With the growth of blended teaching comes a need to support teachers that are shifting their instruction to this mode of teaching. Coaching is a form of professional development that is growing in K-12 institutions. However, research of coaching specifically intended to support blended teaching practices is lacking. This phenomenological…

Preparing future teachers with virtual teaching competencies that can be applied to blended or fully online settings has long challenged teacher education programs. The need for this preparation has been made increasingly apparent by global events, advances in technology, and the shifting landscape of K-12 education. Therefore, this study examined…

This descriptive phenomenological study sought to achieve two goals: to deeply understand early career teachers' (ECTs) past and present experiences and how these might impact ECTs' intentions and purposes for participation in an online community, as well as to inform the development of a new online community for ECTs. Five early career elementary…

Nurturing computational thinking (CT) in students is necessary for problem solving and important for bridging the current STEM gap, such as the American K-12 students' lagging behind in math and science standardized testing. To facilitate the integration of CT in students' and teachers' experience and insights on implementing CT into K-12…

Elementary school teachers are increasingly being asked to teach computer science (CS)--a subject area with which they often have little familiarity. To address this gap, teacher professional development (PD) is a common approach for helping teachers become familiar with CS content. This paper describes a collaborative PD designed to accompany a…

Prior work has shown a lack of quality professional development (PD) programs specifically targeted for early elementary teachers to improve their knowledge and self-efficacy around teaching coding in their classrooms. Whereas traditional PD programs in this area have relied upon in-person workshops, the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated the need to…

Data science and computational thinking (CT) skills are important STEM literacies necessary to make informed daily decisions. In elementary schools, particularly in rural areas, there is little instruction and limited research towards understanding and developing these literacies. Using a Research-Practice Partnership model (RPP; Coburn &…

Professional development programs today increasingly ask teachers to capture video in their own classrooms to share with peers. Yet little work has explored the nature of the videos that teachers produce for this purpose. This study takes a first step by looking inside a set of almost 200 videos collected by 84 K-2 teachers participating in one of…

Although students and adults alike are constantly exposed to visuals both online and offline, merely being exposed to visuals does not guarantee visual literacy (Kedra & Zakeviciute, 2019). This study explored K12 teachers' perceptions regarding their personal and instructional use of online images as well as the influence of a visual literacy…

New computer science standards are being rapidly introduced at the elementary level but little is known about how to prepare teachers to learn and teach the content of these standards, or how to support students with disabilities in learning computer science. Accordingly, we designed and studied the Inclusive Computer Science Model of Professional…

In the midst of the COVID-19 outbreak, many educators across the country and around the world scrambled to shift their practice from in-person to remote teaching within a matter of days. This global pandemic exposed a significant gap in teacher preparation and training for emergency remote teaching, including teaching with technology to ensure…

As of mid-April 2020, 1.5 billion learners were affected by school closures across 191 countries due to the COVID-19 pandemic (UNESCO, 2020). During the weeks of school closures, teachers were expected to become online teachers overnight. As teacher educators, we were curious about teachers' readiness for online practice. In the Teachers'…

Global challenges require international collaboration in order to solve, as Covid 19 exemplifies. In order to oppose xenophobia and promote global solidarity as the world fights this pandemic, teachers need professional development on global learning. Analysis of data collected during an online course that integrated global learning and a variety…

The past decade has been marked by a shift toward practice-based approaches in teacher education. Rehearsal has become an important dialogic strategy for encouraging candidate reflection as they work toward deconstructing and enacting high leverage practices (HLPs) during their preparation. Despite the frequent reference to rehearsals in the…

In order to create professional development experiences, curriculum materials, and policies that support elementary school teachers to embed computational thinking (CT) in their teaching, researchers and teacher educators must understand ways teachers see CT as connecting to their classroom practices. We interviewed 12 elementary school teachers,…