Annela Teemant

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https://hdl.handle.net/1805/31289

Reframing Teacher Learning as a Mirrored Process of Becoming

Professor Annela Teemant's expertise is in preparing teachers for students learning English as a new language in K-12 settings. English language learners are the fastest growing student population in the United States, making up about 10% of the population currently. But projections say that by 2025, it may be as high as 25% of students are English language learners.

Currently, 64% of United States teachers already have at least one English learner in their classroom, and soon they will have more. What this means is that every teacher is a teacher of English language learners. These teachers deserve more professional development opportunities that expand their knowledge of language, culture, pedagogy and equity mindedness. Professor Teemant's research focuses on improving teacher preparation for multilingual learners. Over her career, she has garnered six U.S. Department of Education federal grants (about $14 million in federal funding) to study teacher quality for multilingual learners.

Educational equity for multilingual learners and the American public school system is a complex problem. Current solutions are never final. It's an evolving and ongoing process. Professor Teemant works collaboratively with public school teachers as capacity builders to implement and then evaluate research findings in the proposals, the designs, and in the professional development. Professor Teemant and her research partners hope this leads to better outcomes for their students. Her scholarship has always been nestled between the university and public schools, and she has used that collaborative space to translate theory and research into practice in collaborations with teachers, coaches and school leaders. She has created curriculum materials or approaches to professional learning that she and her collaborators are able to design, implement and then evaluate using quasi-experimental, qualitative and mixed method research to determine the impact those innovations have on teacher learning and then ultimately on student learning outcomes. Educational equity is an unfinished reality. And as collaborators in that process, in the research that Professor Teemant conducts with teachers, they both get to be unfinished and incomplete. Yet, they are still on a process of becoming more equitable and more aware of how they can better serve multilingual learners in the public school systems.

Professor Teemant's translation of research into opportunities for teachers to improve their pedagogy practices for all learners is another excellent example of how IUPUI's faculty members are TRANSLATING their RESEARCH INTO PRACTICE.

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    Academic Success of English Language Learners: Are Mainstream Teachers Underprepared?
    (Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, 2015-04-17) Covarrubias, Maritza; Teemant, Annela; Bhathena, Cathy
    The population of English Language Learners (ELLs) in Indiana schools has increased over the years and will keep increasing. However, the graduation rates of ELLs and their standardized test scores are not improving. After reading various articles about why this might be occurring and using my personal experience as an ELL, there was one factor that stood out to me: mainstream teachers are underprepared to work with ELLs. The purpose of this research project is to investigate how prepared mainstream teachers feel to work with ELLs and what, if any, are the barriers that keep them from doing so. For this project, I will be using mixed methods research: qualitative and quantitative. Qualitative research will be the primary method and will be collected in the form of teacher interviews. These interviews will include questions about how teachers feel about working with ELLs and the teachers’ observations about how ELLs function in their classrooms. The qualitative research will be supported by quantitative research that will be collected through surveys and classroom observations of teacher pedagogy. The overall goal of this project is to help make classrooms places where ELLs can be academically successful and improve graduations rates and test scores.
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    Beliefs and Attitudes: How the Presence of English Language Learners in Mainstream Classrooms Affects Classroom Practices
    (Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, 2016-04-08) Covarrubias, Maritza; Teemant, Annela; Bhathena, Cathy
    As the population of English Language Learners (ELLs) in Indiana schools increases, mainstream teachers have the responsibility of effectively teaching them. However, research indicates that there are various factors that may hinder a mainstream teacher’s ability to do this. One of the factors that stood out to me is the teacher’s beliefs and attitudes towards ELLs. This research project will focus on mainstream teachers in Indiana schools and how their beliefs and attitudes towards ELLs affect classroom practices. Further, it will investigate whether teacher preparation has an impact on mainstream teachers’ attitudes and beliefs towards their ELLs. The overall goal of this research project is to provide insight into the practices mainstream teachers in Indiana are using in the classroom to assist ELLs. Data will be collected through qualitative methods. Teacher interviews and classroom observations will be conducted. The teacher interviews will help to understand how teachers work with ELLs in the classroom, what feelings they have about ELLs, and how they modify their lessons to fit the needs of ELLs. The classroom observations will help to support the data collected by the interviews. Classroom observations will look for what visible modifications teachers are making to assist ELLs and what attitudes they portray about ELLs. This is a starting research project and there are no definite results or conclusions at the moment.
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    Investigating the Efficacy and Sustainability of Instructional Coaching on Teacher Pedagogy
    (Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, 2011-04-08) Teemant, Annela
    Identifying value-added models and measures of instructional coaching are increasingly important with renewed focus on improving teacher quality. This longitudinal and quasiexperimental study investigates the efficacy and sustainability of instructional coaching outcomes with urban elementary teachers (N = 36). The instructional coaching intervention targets use of five research-based practices—the Standards for Effective Pedagogy—known to benefit culturally, linguistically, and economically diverse learners. Quantitative preintervention, post-intervention, and one-year-after intervention data were collected across two years. The intervention consisted of a 30-hour workshop and seven individual coaching sessions across the school year. Findings demonstrate instructional coaching led to statistically significant teacher change against a performance standard. Teachers were able to sustain these changes, albeit at a slightly lower level of fidelity, one year following the intervention. The pattern of attrition reveals that teachers struggle to sustain a commitment to providing teacher assistance to students in the process of learning.
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    Reframing the space between: Teachers and learners in context
    (Sage, 2018) Teemant, Annela; School of Education
    New audiences, new theoretical understandings of cognitive development and teaching, and the moral imperative to reach all learners and teachers require reframing how we assess our effectiveness in ELT. In this article, I present four areas of LTE that require reframing: (1) Who we prepare (2) with what content (3) to competently participate in personal and social change, (4) by making the space between teacher and students active with responsive assistance that improves learner outcomes.
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    Ways of Interacting: What Underlies Instructional Coaches’ Discursive Actions
    (Elsevier, 2019-02) Haneda, Mari; Sherman, Brandon; Bose, Frances Nebus; Teemant, Annela; School of Education
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    A Rhizomatic Case Analysis of Instructional Coaching as Becoming
    (Routledge, 2020) Sherman, Brandon; Haneda, Mari; Teemant, Annela; School of Education
    Drawing on rhizomatic theory, we examine the professional development approach of instructional coaching as a space of becoming. Analyzing episodes from a year-long coaching collaboration, we show how teacher/coach interaction can be understood as a complex and shifting network of material and discursive elements that can combine to produce surprising outcomes. Thinking through key rhizomatic figurations of assemblage, rhizomatic lines, and territorialization, we examine coaching across intra-actional events: how happenings in coaching conference extend and intertwine with larger assemblages of the classroom and school. We show how rhizomatic ruptures emerging in practice may open up new possibilities for teachers and students.
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    Unravelling effective professional development: a rhizomatic inquiry into coaching and the active ingredients of teacher learning
    (Taylor and Francis, 2021-05-27) Sherman, Brandon; Teemant, Annela; School of Education
    Teacher professional development (PD) is about change. One of the most prominent lines of research on PD addresses what makes it an effective change process. This research produces critical features of effective PD, the seemingly active ingredients of teacher change that are meant to guide professionals in the design, implementation, and evaluation of PD programmes. Embedded within this research is a linear, hierarchical, causal mono-logic model that is the hallmark of Western rational thought. Rhizomatic thought, with its non-linear perspectives, offers a contrast, highlighting the unpredictable multiplicity of complex systems that embrace the emergent dynamics of becoming and hybridity. In this paper, we look at features of effective PD through a rhizomatic lens, with a focus on PD as mapping and tracing. Drawing on vignettes from two case studies from a year-long pedagogical coaching PD programme, we explore how effective features of PD can be unravelled in practice and rewoven into vibrant hybridity within real-world school contexts.
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    An equity framework for family, community, and school partnerships
    (Taylor and Francis, 2020-12-11) Teemant, Annela; Borgioli Yoder, Gina; Sherman, Brandon J.; Santamaría Graff, Cristina; School of Education
    Equity has often been identified as a foundational concept for truly inclusive and reciprocal partnerships among schools, families, and communities. Equity can be difficult for schools to achieve without cultivating new paradigms for interacting with historically marginalized students, families, and communities. In order to bridge the ideal of equity with radical, scalable, and sustainable institutional change, we developed an equity framework for cultivating mutual interdependence among families, communities, and schools in partnership. Rooted in sociocultural and critical theories, this framework builds upon the values of mutual respect, democratic participation, critical consciousness, and sustainability. These values then support cycles of collaborative action amongst stakeholders leveraging problem posing and community organizing to address inequities. In our article, we discuss the underlying theory supporting the framework and elaborate upon its implications for practice.
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    Unravelling effective professional development: a rhizomatic inquiry into coaching and the active ingredients of teacher learning
    (Routledge, 2020-09) Sherman, Brandon; Teemant, Annela
    Teacher professional development (PD) is about change. One of the most prominent lines of research on PD addresses what makes it an effective change process. This research produces critical features of effective PD, the seemingly active ingredients of teacher change that are meant to guide professionals in the design, implementation, and evaluation of PD programmes. Embedded within this research is a linear, hierarchical, causal mono-logic model that is the hallmark of Western rational thought. Rhizomatic thought, with its non-linear perspectives, offers a contrast, highlighting the unpredictable multiplicity of complex systems that embrace the emergent dynamics of becoming and hybridity. In this paper, we look at features of effective PD through a rhizomatic lens, with a focus on PD as mapping and tracing. Drawing on vignettes from five case studies from a year-long pedagogical coaching PD programme, we explore how effective features of PD can be unravelled in practice and rewoven into vibrant hybridity within real-world school contexts.
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    The Critical Space Between: Weaving Freirean and Sociocultural Pedagogies
    (Routledge, 2022) Sherman, Brandon J.; Teemant, Annela
    Freirean critical pedagogy and sociocultural theories of learning have been found to resonate in certain ways while remaining distinct bodies of theory. Sherman and Teemant argue that these theories of learning, considered in tandem, have implications for the practice and pedagogy of language and literacy instruction for emergent bilinguals. In this chapter, we read sociocultural principles of pedagogy through Freirean principles of critical pedagogy using illustrations drawn from teacher practice. In this way, we draw valuable connections between how teachers translate Freirean perspectives into living educational practice.