Beaton et al. (2016)

Power and Potential in a Dialogic Framework for Equity-based Teaching Dispositions

Jehanne Beaton

Jenna Cushing-Leubner

Su Jung Kim

Mistilina Sato

Miranda Schornack

Jessica Tobin

University of Minnesota--Twin Cities

Authors are listed alphabetically. Each made unique and substantial contributions to the development of this paper and the dispositions assessment system that we describe.

This manuscript has been submitted for publication. Please use this format for citation:

Beaton, J., Cushing-Leubner, J., Kim, S. J., Sato, M., Schornack, M., & Tobin, J. (2016). Power and potential in a dialogic framework for equity-based teaching dispositions. Manuscript submitted for publication.

Abstract

Teacher education is facing heightened urgency for focused attention to the cultivation of dispositions that demand relentless effort to teach every child well. To this end, we have engaged in a multi-year research effort to theorize equity-based dispositions for teaching that move our teacher preparation programs toward social justice. This paper reports on our theoretical framing of culturally relevant pedagogy, distributed knowledge, and formative coaching as a means toward creating a dialogic approach to coach and assess teacher candidate dispositions. We describe our dispositions framework, a new conceptualization of rubrics for describing teacher development of dispositions, and a series of construct validity efforts that test our developing theoretical framing. Finally, we grapple with questions about candidates’ coachability as a mindset and a practice, the distinctions between dispositions and instruction, and how to engage teacher educators in understanding race, gender, class, and linguistic dynamics as part of coaching for equity-based dispositions.

Keywords: equity, multicultural teacher education, preservice teacher education, social justice, teacher characteristics

Additional Keywords: dispositions, distributed knowledge

Power and Potential in a Dialogic Framework for Equity-based Teaching Dispositions

As the number of young people of color in schools increases, we face an ever-growing need to prepare teachers who embody the knowledge, skills, and commitments to support and enable all learners in their academic achievement. University school partners, particularly those serving students diverse in racial, gender, linguistic, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds and identities, confirm the importance of teacher dispositions in successful teaching, viewing “the difference between more and less effective urban teachers [as being] largely dispositional” (Laine, Bauer, Johnson, Kroeger, Troup, & Meyer, 2010, p. 74). This demographic imperative heightens the urgency for teacher preparation to turn focused attention to the cultivation of dispositions that demand relentless effort to teach every child well. To this end, our university has engaged in a multi-year research and development effort to create a performance assessment that uses a dialogic approach to assess and coach teacher candidate dispositions.

This paper proposes a theoretical approach to the development of equity-based teaching dispositions that drive toward social justice within a dialogic, distributed knowledge community.  The equity-based framework that underlies the [State name denoted as **] Educator Dispositions System (**EDS), an assessment system we have created for coaching teacher candidates, grows out of the literature on culturally relevant teaching and is described here as a dialogic and multi-dimensional teacher development theory to imagine the development of such dispositions for beginning teachers. We discuss results of initial validity studies about the framework and its use in practice and we wrestle with questions we continue to face in moving toward a theory of equity-based dispositions development for teachers. This work offers teacher education programs and school districts insight into their practices with teacher candidates and novice teachers for the development of dispositions for equity and insights for researchers and theorists about how to conceptualize dispositions how they are developed.

Institutional Background

Our university supports teacher education programs in ten content areas. These programs serve approximately 350 candidates each year, in undergraduate, post-baccalaureate masters’ degree, five-year, and alternative pathway certification programs. Our university is in a major metropolitan area with campuses in two neighboring cities. The metro area population of just over three million comprises about 22% people of color, robust international immigration into the area, and numerous native languages. We currently partner with eight school districts in the metro area, ensuring that all teacher candidates have opportunities to teach in diverse classrooms.

Our college supports a dispositions assessment as required by our national accreditation body and state licensure program approval rules. In 2012-13 we reviewed our aggregate data on the dispositions assessment that has been used across all teacher licensure programs since 2002. The assessment instrument used a “Meets” or “Does Not Meet” option along with an option to indicate “No Opportunity to Observe.” The data showed no differentiation of performance of candidates — nearly 100% of the candidates received “passing” scores on the assessment and a large percentage of raters chose “no opportunity to observe” on several items of the assessment.

Our Teacher Education Research Collaborative (TERC), a group of graduate students interested in teacher education issues, led and supported by faculty, took on the development of a new dispositions assessment. Funded by a grant for a university-based Teacher Education Redesign Initiative and the Campbell Endowed Chair for Innovation in Teacher Development, this group put preparing equity-minded teachers of diverse learners with a drive toward social justice at the center of their development work. In this pursuit, TERC sought to create a framework that would be contextually sensitive, dialogic among teacher educators and the teacher candidate, and focused on coaching teacher candidates toward relational work with students with explicit attention to race, class, gender, and ability differences.

This work began with a literature review, followed by a review of current professional standards related to dispositions at the national level and in our partner school districts. In ongoing conversations with school partners, the researchers heard educators describe the essential characteristics of beginning teachers in terms of how they relate to children and peers and the need to have stronger supports for developing these relational and dispositional aspects of a successful teacher. Based on this information, TERC has theorized a framework for dispositions with eight strands and indicators of performance and situated this framework within a theory of disposition development that is formative, dialogic, and distributed within a knowledge community.

Conceptual Framing

Given that dispositions for teaching have been included in institutional accreditation and program design standards for more than two decades (NCATE, 1992), we might expect the assessment of dispositions in teacher education programs to be well developed.  However, research literature suggests that the field is not settled on a definition of dispositions (Diez & Murrell, 2010; Freeman, 2007; Schussler, 2006), and there is little shared understanding about methods or approaches to formatively teach or coach for dispositions (Raths, 2007; Rose, 2013).

We sought to create an equity-based disposition framework and processes of coaching teacher candidates to address not only the disputed issues in the research literature, but also to address the coherence and joint understanding of what dispositions mean within and across our local programs. Our dispositions framework is rooted in three fundamental concepts:

• 1. Dispositions can develop over time;

  2. Dispositions must be defined through an equity focus, with a drive toward social justice;

  3. Dispositions should be assessed and coached by multiple stakeholders across a variety of contexts during teacher preparation.

Each of these elements of our conceptual framing is discussed in turn.

Formative Development of Dispositions

Our approach to assessing teacher candidate dispositions is rooted in the belief that dispositions can be cultivated, coached, and changed; they are not fixed personality traits (Diez & Murrell, 2010; Salazar, Lowenstein, & Brill, 2010; Whitcomb, 2002). After reviewing the literature on dispositions for teaching (Birmingham, 2009; Day, Kington, Stobart, & Sammons, 2006; Johnson, 2008; Johnston, Almerico, Henriott, & Shapiro, 2011; Mills, 2008; Murrell, Diez, Feiman-Nemser, & Schussler, 2010; Rose, 2013; Schussler, Stooksberry, & Bercaw, 2010; Shiveley & Misco, 2010; Splitter, 2010; Whitcomb, 2002), TERC defined dispositions as:

Dispositions are attributed characteristics that illustrate trends in the way an individual interprets the world, makes judgments, and takes action in a particular manner under particular circumstances. Teachers’ dispositions are shaped through and developed within complex and contingent sociocultural contexts and draw upon the knowledge, skills, values, and beliefs of the educator in their interactions with students, colleagues, families, and communities.

Social Justice Orientation

The **EDS disposition framework grounds equity as a core element in successful teaching, recognizing its heightened importance in schools whose teacher population does not mirror the racial, socioeconomic, linguistic, and ethnic diversity of their students. Equity means school systems must be fair--personal and social attributes (e.g., racialization, class, gender, sexual identity, language) should not limit one’s opportunities for success. Equity demands that we create access to opportunities within systems that have historically been denied to some students. Ladson-Billings (2006) argued that we have accumulated an “education debt” in the United States through historical, economic, sociopolitical, and moral factors and decisions regarding public school systems. Through systematic denial of access to resources, opportunity, quality instruction, and curriculum that feels personal and empowering, students of color, English learners and newly immigrated students are at a larger disadvantage today than their white, English-speaking counterparts. Our schooling system today requires differentiated access and support in order to provide equitable education for all students. Educators must work to bring about a more socially just set of schooling practices in order for all students, and especially historically marginalized students, to experience school with full access and fairness.

Working inside classrooms and schools requires close attention to the everyday-ness of interactions between and among students, teachers, paraprofessionals, and administrators. When we bring our equity focus to what we term as micro-interactions and micro-practices within schools, we are convinced that a conceptual frame of cultural relevance is needed for the enactment of equity-based dispositions. Ladson-Billings (1995) identified three fundamental characteristics of culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP): 1) students experience academic success; 2) students experience instruction with cultural integrity that allows them to maintain their cultural identity while engaging in high level work; and 3) students are challenged to develop a critical socio-political consciousness and to analyze macro-social norms. These three tenets help us define the development of teaching dispositions that affirm multiple definitions of success in school, welcome and embrace cultural differences within classrooms, playgrounds, and hallways, and bolster pedagogical courage to lead and facilitate classrooms where students develop critical consciousness and question the status quo.

Numerous scholars describe the ways in which students experiencing culturally relevant and culturally sustaining classrooms have academic success (Bondy & Ross, 2008; Bondy, Ross, Hambacher, & Acosta, 2013; Duncan-Andrade, 2005; Eislinger, 2012; Emdin, 2016; Milner, 2011; Paris, 2012; Salinas & Castro, 2012). Yet, fewer scholars describe the dispositions held by teachers who led such classrooms. Bondy and Ross (2008) describe “a teacher stance that communicates both warmth and a non-negotiable demand for student effort and mutual respect” as a warm demander (p. 54). Others highlight dispositional descriptors such as care (Bondy & Ross, 2008; Eslinger, 2012; Shevalier & McKenzie, 2012), a rejection of color-blindness (Milner, 2012), as humility with a desire for knowledge (Eslinger, 2012), with a view of teaching as an avenue for civic agency (Mirra & Morrell, 2011), and a view of knowledge as co-constructed (Salinas & Castro, 2012). Hill-Jackson and Lewis (2010) assert that “dispositions and social justice are inextricably linked” and criticize teacher preparation for assessing dispositions with “checklists” that reference “oral and written communication, attire, tardiness [and] initiative” while failing to attend to “culture, diversity, and justice” (p. 65). In **EDS we attend to professional aspects of teaching as relational practices among teaching colleagues and the communities the schools serve as well as relational aspects among teachers and students that support students in their development as citizens and actors in a racially and culturally diverse democracy.

Distributed Knowledge

Finally, we base our assessment development in a model of distributed knowledge (Hutchins, 1993). The fundamental assumption of a distributed knowledge system is that knowledge is held across multiple agents within the system and can be collectively applied or aggregated in order to solve problems or make decisions within a complex system (Hutchins, 1993). When one speaks of distribution of knowledge, it is usually assumed to mean that each person is responsible for a discrete segment of knowledge necessary for the complete task. Hutchins found the distribution of knowledge regarding the individual tasks to be overlapping and differentially redundant. This distribution provides the system with effective error detection and flexibility, and the overall ability to accomplish a complex task that could not be accomplished by a parallel system made up of individuals who were not part of a distributed knowledge system.

However, communication among people within a system of distributed knowledge is a limitation within the system. For example, to assess the dispositions of a teacher candidate, we cannot rely on the judgment of an individual teacher educator or cooperating teacher. The knowledge of a candidate’s performance must be made visible across a variety of tasks and performances, creating a distributed knowledge system that draws on the resources of multiple minds with differentiated experience in the teacher preparation system. Our framework and assessment process attempts to create new communication structures and mediating artifacts that carry information within this distributed network of people participating in the dispositions assessment in order to address the system’s limitation of communication across multiple teacher educators.

Given the complexity of the teacher candidate learning experience, viewing the responsibilities of supporting dispositional development for our candidates as a distributed knowledge problem gives us a new approach to this work in our teacher education programs. For example, in a national survey of teacher education institutions, Rose (2013) found that conversations were the most commonly used approach to teaching pre-service teachers about dispositions and that most of these conversations were based in individual faculty–candidate discussions. We propose that individual coaching may not be sufficient for addressing the complexity of teacher development across contexts. As a candidate moves between foundational courses and content-specific methods courses, their ways of thinking and acting as a teacher shift. When they enter clinical settings and are faced with the challenges of uncertainty in the classroom and encounter students who often do not share their own schooling, ethnic, racial, or gendered experiences in the world, and their dispositional development manifests in new ways. Therefore, we need to structure the process of coaching and assessing dispositions across all of these learning contexts in order to promote contextually-sensitive development.

Theorizing a Framework for Equity-based Teaching Dispositions

Based in these three concepts, we developed a dispositions assessment framework and support system that we now call the [State name denoted as **] Educator Dispositions System (**EDS). The system includes a dispositions framework that identifies the core strands of the dispositional aspects of teaching, an assessment process that is dialogic and reflexive, a set of assessment rubrics that capture movement within a spectrum of teacher development from mindset to practice, and materials that support the development of stakeholders conceptual understanding and technical use of the assessment tools. The framework for the assessment system comprises eight strands: Assets, Role of Self, Collaboration and Communication, Care, Intentional Professional Choices, Imagination and Innovation, Navigation, and Advocacy (Figure 1).

In addition to the framework, we have created an assessment design based on the intention to create space and structure for reflexive identity development, with focused attention to race, class, gender, sexual orientation, language, and other aspects of diversity. The assessment process views candidates holistically and focuses on their comprehensive experiences, recognizing the complexities of dispositional development across multiple contexts (e.g., school-based experiences, campus courses) through the eyes of multiple teacher educators (e.g., supervisor, mentor teacher, course instructor). To bring these interactional and dialogic design elements to life, we created a model in which multiple stakeholders—teacher candidate, cooperating teacher, university instructors, and university supervisor—have access to the dispositional assessment information. In our model, a team of teacher educators virtually sit around a table in conversation with each other and with the teacher candidate to discuss disposition development needed to support all learners in varied school contexts.

The assessment process enables teacher educators to capture dispositional enactments, provide information and evidence of both critical awareness and praxis (Murrell, Diez, Feiman-Nemser, & Schussler, 2010), and support constructive conversations, coaching, and opportunities for identifying a holistic “readiness” point for a teacher candidate nearing the end of the program. To illustrate the design shifts in how the new dispositions assessment system aligns with our conceptual framework, we distinguish how our previous understanding and approach to disposition development contrasts with our nascent theory of dispositions development (Table 1).

The rubrics in our assessment framework are built around the eight disposition strands. We have structured the rubrics across four development dimensions: counter evidence and blind spots, awareness, commitment, and enactment. We have developed indicators that describe the kinds of evidence that can be brought to bear under each of these rubric categories. Figure 2 provides an example from the assets strand.

In our rubric development efforts, we have intentionally chosen not to attach a numerical scale to the descriptors in order to avoid conveying a linear sense of progression. Through our theoretical development work thus far, we have seen examples in several candidates that dispositions develop in stops and starts and in spiral or iterative loops. Development is dependent on and interconnected with the complex contextual factors within which a teacher learns and works. Thus we have structured the rubrics to communicate that at some point in time, in some contexts, the dispositional aspect of being a teacher within an equity-based framework may be situated as a disposition awareness. In these cases, the candidate has an eyes-open awareness to what is happening within the context and within practice. In another context, the teacher candidate may be able to express and even desire to have a commitment to the disposition in question, yet may not know how to leverage his or her own skills or local resources to act on a situation. Ideally, when the context allows and the candidate has the knowledge and skills, enacting dispositions in the interactions and relationships of teaching is possible.

Through early work on building out the enactment category of our rubric, we have begun to identify what we are naming micro-practices in teaching. These micro-practices are not the same as the instructional methods or practices that teacher candidates learn in teaching methods courses. They are also not the instructional decisions we expect to see in lesson plans. Micro-practices are illustrations of the subtle, yet deeply present, moves that teachers make in positioning themselves in relationship with their students, the patterns in their spoken and body language that students interpret in terms of care, love, neglect, hostility, and the emotional stances that teachers take in the face of uncertainty and complexity. This paper will not further describe these micro-practices, but we introduce the concept here to begin the construct development within the enactment category of our rubric development.

Our rubric also includes a counter-evidence and blind spots category. There are moments when teacher candidates display evidence of dispositions that can potentially harm children. These dispositions might be displayed through overt behaviors, such as sexist language or disproportionate use of punishment on children of color. At other times, evidence is more subtle: calling on boys more than girls, low expectations for second language students, body language that communicates disregard or contempt for groups of students because of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, or immigration status. These micro-aggressions can be harder to name, but must be identified, as many times they are unintentional blindspots teacher candidates have on their lenses into children, teaching, and the world (Kohli & Solórzano, 2012). The counter evidence and blindspots category of the rubric does not intend to shame the teacher candidate or to make summary judgments. We hold strongly to our conceptual framework that dispositions can be coached and developed. This category of counter-evidence offers critical, coachable moments that may otherwise go unattended. Coaching discussions catalyzed by evidence located in the counter evidence category can move a teacher candidate to a place of awareness, at a minimum, about how their actions and words can be harmful to students.

Theory into Action: Exploring Construct Validity of the **EDS Assessment Framework

In the field of psychometric measurement, Messick’s unified construct validity theory (Messick, 1989) is widely accepted and codified in the most recent revision of the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (AERA, APA, NCME, 1999; 2014). The recently updated standards indicate that validity is not an inherent characteristic of the assessment itself, but is an argument for how the assessment information is interpreted and used. Messick (1989) argued that the validation of an assessment is a continuous process to evaluate the underlying rationale or the assessment design against empirical evidence and how users interact with assessment results.

In our initial efforts to determine the content validity of our framework as a way of testing our theory of equity-based dispositions for teaching, we asked whether our framework was aligned with accepted professional standards, already created by national organizations. We conducted an alignment analysis against the full range of Interstate Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium Standards (InTASC) given that these professional standards provide a consensus from the Council of Chief State School Officers (2011) about the necessary knowledge, skills, and essential dispositions for teaching. Our framework does not follow the same organizational structure as the InTASC standards since we draw on a theoretical framework based in culturally relevant pedagogy and equity. We can, however, map each of our disposition strands to the InTASC standards, thus assuring we are attending to the professional expectations set forward by this national group, while also identifying key elements of critical pedagogy within our framework.

We then asked if our framework for assessing dispositions addressed areas of teacher performance not already assessed in other ways. To answer this question, we looked to our largest urban partner school district, examining how teacher performance expectations are codified in their teachers’ contract and enacted through the district’s teacher evaluation framework. We questioned whether our framework for dispositions was discriminating aspects of teachers’ practice that were not already being assessed within the district’s framework for evaluating instructional practices. Focus groups with full-time mentor teachers from this district provided clear evidence of the low cross-construct relationship between the instructional skills assessed by the district evaluation framework and the professional and humanist characteristics described in the **EDS dispositions framework.

To further our construct validity investigation of the initial disposition framework and the design of the assessment format, we engaged multiple stakeholders in early trials of the assessment process in focus group interviews and activities.

Research Questions and Data Collection

As we move **EDS from definition, to a set of strands for recognizing and naming dispositions, to more detailed rubric descriptions, we aim to generate a theory of dispositions dimensionality that accounts for a teacher’s blind spots, awareness of, commitment to, and enactment of these equity-based strands practice. As we build this theory, both conceptually and through specific practices that demonstrate how teachers grow toward equity-based teaching, exploring construct validity enables us to test our theoretical constructs with practitioners and participants to determine its theoretical viability. We now discuss the results of a series of construct validity studies of this dispositions framework. These qualitative studies seek to answer the following questions.

Q1. How do mentor teachers respond to the formative development aspects of the dispositions framework?

Q2. How do practicing educators, committed to educational equity, respond to the disposition strands within an equity-based framework?

Q3.       How do our teacher education colleagues nationally and locally respond to the use of a distributed knowledge approach to assessing teacher candidates?

Q4.       How do university supervisors view the use of the dispositions framework for supporting their coaching and mentoring of teacher candidates?

Q5.      How do teacher candidates view the use of the dispositions framework for supporting the development of their dispositions for teaching?

Throughout the 2014-15 academic year, we engaged participants in the following data collection activities aligned with the questions we posed.

Q1

• • 2 two-hour focus groups with 11 mentors from a large urban partner school district

  • Data: a group-generated list of important dispositions for successful teaching in their school district prior to seeing our disposition strands, evidence of disposition enactment from beginning teachers, ranked relevance of each disposition strand, identifying development progressions for beginning teachers for each dispositional strand, focus group discussion

Q2

• • 1-hour focus group with 25 participants at multicultural education conference

  • Data: group-generated list of important dispositions for successful teaching in diverse schools, ranked relevance of each disposition strand, focus group discussion

Q3

• • 30 minute session with 23 participants at national meeting of teacher educators

  • Data: questions generated about the approach to assessing dispositions at their home institutions

  • 60 minute session with 40 teacher educators in our university program

  • Data: placing examples of evidence of the dispositional strands across a timeline for candidates in our programs

Q4

• • 5 University supervisors

  • Data: journal reflections from 2 supervisors, 5 annotated dispositions frameworks for teacher candidates, and interviews with 4 supervisors

Q5

• • 6 teacher candidates

  • Data: journal reflections from 2 teacher candidates, 5 annotated dispositions frameworks, interviews with 2 teacher candidates

Findings across Stakeholder Groups

As our research questions illustrate, we placed specific attention on working across multiple stakeholder groups to test and develop the validity, and therefore the theoretical constructs, of our disposition framework and assessment processes. The results from each stakeholder group are discussed in turn, followed by a discussion about each of the framework strands.

Mentor Teachers

We asked the mentors to rank the disposition strands in terms of their relevance to successful teaching in urban schools. All of the participants rated all eight strands as relevant or highly relevant. The strand with the most ratings of very relevant was Care, with all 11 participants giving it this rating. Role of Self, Intentional Professional Choices, and Navigation each had 8 participants give it the rating of very relevant. We also asked participants to identify the most relevant strand for successful teaching in urban schools, framing this idea within a discussion about equity-based teaching with a drive toward social justice. Four of 11 participants agreed that Care was the most important strand for successful urban teaching. The strand Intentional Professional Choices was rated as the second highest in overall relevance. The strands Assets and Advocacy received no support for being the most relevant (Table 2).

The mentors in the focus group agreed that the disposition assessment framework had the potential to assess a teacher’s dispositional stance and that the framework itself provided a tool to use for coaching and mentoring. One participant said, “I could start to see where some of my new teachers who are having difficulties are in their dispositions and how I need to move them along.”

Practicing Educators Committed to Educational Equity

The data for this stakeholder group were collected from a focus group of members of the [State] National Association of Multicultural Educators. The relevance rankings from these 25 participants are shown in Table 3.

This group showed high levels of agreement on the relevance of the dispositions strands. None of the eight strands were rated as having little relevance. All strands were rated by a minimum of 19 participants as relevant or very relevant to successful teaching in urban schools. The strand Care had the strongest support with 24 participants rating it as relevant or very relevant. Additionally, the participants rated Navigation with the highest number of somewhat relevant ratings with 5 of the 25 participants giving it this lower rating. As with the mentor teachers, Care received the most responses as the strand with the most relevance for successful teaching in urban schools and the strand Role of Self ranked second for most relevant. Similar to the mentor teacher ratings, the strands Assets and Advocacy received little support as the most relevant strand to support equity-based teaching, while Navigation received no support.

Teacher Educators

During a 60-minute session with 40 teacher educators at our university, we asked them to identify where instances for evidence of each disposition strand could be collected across a teacher candidate’s program timeline. Participants represented several roles in the distributed knowledge community within our teacher education program—university supervisors, cooperating teachers, foundations course instructors, and teaching methods instructors. Participants located instances for evidence collection along a visual timeline that represented a teacher candidate’s preparation for licensure. Patterns on the timeline indicated that Role of Self was the only strand in which evidence was collected across the entire timespan of a teacher candidate’s program. In the ensuing conversation about the distributed nature of collecting evidence about the teacher candidates’ dispositions, participants identified the strand Collaborates and Communicates as one that would be difficult for many teacher educators to observe in the interactions between candidates and parents and families.

Teacher educators also discussed difficulties they experienced in trying to distinguish how some pieces of evidence aligned with distinctive strands. They expressed concern that there might be overlap across the distinct strands. We interpret this as part of the difficult process of deconstructing complex concepts into discrete elements, while still maintaining complex understanding of the concept and the interaction of its elements. This concern, however, does suggest that the strands need further definition and additional supporting materials in order to make clear distinctions among them.

Teacher educators also expressed concern about the burden of adding another assessment tool to the already busy and complicated assessment system that teacher candidates experience. In one interpretation of adopting a new assessment, the expectations of identifying evidence across eight disposition strands could prove to be a burden on any single individual. However, **EDS structures the assessment so that no one person is responsible for collecting evidence across eight disposition strands. Rather, evidence is collected and discussed among a team of teacher educators and the candidate her/himself. In this sense, the framework moves beyond an accountability instrument and becomes a forum for a community of teacher educators to engage  across roles about assumptions and expectations of how a teacher should engage with students when enacting practices through an equity-based lens. As one teacher educator framed this view: “This tool could bring together all the evidence we have on a candidate, but in a different way--through the piece that’s dispositional, the grey zone, and we can start our conversations from this.”

University Supervisors

When we asked university-based supervisors of teacher candidates to provide feedback on their use of the **EDS framework, they raised two distinct concerns about time. Both have implications for the coaching and formative development of teacher candidates. First, university supervisors raised questions of when to locate evidence linked to a disposition strand with a teacher candidate. For example, if a supervisor identified counter evidence early in the teacher candidate’s practicum or student teaching placement, then this could be noted, discussed, and a coaching plan could be implemented.  But, how long would this recorded counter-evidence continue to live with the candidate in the distributed knowledge space for other teacher educators to see? Would it remain evident and visible throughout the candidate’s preparation? Who would have access to it? What if counter evidence is identified late in a candidate’s preparation experience? These questions reaffirm the need to define expectations and consequences, as they will have important ramifications for how our university establishes performance expectations and consequential policies within programs.

It also has ramifications for how to understand the development of dispositions toward equity-based teaching.  Early evidence can be acted upon through formative coaching and later manifestations of evidence can as well. However, neither of these moments of formative coaching guarantees that the teacher candidate will remain situated in one location on the rubric if we truly understand disposition enactment to be contextual.  

Much like national research shows (Rose, 2013), our institution uses our current dispositions assessment in minimal ways for coaching candidates, typically relies on an individual (usually the university supervisor) to assess dispositions, and when candidates are identified as needing additional dispositional attention, the response is individual conversations with program leads or deans.  Imagining a different kind of distributed knowledge system for assessment or a joint understanding of how to dialogue with teacher candidates about dispositions as they shift between and within contexts is not yet part of our institutional culture or practice. Therefore, a fuller understanding of how to map dispositional development across contexts and within a distributed knowledge environment will need additional exploration.

Based on supervisor’s engagement with the framework and the assessment process itself, we see patterns of focus on particular strands, with some strands left completely unattended. Assets, Role of Self, Collaboration and Communication, and Intentional Professional Choices each had evidence recorded for teacher candidates by the supervisors. The other four strands had no evidence recorded. Admittedly, this was a very limited trial. But we do think that it is worth noting that Navigation and Innovation and Imagination were not quickly identified by university supervisors with evidence.

Teacher Candidates

Our data from teacher candidates is the most limited data set. We see similar patterns in the teacher candidate engagement with the assessment process as we see with the university supervisors. Candidates we interviewed expressed concern about additional work required by the **EDS framework, especially with regard to the demand for reflective writing in the program. One teacher candidate in the English as a Second Language (ESL) licensure program reflected on how some strands in the disposition framework may be more important to teachers in specific content areas:

Collaborates and communicates is most important for a technical and logistical reason— the future of ESL is co-teaching. You are going to have to work with people who fundamentally disagree with you. Your role as someone who believes this disposition is to determine how I will achieve my end, working with people I fundamentally disagree with? When you’re traveling from room to room, this is more important for you than the classroom teacher.

This insight about the differential need for dispositions across different content areas is worth noting for our continued conceptual development of an equity-based disposition framework.

Another teacher candidate raised a fundamental question related to locating evidence within the framework. So far, we have assumed that the absence of evidence is an active choice by the stakeholder locating evidence or a process that is strongly mitigated by the learning opportunities presented by the program. This teacher candidate asked: “Something missing is the hard conversation about what happens when the dispositions are missing. If we believe they can be taught, how can we make assessors commit to teaching them, when it’s apparent teacher candidates don’t have them?” This candidate also raised the question about her responsibilities as a peer with regard to noting dispositions: “Is there a place for me, as a peer, to navigate a Facebook post that is racist and sexist? How to interact with people who are teacher candidates, exhibiting dispositions contrary to these?”

These insights help guide our continuing investigations of how the **EDS framework, as a theoretical construction works in practice to support teacher development, how we set expectations for our student teaching supervisors, and how we engage our teacher candidates and teacher educators in this dialogic and peer-based culture building around a commitment to these dispositions.

Toward a Theory of Equity-Based Dispositions for Teaching

Across all five populations the relevance rankings and focus group data show strong resonance with the relevance of each dispositional strand with regard to successful teaching in urban schools. This supports a claim that the construct validity, in terms of the content of the **EDS framework, is strong in the eyes of educational stakeholders committed to social justice and equity in schools. We first discuss what we have come to understand about each of the strands in the disposition framework. We follow this with a more holistic discussion of the assessment process as viewed by the stakeholders in these studies.

Findings across Strands within the Dispositions Framework

Based on our literature review, the strand Assets presents an essential mindset about teaching in contexts where students come from diverse culture, language, and socio-economic backgrounds. Teachers need to see their students as arriving in class not “in need” and as “not having” skills or cultural knowledge that will help them succeed. Rather, students need to be seen as bringing assets with them that schools should build upon—not replace or fix. Yet, this strand does not stand out among our stakeholders as being the most relevant or critical of the strands in our framework. This does not mean that Assets is not identified as relevant to successful teaching in diverse contexts.  All of the strands have been interpreted as relevant by our participants. However, our participants may assume that an asset-based dispositional stance is fundamental and should be expected rather than called out as a disposition in need of careful and intentional development.

Similarly, the strand Advocacy was viewed as relevant, but did not get strong support as highly relevant or most relevant. We found that the notion of teachers as advocates is a consistent metaphor in the literature related to culturally relevant pedagogy and equity-based teaching. Yet, we also hear our supervisors and teacher educators indicate uncertainty about what this strand looks like in the practice of a teacher candidate. The question of whether we should expect teacher candidates to be able to advocate by locating resources or advocate in the face of politically complex contexts is also regularly raised. Supervisors were keen to point out that some strands do not manifest evidence as readily as others, and Advocacy seems to be one where evidence is difficult to locate. Given our commitment to a social justice orientation and that stakeholders show support for this strand, we remain resolved to continue to develop this strand. If we can locate examples that illustrate the practices of teacher candidates in this area, we may contribute to the understanding of how teacher candidates can be advocates for their students and support the cultivation of an advocacy disposition in beginning teachers through their initial preparation.

The strand Innovation and Imagination was rated similar to the strand Advocacy— relevant, but not identified as strongly relevant or most relevant. Again, the issue of locating evidence seems to be at play with this strand. What does it look like in practice for teacher candidates to enact a disposition of innovation and imagination, especially when placed in a classroom as a student teacher, where they perceive themselves to have no authority? If we continue to support the notion that teacher candidates should be able to solve complex problems and be responsive to educational change with their own innovation and imagination, we will need to develop stronger messages and learning opportunities for our candidates and their cooperating teachers with regard to this strand. We will not successfully locate evidence of this strand if we stand back and wait for it to manifest.

The strands Role of Self and Care received the most positive attention from participants. We attribute the attention given to Role of Self to the increasing consideration of teacher identity in the field of teacher education in general and to our increased examination of teacher identity through a Teacher Identity Self-Study at our institution particularly. Further, we interpret the identification of Role of Self as one of the most relevant dispositional characteristics needed for success in urban schools as a signal for specific attention to teacher candidates exploring their racial identity in school contexts where race is an active and explicit part of teacher-student interactions. Similarly, the focused attention on the strand Care is not just a call for more loving relationships between teachers and students. It punctuates the demand that teacher candidates see students of color and students with multi-lingual backgrounds as complex and worthy human beings who carry multi-layered and unique histories with them through every moment of instructional interaction, and who have potential to be successful in their futures.

The strands Collaboration and Communication and Navigation proved to be difficult for teacher educators to locate evidence as shown in supervisor journals, the annotated assessment frameworks, and the candidate timeline completed with our university-based educators. These results suggest that these strands may require tapping a different part of the distributed knowledge community, namely, cooperating teachers, to provide assessment and coaching on these strands.

The strand Intentional Professional Choices showed up as a highly regarded strand by our school-based mentors, working with first year teachers, but does not yet stand out among other stakeholders. This may be attributed to stronger connections made by the mentors between this strand and curricular and instructional choices of beginning teachers once on their own in classrooms, including classroom management. Indicators in the strand Intentional Professional Choices speak to the teacher’s agency and how the teacher chooses to interact with students and colleagues. It also connects a teacher’s agency to the ways in which a teacher chooses to represent oneself professionally. From the stance of a mentor for a beginning teacher, this particular strand may resonate with the core of mentoring work with regard to supporting the development of strong instructional skill and in acculturating the beginning teacher into the school context.

Toward A Theory of Dialogic Development of Equity-Based Dispositions for Teaching

While we continue to wrestle with the development of this nascent theory of developing beginning teachers’ dispositions within an equity-based framework, we leave this analysis with deep consideration for four conceptual issues related to the practices of coaching teacher candidates toward these dispositions. These issues have significance for how we continue to develop the indicators of performance and create practices for coaching teacher candidates in their development of these dispositions as our theoretical assumptions come into contact with and are further shaped by practice. These issues also speak to other institutions’ efforts to develop their instrumentation and assessment practices around dispositions of teacher candidates and are not specific to our particular dispositions framework.

Accessibility of the Theoretical Constructs that Underlie the Disposition Framework

From the interviews with teacher educators and university supervisors, questions of accessibility of the conceptual constructs within the framework were raised. Our current iteration of the framework has numerous theoretical constructs embedded in the instrument, which can lead to multiple interpretations by users depending on their familiarity with the theoretical premises on which the framework is built. We have written background essays for each strand, yet one supervisor’s comment helps us see the importance of working across our teacher education community around the underlying theoretical premises in the framework and not just the implementation of the framework as a coaching tool. She said:

Now that I’ve read it through several times, it feels much more accessible. The first time through, I felt inadequate. Most of the strands are accessible but the ones that are the most challenging are about race and identity. It would be worthwhile to look at a few excerpts from very clear articles, just to support supervisors, who may or may not have heard about culturally relevant pedagogy.

Here, the supervisor comments not only on the usability of the instrument for assessment purposes, but she also points out that the concepts themselves—race, identity, and culturally relevant pedagogy—need to be accessible to the user as well. Our further development of the assessment system will need to ensure that our community of teacher educators is familiar with and confident in their understanding of these core concepts, if we expect them to coach and assess our teacher candidates.

The issue of locating evidence in practice that supports this theory of equity-based teaching dispositions will be ongoing in this development work. Locating appropriate evidence across observations, artifacts, and self-analysis or reflection is challenging. Some strands shine a spotlight on structural issues that might impede a teacher educator’s ability to locate evidence to support the development of the desired disposition. It begs the question, if we are not locating evidence of dispositions in our teacher candidates during their preparation, why not? Are the expectations of the assessment inappropriate? Does our program offer the right opportunities for candidates to engage with students and learn how to enact dispositions such as Advocacy and Innovation and Imagination during their preparation journey, when they have the most support? Are these constructs too amorphous to link to specific forms of evidence?

“Coachability” as a Starting Point

Our work in developing this framework and designing the assessment approach relies on an assumption that dispositions can be developed and are coachable (Murrell, Diez, Feiman-Nemser, & Schussler, 2010). Coachability seemed to be somewhat synonymous with ideas such as “open-minded” and for having a “growth mindset” (Dweck, 2006). In our conversations with mentor teachers, they emphatically identified a beginning teacher’s coachability as a necessary starting point. If a beginning teacher is not responsive to feedback, shows little effort to engage with the mentor teacher, or, in some cases, is hostile toward suggestions and coaching offered by the mentor, mentors see little they can do to help improve the instructional practices or the dispositions of that teacher. District mentors view beginning teachers who appear unreceptive to coaching and feedback as jeopardizing their retention in the profession. For school personnel, the coachability of a beginning teacher is a key starting point, and needs to be in place when that teacher is hired.

Our current dispositions framework identifies a commitment to reflection and ongoing professional learning in the strand Intentional Professional Choices. Upon further analysis, our articulation of coachability as reflection centers this indicator on a more traditional cognitive approach to individual learning and development. When we describe reflection, we position it as a process completed by the teacher candidate, reliant on the ability to self-assess ones own performance. If we expect teacher candidates to accept and act on feedback, then we establish a teacher candidate’s reflection process as a distinctly different kind of process. Our future work on this theory of dispositions development must consider how we address coachability with our candidates when communicating our expectations, supporting their skills and mindsets about being coached, and expecting improvement from a coaching cycle.

Locating Distinctions Between Instructional Competence and Dispositions

We continue to wrestle with the distinction between locating evidence of dispositions versus evidence of instructional competence, particularly when evidence of dispositions is often located in the instructional moves that the teacher makes. Researchers have argued that we cannot keep dispositions separate from knowledge and skills (Breese & Nawrocki-Chabin, 2007; Diez, 2006; Diez & Murrell, 2010). If a teacher is to be able to live out dispositions, the teacher needs to have the knowledge and skills to enact those dispositions. This interlinking of knowledge, skills, and dispositions creates a significant boundary issue when trying to develop an assessment that brings stronger focus to the dispositional aspects of teaching.

As we look at the data from our interviews with university supervisors and teacher candidates, we can see the conflation of expectations of instructional practices with expectations of dispositions. The focus group of equity-minded educators also described desired dispositions as teachers who know how to provide “hands-on opportunities,” “integration of technology,” and “non-punitive classroom management” for their students. Each of these descriptions have underlying dispositions that may lead the teacher candidates to make choices about being intentional with instructional choices, about taking risks with new technology, and about caring for students when managing classroom interactions. Yet, the links between the internal rationale for the decisions that then manifest in instructional practices is a challenging space in which to assess and coach a teacher candidate. As we continue to develop this theory of disposition development for beginning teachers we need to identify clearer indicators that denote how dispositions manifest in a teacher’s demonstrated skills and knowledge.

Making Distinctions Between Personal Traits, Mindsets, and Behaviors

Finally, a fundamental issue continues to rear its head throughout our efforts to engage professional educators in validity studies and discussions about disposition development. When assessing and coaching for dispositions, are we assessing a set of personal traits, a set of mindsets or beliefs, and/or a set of behaviors or competencies? In our conceptualization, we posited that a teacher candidate’s dispositions could manifest in writing (through reflective essay, analysis of local contexts), through observation of a teacher candidate in their university settings and P-12 settings, and through artifacts such as lesson plans, student work, and course assignments. This decision provides ample opportunity to collect evidence of teacher candidate’s dispositions and share that evidence in ways beneficial for coaching purposes within a dialogic and distributed knowledge community. This conceptual choice also commits us to identifying dispositions as both mindsets that can be expressed in writing and behaviors that can be seen in action.

After engaging with stakeholders, we are now struggling with the role personal traits play in how practicing educators speak about dispositions. What does it mean when mentor teachers want beginning teachers to have a “positivity” in them? Is “confidence” a personal trait or a professional disposition that we can coach candidates toward? If we want teachers who are persistent and relentless in their support of students, are we entering into a discussion of a person’s core values? As we continue to develop this theory of dispositions development, we must articulate our framing of the professional expectations we hold for teacher candidates and communicate how those expectations are grounded in our university’s core values around equity and social justice. We must also be clear about what we expect our teacher candidates to learn about the social structures of schooling and the historical inequities in which schooling is situated. This will help clarify our teacher preparation program’s professional expectations of candidates rather than imposing a set of traits that we expect candidates to hold personally.

Closing Thoughts

In our progress towards a theory of equity-based dispositions development in teachers, we offer this analysis of our initial development and research of **EDS, a system for multiple stakeholders in teacher education to examine dispositions for teaching, improve consistency in coaching for dispositions across and within licensure programs, and develop consistent expectations for coaching and developing candidates’ dispositions for teaching within a equity-based framework that drives toward social  justice. Our theory of dispositions development for beginning teachers has the potential to shift the way teacher licensure programs at our university assess for dispositional growth, as it employs a model of distributed knowledge across multiple stakeholders in our program, including the teacher candidate. Because our theory prioritizes the importance of coaching for dispositional development and works in the space between assessment of and assessment for teacher candidate growth, it engages the teacher candidate and his/her team of teacher educators in critical conversations about the commitments needed to teach in diverse classroom settings.

Based on our work to date, we believe our beginning theoretical development has the potential to align supervisory coaching during pre-service education with learning and support of beginning teachers around practice that is equity-based. We also hope that this work will engage the field of teacher education in the continuing development of our definitions and approaches to assessing teacher candidate dispositions in more robust, collective, and impactful ways.

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Appendix

Table A3. Educators Committed to Educational Equity Relevance Rankings