Beginning Teachers' Perceptions of Preparedness: A Teacher Education Program's Transferability and Impact on The Secondary English/Language Arts Classroom (original) (raw)

A two-phase, sequential mixed-methods design was used to assess perceptions of Preparedness (28 items, alpha = .96) to differentiate instruction for N = 36 graduates from one MAT teacher preparation program. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, one-way ANOVA and t-test procedures. A focus group with N = 10 purposively selected 2010 graduates and interviews with N = 2 graduates each from the 2008 and 2009 classes, and N = 2 faculty were conducted. The following areas presented challenges to teachers when attempting differentiation: pre-existing ideas of how to teach which contradict differentiation, misinformation regarding differentiation, and classroom management skills. This resulted in the unintentional implementation of surfacelevel differentiation, rather than deep-structure differentiation (Brighton, Hertberg, Moon, Tomlinson, & Callahan, 2005).