.

Within this journal article, I seek to promote K-12 educators to think consciously and cognitively of their subject areas on how STEM can be initiator of content-delivery. STEM is still fresh within the confines of the traditional K-12 education field, and many are seeking to understand its relation to the real world as well as other subject areas. Within this article, I seek to prove how STEM steeps itself throughout three other content areas often separated: Language Arts, Social Studies, and the Arts. If we as educators as to enhance and entice our students to think intrinsically and deeply about their learning, it is important that we search to understand how STEM can derive to and from these inherent content focal points.