Conference Agenda

Focus of Inquiry: This paper explores how collaborative engagement with youth as co-researchers in a longitudinal research study of youth STEM trajectories provides unique opportunities to center youth voices, knowledge, and perspectives and to cultivate a sense of belonging for youth in supportive learning environments. Co-researchers are researchers from populations of the research itself, including: youth, teachers, and school leaders. Drawing on seven years of collaboration with six youth co-researchers at various stages of college and graduate school, we highlight the key features of youth participation, how youth participation shaped the design, implementation, and dissemination of the research, and in what ways this collaboration supported a sense of belonging between youth and adults over time. This paper responds to the ICSEI sub-theme “policy and practice learning to support teacher and school leader development,” by shedding light on features of the collaborative co-research process that may inform educators seeking to build partnerships with youth and cultivate a sense of belonging for youth in learning spaces that may have traditionally excluded their perspectives.

Theoretical/ Conceptual Perspectives: We draw on the core concepts of a community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991) framework, including practices, mentoring relationships, identity and sense of belonging (Good et al., 2012) to design our collaborative co-research process and understand how and in what ways youth feel acceptance and membership in our research community of practice. We also draw on key features of youth participatory action research (Caraballo, Lozenski, Lyiscott & Morell, 2017) to center youth voices and perspectives and position young people as collaborators bringing critical expertise and intimate knowledge about their own lives.

Data & Method: Data are drawn from a case study of a seven-year education research fellowship that prepared six youth who are study participants in Staying in Science to expand their STEM research experiences into an education research context. We draw on multiple sources of data, including interview transcripts, recordings, written reflections of our collaborative process, and historical documentation of the ways youth participated in the design of surveys and interview protocols and co-conducting interviews with study participants. Using this data, we identify the key features of our co-research process that support youths’ sense of belonging both to the study and to the process of research.

Findings

Analysis revealed a set of strategies and practices educators utilized that contributed to and/or hindered youth being key collaborators on a longitudinal study exploring their and their peer’s STEM trajectories. For example, we found that adult researchers authentically addressed power in adult-youth co-researcher relationships by actively inviting input, communicating when input was not incorporated, and clearly articulating adult and youth roles.

Educational Importance for Practice and Theory

This project shares findings about the practices, routines, and structures that adults and youth have enacted that have been critical to a productive collaborative co-research process. We focus on sharing strategies that teachers, school, and college educators can implement in their educational settings to support the process of centering youth voices and perspectives and promote inclusion and belonging in education.

Literacy is tied to productivity, employment, and earnings potential, but performance on reading assessments has been stagnant or declining for years within the US (National Center for Education Statistics, 2012, 2022). Despite multiple decades of attention (“Editorial: Overcoming Racial Injustice,” 2020), historically underrepresented student groups’ outcomes are especially poor.

Researchers have identified teaching practices that consistently support student growth in reading comprehension (Graham et al., 2018; Graham & Hebert, 2011). Among them, a strong factor is the use of student-centered practices (Davis, 2010), including those that leverage writing instruction, such as pair/trio sharing where students can try out ideas in a “low risk” setting (Matsumura et al., 2022). However, these student-centered routines are not commonly found in reading instruction, raising the question of why implementation at scale is not occurring for proven practices.

Networked improvement communities (NICs) have become a popular approach to addressing major problems of practice in education (Bryk et al., 2011, 2013; Russell et al., 2017). NICs combine the organizational routines and analytic lenses of improvement science with the collective knowledge and coordinated effort of networks, offering a potentially powerful method for managing complex problems. Although improvement science has been well-researched in other industries (Ogrinc et al., 2012; Rother, 2009) and networks have been explored for educational improvement (Muijs, 2010), more studies are required to test the use of NICs, specifically. This need for research on the effectiveness of NICs is particularly critical for NICs focused on instruction inside the classroom, where there is significant complexity in all elements needed to productively shape student learning. Recent work suggests NICs can improve classroom instruction, but has not focused on explicit analysis of the relationship between implementation and student outcomes.

In this study, we examine two years (2021-22, 2022-23) of student outcome and teacher implementation data in a large NIC. Depth of implementation was assessed using teacher self-reported implementation of six core teaching practices and student outcomes were measured using NWEA’s MAP Reading assessment. This NIC focused teachers on a set of six student-centered routines to understand their impact on student reading outcomes. The network led professional development sessions and held network-wide convenings, fulfilling an essential NIC function by creating inter-organizational spaces for productive collaboration (Russell et al., 2017). Teachers were introduced to these instructional practices and learned how to embed them in their classrooms during professional development sessions. In network convenings, network members came together to align on group norms and share their successes.

The findings show that the benefit of having a high-implementing teacher was only slightly less in magnitude than a typical four months of learning at the national scale. Results also showed consistent benefits across both study years for student groups with power. Benefits for underpowered student groups (students with special needs and Black students) were positive but noisy. This study has implications for practitioners as they decide how to implement high-quality professional education to support interventions, as well as for researchers’ theory-building about the impact of using a NIC-based implementation approach.

Introduction

As the world emerges from the pandemic, the negative impacts on student learning and education structures are evident. Educators and researchers face the challenges resulting from the disruption to learning. As students resume in-person schooling, a key emerging challenge is their adjustment to being back in classrooms (Rapanta et al., 2021). These challenges encompass the socio-emotional state of students, including difficulties in sitting for extended periods and engaging meaningfully with their peers. Believing that peer interaction and collaborative classroom learning are crucial for student growth (Laal & Ghodsi, 2012; Wood and O'Malley, 1996, Vygotsky, 1987) our paper asks: How do teachers understand the change in student social behaviors in classrooms since their return to in-person schooling?

Context

This study involved five teachers from schools in India's capital, Delhi. Delhi had one of the worst impacts of Covid-19. Some estimate that approximately 4 million people lost their lives between April 2020 and January 2022. Therefore it is no surprise that schools in India were restricted to online classes for most of the past three years.

Methods and Analysis

In this qualitative study, we interviewed five school teachers from three private schools. These schools experienced significant closures during the pandemic, including one school being the epicenter of COVID-19 cases among Delhi schools in 2021. The forty-five-minute interviews aimed to capture teachers' classroom experiences in the past six months. Recorded interviews were transcribed for analysis. We utilized the constant comparative method (Glasser, 1965) to identify overarching themes of teacher perceptions about student behavior.

Findings

Analysis revealed four prominent themes. Firstly, teachers noticed a rise in "shy" students, resulting in quieter classrooms and reduced student enthusiasm. Secondly, students exhibited decreased teamwork skills, displaying impatience and reluctance to compromise. Interestingly, a third theme emerged, indicating that online pandemic-formed groups led to exclusive cliques within classrooms. Finally and most concerningly, all teachers in the study talked about how they were especially worried about the students who had been isolated even before the pandemic. Coming back to classrooms after spending more than a year in a home environment has been especially difficult for students who, pre-pandemic, also felt isolated by their peers and regressed in their social growth over the past two years.

Implications:

Most people expected the pandemic's long-term effects to dissipate upon returning to normal. However, this study highlights a new normal with fresh challenges for teachers and students. Based on our findings, we make the claim that there needs to be support for all returning students that goes beyond helping them “cover-up” academic content and explicitly centers students’ socio-emotional growth. Furthermore, administrators must assist teachers in working with students who are especially struggling with reintegration into in-person classes.

Importance and Connection to ICSEI theme:

This study is connected to the themes of the need for continued professional development (CPD) and the subtheme of the ongoing system and school implications arising from the COVID-19 crisis. This reserach speaks to the teacher's perception of the long-lasting social impact of school closures and online school.

Beliefs about gender norms can result in disproportional exclusionary discipline when educators over-policing students whose behavior deviates from teachers’ gender expectations. Using the inclusivity professional development framework, we outline core elements of effective professional development theorized to influence school disciplinary rates. Despite several case studies suggesting IPD may be an important component in developing supportive educator-allies for LGBTQ+ youth (Greytak et al., 2013; Mangin, 2019; Payne & Smith, 2011), few quantitative studies have connected IPD with improvements in disciplinary outcomes.

Purpose

This study examines a large, U.S. school district’s implementation of an IPD program in elementary schools. The program trains educators in preventing bias-based bullying, learning about LGBTQ+ identities, and creating welcoming classrooms for all families. Our cross-sectional study addresses two main research goals: First, we investigate differences between which schools in the volunteered for the IPD program by evaluating school demographics and other characteristics each year (2018-2019). Second, we examine whether participation in the IPD program contributed to disciplinary outcomes.

Methods

School data comes from two sources: 1) the administrative and discipline data for 33 elementary schools, and 2) district training records. Using demographic data from the School Report Card, we examine the balance of school demographics between IPD and Non-IPD schools using t-tests. Next, we examine IPD's contribution to school disciplinary outcomes using Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) multivariate regression analysis controlling for race, SES, and special education enrollment.

Results

IPD schools enroll fewer low-SES students (t(33) = 3.348, p = 0.002), and marginally less special education students (t(33) = 2.013, p = 0.053). Non-IPD schools have less white students (t(33) = -2.208, p = 0.035), more Black/African American students (t(33) = 3.336, p = 0.002), and more students with two or more races (t(33) = 3.464, p = 0.002) than IPD schools.

OLS Multivariate Regression Analysis

When controlling for school demographics, IPD schools have lower suspension (β = -1.592, p = 0.032), assault (β = -1.098, p = 0.049), and endangering behavior rates (β = -0.284, p = 0.027) than Non-IPD schools. There are no significant differences in other school violations (β=-0.157, p = 0.209) and weapon-related incidents (β = -0.045, p = 0.191) between IPD and Non-IPD schools. Overall, our results suggest the IPD program contributes to lower behavioral performance of students even after controlling for school demographics.

Discussion

Effective instruction of K12 students requires pedagogical expertise and appropriate understanding about how students’ identities and social statuses influence their school experiences (Gay, 2010; Ladson-Billings, 1999; Shulman, 1987). The IPD curriculum aims to enhance educators’ understanding of how and why school structures should change to reach