Understanding Grade 4-8 Teachers’ Instructional Practices and Beliefs as a Function of Transdisciplinary Coaching in STEM-Language Literacy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Changes in STEM education in Ontario have resulted in the need for teachers to have professional development and coaching support to introduce a cross-curricular, transdisciplinary instructional approach while honouring teachers’ knowledge, attitudes, and instructional methods. This study sought to introduce Grade 48 teachers to transdisciplinary STEM and language literacy through a five-session coaching partnership with the Principal Student Investigator. Participating teachers and students solved real-world problems using a transdisciplinary rather than typical single-subject instructional delivery. The study adopted a generic descriptive qualitative approach (Elliot & Timulak, 2021) to investigate Grade 48 teachers’ practices and beliefs. Four types of data—pre-questionnaires, interviews, researcher reflections, and fieldnotes—were coded to highlight recurring concepts and descriptive words and expressions. Three meaningful themes and sub-themes were identified to respond to the research question. Findings indicated that changes to teacher instructional practices were possible from starting with structured practices, shifting to inquiry-based, student-driven learning, seeing increasing student motivation and problem-solving and identifying the need for more coaching time. Teachers also saw the benefits of learning coding alongside students and how to implement cross-curricular assessment. Teacher beliefs varied with regards to conceptions of teaching language literacy in STEM; their initial apprehensions shifted to realizations, reservations about accountability related to transdisciplinary learning were expressed, and the positive outcomes of transdisciplinary learning impact on students was witnessed. A productive working relationship was established between the coach and teachers. The teachers expressed that the coach was flexible and open, met the teachers where they were at, listened to their needs, and adhered to the gradual release of responsibility to extend the teachers to their next level of instructional acumen. The study identified how teachers’ practices and beliefs might change when provided with coaching support through professional learning (PL) sessions focused on transdisciplinary approaches to STEM-Language Literacy education. Implications for practice include coaching support for teachers to evolve from single-subject teaching to adopting STEM-Language Literacy with the transdisciplinary approach. Implications for theory suggest that scaffolding teachers through the PL experience with STEM-Language Literacy is consistent with the experiential learning theory (Dewey, 1938).
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".