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Developing teacher efficacy through shared stories.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

For new teachers, learning to navigate the demands of standards and curricula while developing a classroom persona can be extremely challenging. The stories of mentor teachers can help novices envision ways to adopt new teaching strategies that can help them develop a successful practice. Effective stories emerge when a mentor listens to teachers' concerns and finds matching stories from her own experience. When this occurs, the stories illuminate the embodiment of pedagogical theory, thus helping the novice teacher to locate and develop self-efficacy.

Introduction: I Could See Myself in Your Shoes

This article discusses teaching stories and their contribution to new teachers' efficacy. Offering strategies in a narrative, non-authoritarian way allows teachers to insert themselves into the stories and imagine scenarios in which they are enacting the strategies described by a mentor. The narrative accounts of sharing stories with teachers presented here are drawn from interviews and qualitative field notes gathered as I documented my work as a staff developer in urban elementary schools. Woolfolk (1997) states her belief that "qualitative methods are appropriate for an exploration of factors that mediate efficacy development and cultural influences on the construction of efficacy beliefs." (p. x) Some of the stories teachers described as being helpful in informing their practices were my own, while others were shared informally among teachers.

Method of Study

This work reports the results of an ethnographic self-study with a primary focus on staff development practices evaluated through the lens of teacher self-efficacy. I documented observations of and conversations with 36 teachers across four elementary schools with whom I worked as a district-based staff developer. I took notes on our conversations, wrote descriptions of their classrooms as well as detailed observations of their teaching and descriptions of teaching strategies I modeled in their classrooms. My role was to serve as a consultant, modeling reading and writing instruction, helping them to plan and reflect on their practice and helping them develop curriculum. Field notes were written immediately after rather than during meeting with or observing teachers so that I could be fully engaged in the encounter. In each case, permission to document was obtained, pseudonyms were created and identifying characteristics were masked.

In the second year of the study I chose five teachers in one school around whom I would shape the ethnographic study. Because these five teachers worked together I was able to document the teaching stories they told each other in my presence as well as those I shared with them. An added dimension of our work became the stories two of the teachers shared with the other three about the work I had done with them the previous year and how it had changed their approaches to teaching. One...

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