Faculty learning in career and technical education: a case study of designing and implementing peer observation

This dissertation addresses the issue of low and inequitable student success rates among community college students in the United States through a focus on career and technical education (CTE) faculty and their learning related to pedagogy and instruction and the ways in which pedagogy and instruction are linked with equity in student success. Building upon prior scholarship on CTE pedagogy and instruction, and practitioner learning in higher education and K-12 settings, this study makes two important contributions. First, the study sheds needed light on a topic that has been largely neglected in the literature: CTE faculty learning and, relatedly, how CTE faculty practice might be remediated so that CTE students’ success rates are improved and become more equitable across racial/ethnic lines. Considering that CTE is increasingly promulgated as a vehicle for individual and state/national economic advancement and has thus become a central component of many reforms seeking to improve community colleges, this contribution is both significant and timely. ❧ The second contribution this study makes is through its application of design-based implementation research (DBIR; Penuel, Fishman, Haugan, Cheng, & Sabelli, 2011) that involves researchers and practitioners collaboratively and iteratively designing and implementing practice-based tools that are aimed at a persistent problem. In this study, that problem is low and inequitable student success rates, and the co-designed tool is a peer observation protocol and process. That the DBIR approach has not been extensively applied within higher education, this study’s documentation of the iterative co-design and implementation process, and the learning that resulted through it, represent an informative and unique contribution. ❧ Through a single case study design, this study investigates the learning of a group of CTE faculty at one college who were engaged in the above-described co-design and implementation of a peer observation protocol and process. In this study, that joint work is conceptualized as a professional development (PD) intervention. Drawing on data collected through interviews, observations, and document review; and employing a conceptual framework that pulled on various theoretical threads from within the sociocultural learning perspective; this study examined what, if anything, was learned through participation in the PD intervention and how such learning was shaped by participation in the PD intervention. ❧ The findings of this study are laid out in respect to the personal and interpersonal planes of learning. Along the personal plane, learning occurred within the context of various identity trajectories that participants seemed to invoke, and was represented by their transformation in conceptions and actions related to pedagogy and instruction and/or their framing of the racial/ethnic equity gaps in student success rates at the college. Participation in the PD intervention shaped learning along the personal plane through the various means of assistance (e.g., feedback) made available within the PD intervention. Along the interpersonal plane, this study’s participants fine-tuned their joint understanding of their stated goal and appropriated new representations or resources for negotiating meaning related to pedagogy and instruction and how they are implicated in student success. Participation in the PD intervention shaped learning along the interpersonal plane through: practical and conceptual tools that triggered the negotiation of meaning process within the group, the provision of assistance (e.g., questioning), and a form of community maintenance that fostered a sense of safety seemingly needed for the critical examination of practice at the group level.