UC Berkeley

This study investigates how middle school teachers who engaged in a teacher professional development program that focuses on the development of academic literacy for English learners, implemented the program's instructional tools in their classroom instruction. This research sheds light on teachers' understanding of the professional development and their subsequent decision-making for appropriating, or not appropriating, new instructional tools and practices from the program as they enacted their literacy goals for student learning in English language arts and English language development classrooms.

This study contributes to the understanding of the situated nature of teacher professional development and teachers' implementation efforts. This research offers an analysis of the tensions that emerged between the various discourses about teaching and learning for three eighth grade teachers' perceptions of the professional development. The findings suggest that the discourses of standardized testing, accountability for student achievement, and classroom participation influenced how teachers negotiated and prioritized competing goals for student learning. Further, this research examines each of the three case study teachers' implementation in their respective classrooms, two in regular eighth-grade English language arts classrooms with English learners and one in a specialized English language development course with only English learners. The case study teachers and classrooms afforded the examination of teachers' implementation in various instructional settings with English learners. The findings from the case studies suggest that teachers negotiated their implementation of the professional development program in a variety of ways. The analysis demonstrates that when the teachers enacted the program's instructional tools and practices, they appropriated them by making modifications that were aligned to their goals for students' literacy. One case study teacher uses both compliance and the power to reject the professional development in order to maintain established teaching practices. The second case study teacher highlights the roles of compliance, resistance, and rejection following unsuccessful implementations with her students. The third case study teacher points to an implementation that integrates the professional development among other instructional tools and practices but also resists and rejects aspects of the professional development. The analysis of the case study teachers' implementation and appropriation of the professional development also highlights the various ways in which teachers make sense of how new instructional tools and practices support their goals for teaching and student learning.