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Which grain will grow? Case studies of the impact of teacher beliefs on classroom climate through caring and rigor

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Which grain will grow? Case studies of the impact of teacher beliefs on classroom climate through caring and rigor

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WHICH GRAIN WILL GROW?
CASE STUDIES OF THE IMPACT OF TEACHER BELIEFS ON CLASSROOM
CLIMATE THROUGH CARING AND RIGOR

by

Jeanne Chun-Pei Loh

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ROSSIER SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF EDUCATION

August 2012

Copyright 2012 Jeanne Chun-Pei Loh

ii
Epigraph

If you can look into the seeds of time,
And say which grain will grow and which will not,
Speak then to me…
- Shakespeare, trans. 1992, 1.3.60-62

iii
Dedication

This dissertation is dedicated to…
My parents, Ed and Jean Loh, whose unceasing support has nurtured my continual love
for learning;
My spouse and padna Robby, for taking over childcare duties, so that I may finish this
mammoth task;
Atticus, our two-year-old, big-headed toddler, whose incessant questioning and new
discoveries remind me that parenting is equivalent to full-time teaching; and to
All my former students at Dorsey High School, Palo Alto High School, Venice High
School, and Heritage College-Ready Academy High School, for offering their
voices and experiences to a gazillion remarkable and thought-provoking moments
in the classroom.

iv
Acknowledgements

I would like to thank…
Julie Slayton, who guided me through the entire, long-winded writing process, read draft
upon draft, and showed constant patience and enthusiasm as she shared her
wisdom about data collection and analysis;
Lauren Anderson, who offered ample comments, reminded me to approach this task with
self-awareness, and shared refreshing insight into teachers and teacher education;
and
Rosa Valdes, who shared her knowledge about teacher evaluation and redirected my
scope to include both the big and little picture.

v
Table of Contents

Epigraph ii
Dedication iii
Acknowledgements iv
List of Figures vi
Abstract vii
Chapter 1: “The charm’s wound up”: Setting the Case for Studying
Teacher Beliefs and Classroom Climate 1

Chapter 2: “There if I grow, the harvest is your own”: Literature about
Teacher Beliefs, Behavior, and Classroom Climate 18

Chapter 3: “You shall put this night’s great business into my dispatch”:
The Methodology for a Study of Teacher Beliefs and Behavior 71

Chapter 4: “To you they have show’d some truth”:
Case Studies and Findings about Three Teachers 91

Chapter 5: “I have begun to plant thee, and will labour to make thee
full of growing”: Implications for Teacher Education 202

References 219

Appendices
Appendix A: Demographic Background of Participants 229
Appendix B: Introductory Interview Protocol 230
Appendix C: Pre-Observation Interview Protocol 232
Appendix D: Classroom Map Protocol 233
Appendix E: Classroom Observation Protocol 234
Appendix F: Reflective Notes Protocol 236
Appendix G: Post-Observation Interview Protocol for Mr. Abraham 238
Appendix H: Post-Observation Interview Protocol for Ms. Leslie 240
Appendix I: Post-Observation Interview Protocol for Mr. Emerson 242
Appendix J: Rigor and Caring Linked to Observed Behavior and
Interview Questions 243

vi
List of Figures

Figure 1: Continuum of caring 192
Figure 2: Intersection of rigor and caring 196

vii
Abstract

Current educational research contains a dearth of studies that examine the relationship
between teacher beliefs and teacher practice. This present dissertation addresses this lack
by bridging teacher beliefs, teacher behavior, and the classroom climates that teachers
build through their interactions and relationships with students. Teacher ideology –
teachers’ rationalization of educational circumstances and student outcomes – and beliefs
about students shape teacher behavior and interactions with students. These interactions
establish the classroom climate, which in turn affects opportunities for learning. The
interviews and observations presented here of three high school English teachers yield
qualitative data that uncover the impact of teacher beliefs about students’ capacity as
learners in the English Language Arts as they relate to two particular components of
classroom climate: rigor of instruction and teacher caring. Overall, teachers’ espoused
and enacted beliefs are observable factors that shape conditions for learning. This study
finds that, in addition to teacher ideology and beliefs, previous teacher training, which
establishes teachers’ content and pedagogical knowledge, and teachers’ view of their role
in the classroom affect their behavior toward students, the rigor of their instruction,
exhibitions of caring, and their curricular and pedagogical decisions. Furthermore, using
Valenzuela’s (1999) categories of caring, this dissertation posits that because rigorous
instruction is a crucial element of authentic caring, content and pedagogical knowledge is
a necessary attribute of authentically caring teachers. This dissertation emphasizes the
need for observational data in educational research about improving teacher practice and
offers implications for teacher education.

1
Chapter 1: “The charm’s wound up”:
Setting the Case for Studying Teacher Beliefs and Classroom Climate

As the witches await Macbeth and Banquo on barren land and boast about their mysterious
powers, they sense the arrival of the victorious war heroes. Their encounter with these men
sparks the unraveling of the plot and leads to assassination, suicide, and betrayal.
“The charm’s wound up” (1.3.38) indicates that their charm is coiled and ready to spring into
action. The following chapter sets the stage for studying the relationship among
teacher beliefs, teacher behavior, and classroom climate.

The No Child Left Behind Act’s mandate of disaggregating student performance
data by racial groups has yielded further data indicating test-score achievement gaps
between minority and White students, as well as between English language learners and
native English speakers (Ed-Data Partnership, 2010). An abundance of education
research has concentrated on identifying and addressing the root causes of the
achievement gap by examining the multitude of factors that impact student learning.
Researchers point to organizational or institutional factors, such as lack of resources, high
teacher turnover rate in minority-majority schools, and the uneven distribution of high-
quality teachers in urban and suburban schools, as sources of discrepancies in
performance (e.g., Darling-Hammond & Sykes, 2003; Haycock, 1998).
The search for and discussions about the causes of the achievement gap have shed
light on the importance of teacher quality. Researchers have studied external factors that
affect and characterize teacher quality, but the close and daily interactions between
teachers and students, which that are shaped by teacher quality, need to be examined too.
Beyond looking at the experiences and skills that teachers contribute to the classroom,
this dissertation reveals how teachers’ beliefs and ideologies impact the kinds of
relationships that teachers form with students and the rigor of instruction that they offer.
Because teacher-student relationships and teachers’ perceptions of those relationships are

2
related to student learning (Hughes & Kowk, 2007; McCarthey, 1997), this dissertation
narrows its scope to the interactions between teachers and students in the classroom. It
focuses specifically on the ways in which teacher beliefs about their students’ capacities
as learners shape the classroom climate that teachers develop for their students,
particularly regarding teacher caring and rigor of instruction.
The title of this dissertation is inspired by Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which I taught
for many years as a sophomore English teacher in California public high schools. In the
opening of the play, Macbeth and his comrade Banquo have victoriously defeated the
Scottish rebels’ attempt to usurp King Duncan. They are approached by three witches
who foretell Macbeth’s ascent to the throne. As Macbeth responds skeptically, Banquo
solicits their predictions about his future:
My noble partner
You greet with present grace and great prediction
Of noble having and of royal hope,
That he seems rapt withal: to me you speak not.
If you can look into the seeds of time,
And say which grain will grow and which will not,
Speak then to me… (Shakespeare, trans. 1992, 1.3.56-62)

Banquo yearns to know the witches’ divination of his opportunity at greatness, and,
ultimately, their pivotal role in this scene drives the actions and outcomes of several
major characters. Though they are hardly the sinister witches who materialize in front of
Macbeth and Banquo, teachers play a central role in the lives and academic outcomes of
students. They are responsible for nurturing every student in their classroom and
developing students’ personal and academic growth. They help students to progress
toward mastering grade-level content standards and guide them in the practice of critical
thinking and analysis of content, while taking into account students’ complex lives. But

3
teachers are also the gatekeepers to students’ journey through the educational institution,
and many serve to establish “which grain grow and which will not” (Shakespeare, trans.
1992, 1.3.61). The role that teachers play in the classroom shapes students’ motivation,
academic achievement, and overall schooling experience.
Background of the Problem
In the 2009-2010 school year, California’s teaching population was 69.2% White,
17.4% Latino/Hispanic, 5.2% Asian, and 4.2% Black. This teaching population served a
student population that was 50.4% Latino, 27% White, 8.5% Asian, 6.9% Black, and
2.5% Filipino (Education Data Partnership, 2010). This racial and cultural demographic
gap between teachers and students plays a role in teacher-student relationships, the ways
that both teachers and students perceive those relationships, and teachers’ pedagogical
and curricular decisions (Cooper, 2003; Duncan-Andrade, 2007; Gay, 2000; Johnson,
2002; Ladson-Billings, 1994; McCarthey, 1997; Valenzuela, 1999). Some studies have
explored the extent to which schools, and their teaching staff, perpetuate existing social
inequities by tracking students into segregated groups and immersing them in curricula
that deny the histories and voices of minority students and reinforce mainstream middle-
class or Eurocentric values and ideologies (Howard, 2003; McCarthey, 1997; Rist, 1970).
Other studies assert that the skills and knowledge that students bring to school conflict
with those expected from schools and by teachers, which may lead to a schism between
students’ home and school experiences (Howard, 2003; Ladson-Billings, 1994).
Teachers are often not prepared to bridge this racial and cultural demographic gap
(Garcia, 2001; Johnson, 2002; Ladson-Billings, 1994; Sleeter, 2001; Wilson, Floden, &
Ferrini-Mundy, 2001). Deficit thinking, a cognitive framework in which educators blame

4
minority students’ backgrounds and communities for students’ poor performance
(Bensimon, 2005), exacerbates this schism (Valenzuela, 1999). Some teachers may turn
to deficit thinking to rationalize poor student performance, which absolves them of
responsibility when they encounter interpersonal or instructional challenges in the
classroom. Howard (2001) suggested that racial incongruity between teachers and
students impacts student learning by hindering the formation of healthy relationships and
open communication between the two.
This schism between teachers and students has palpable effects on students’
learning experiences. As some minority students’ home and school worlds clash, they
may struggle to find a community to which they belong and an identity that straddles
both home and school cultures (Wong, 2011). In the meantime, teachers engage in
fragile or incomplete relationships with students. In these challenging situations,
teachers’ overtures and responses all too frequently leave students feeling that nobody in
the schooling system cares about them (Kleinfeld, 1998; Valenzuela, 1999; Wong, 2011).
These teacher-student interactions and relationships are crucial factors that need to be
considered as educators and researchers engage in an ongoing dialogue about improving
teacher practice and strengthening school communities.
Some researchers follow successful teachers who are able to bridge the racial and
cultural gap, and they find that these teachers not only hold different beliefs about
students’ capacity to learn but that they also possess an asset-minded way of thinking
about their students (Carmangian, 2010; Duncan-Andrade, 2005; Duncan-Andrade, 2007;
Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2005; Ladson-Billings, 1994; Milner, 2010). Ultimately,
the studies about deficit-thinking and asset-minded teachers show that the beliefs that

5
teachers hold about their students’ capacity to learn influence teacher-student interactions
and the ways in which they teach content. The quality of teacher-student relationships
and the ways that teachers perceive those relationships have also been shown to influence
student performance (Hughes & Kwok, 2007; McCarthey, 1997).
Controlling for socio-economic and other external factors, teacher practice and
expertise have the greatest impact on student learning (Darling-Hammond, 1997). This
research offers a clear challenge to arguments that position students’ cultural and
linguistic background, family values, and community’s problems as the primary
hindrances to student achievement. It also highlights a need to concentrate on teachers’
contributions to student learning. Also rebuking the tendency to blame minority students
for their poor performance in urban schools, numerous studies have focused on the
impact of teachers, particularly their attributes, skills, and backgrounds, on students’
learning experiences. Wenglinsky (2000) argued that while teacher inputs (e.g., salaries,
qualifications, and certifications), professional development, and teaching practices all
influence student learning, teaching practices play the greatest role in the high academic
performance of students. Teachers – their expertise, their beliefs, and their behavior –
have a critical effect on student learning.
Increasing concerns about preparing teachers for racially and culturally diverse
student populations have led to a multitude of professional development programs for
teachers and a restructuring of courses in teacher preparation programs to prepare them to
reach across the cultural and racial divide (Johnson, 2002; MacAllister & Irvine, 2002;
Niehuis, 2005; Roger, Marshall, & Tyson, 2006; Swartz, 2003; Walton, Baca, &
Escamilla, 2002). These programs and courses have ranged from using teachers’

6
autobiographical narratives to analyze their views of race and minority students (Johnson,
2002), to practicing emacipatory pedagogies in order to identify and examine pre-service
teachers’ dispositions toward working in culturally diverse settings (Swartz, 2003). Such
experiences aim to offer opportunities for teachers to examine their own frames-of-
reference and to incorporate the perspectives of others into their views of the world.
In attempting to prepare prospective and in-service teachers for culturally and
racially diverse settings, professional development and teacher education programs are
essentially assuming the mammoth task of shaping teacher beliefs and ideologies, which
have been shaped by a lifetime of personal experiences. These teaching programs affect
the way teachers view their students, the communities in which they work, their work,
and themselves. This dissertation explores the complexities of teachers’ beliefs and
ideologies as they are revealed in teacher-student interactions and as they impact
classroom climate.
Statement of the Problem
There are numerous studies about teacher beliefs as reported by teachers, but few
explore how these beliefs manifest in teachers’ practices and influence student learning.
Ladson-Billings (1994) and Duncan-Andrade (2005, 2007) studied the ideologies and
philosophies of successful teachers of minority students, while Rist (1970) and Winfield
(1986) studied the ways in which teachers’ behaviors toward and treatments of students
reflect their beliefs about students’ abilities. Studies that rely on self-report measures
emphasize the impact of perceptions on teacher beliefs (Booker, Pringle, & Lyons, 2010;
Brattesani, Weinstein, & Marshall, 1984; Ferguson, 2003; Ladson-Billings, 1994;
Winfield, 1986). This dissertation moves beyond a focus on beliefs themselves to make

7
connections among teacher beliefs about students’ capacity to learn, teacher-student
interactions, and thus students’ learning experiences.
External manifestations of beliefs are difficult to capture in research (Kagan,
1992), and beliefs are also not often identified and discussed by teachers themselves, yet
they play a significant factor in teachers’ expectations of student performance (Brophy &
Good, 1970; Ferguson, 1998; Gill & Hoffman, 2009; Gollub & Sloan, 1978; Rist, 1970;
Valenzuela, 1999). Teacher beliefs influence their expectations of and interactions with
students; they drive important decisions that impact students’ immediate and long-term
opportunities (Ferguson, 2003; Ready & Wright, 2011; Winfield, 1986). Teachers carry
beliefs about their students’ capacities (Kagan, 1992; Song, 2006; Van der Bergh,
Denessen, Hornstra, Voeten, & Holland, 2010), and these beliefs shape teachers’
behavior and the rigor by which they set classroom instruction (McCarthey, 1997; Rist,
1970).
Related to this, and often influencing teachers’ perceptions, are issues of what
many have called cultural mismatch, cultural incongruity, or cultural incompability
(Howard, 2001; Ladson-Billings, 1994). The concept of cultural mismatch does not
presume that teachers who have similar racial, cultural, and socio-economic backgrounds
as their students experience automatic and natural connections with them. Instead, it
focuses on racial, cultural, and socio-economic differences between teachers and
students. Because some teachers are unable to bridge the racial and cultural divide
between their students and themselves, their expectations of students may clash with the
viewpoints and beliefs that students bring into the classroom (Castagno, McKinley, &
Brayboy, 2008; Kleinfeld, 1998; McCarthey, 1997; Valenzuela, 1999). A disconnect

8
between students’ and teachers’ beliefs emerges and influences teachers’ positive or
negative connections to students. These connections, along with teachers’ views about
their students’ background and capacity to learn, shape teacher-student relationships as
well as teachers’ verbal and nonverbal behavior, which in turn impact the ways in which
teachers exhibit caring and interpret rigorous instruction as they build classroom climate.
Purpose of the Study
This dissertation examines the relationship among teacher beliefs, teacher
behavior, and classroom climate. Specifically, it studies the ways in which teacher
beliefs inform teacher behavior, which in turn shapes teacher caring and rigor of
instruction, two significant components of classroom climate. Following the ideas in the
previous two sections, this dissertation is especially interested in the beliefs and
behaviors of White or middle class teachers towards minority or low-income students.
These particular groups represent a prevalent demographic divide that can affect teacher-
student relationships. This demographic difference between teachers and students does
not presuppose that natural cohesion and understanding exist between teachers and
students of the same racial, cultural, or socio-economic background. Rather, this
dissertation delves into how these different groups behave and interact in relation to one
another and the teachers beliefs that emerge and influence teacher behavior.
Interviews and classroom observations were conducted and artifacts collected to
determine the extent to which teacher beliefs and perceptions of students influence
teacher-student interactions in the classroom and teachers’ pedagogical practices and
curricular decisions. The guiding research questions are as follows:

9
1. How do teacher beliefs impact classroom climate as they relate to rigor of
instruction and teacher caring?
2. What are teacher beliefs about their students’ capacity to learn in relation to the
English content area?
3. How do those beliefs influence their practice, pedagogical and curricular
decisions, and responses to students?
Using interviews and observations, this dissertation explores the relationship between
teacher beliefs and expectations and teachers’ actual instruction and interactions with
students.
This dissertation consists of qualitative case studies of three high school English
teachers. I observed each teacher with two classes of students and spent one week with
each class. The study began with an introductory interview in which I asked questions
regarding the following: background and teaching experience, beliefs about the students’
capacity as learners of the English content area, students’ strengths and weaknesses in the
English content area, academic expectations, relationship with students, and teaching
philosophy. I conducted a week’s worth of daily classroom observations with each set of
students, and each day was preceded by a pre-observation interview, in which I asked
teachers about their learning objectives of the day. At the end of two weeks of
observation, after watching each teacher with two sets of students, I conducted a post-
observation interview in which I provided the teachers with an opportunity to share
immediate feedback about the lessons, explain their beliefs and expectations about the
students’ ability, and respond to questions about particular pedagogical and curricular
decisions. Artifacts consisted of teacher-made handouts and gave further evidence of the

10
level of rigor in the teachers’ instruction as well as their academic expectations. The
post-observation interviews, which included the teachers’ perspective, added a layer of
complexity to the classroom observations.
Significance of the Study
While some educators play Pontius Pilate, washing their hands of individual
responsibility and blaming the students’ community or culture for poor student
performance (Valenzuela, 1999; Winfield, 1986), Darling-Hammond and Ball (2000)
found that, controlling for socio-economic factors, teacher expertise remains the primary
determining factor in student achievement. Ladson-Billings (1994) and Tharp and
Gallimore (1988) contend that teacher practice and teacher-student interactions strongly
impact how students perceive curriculum content. Thus, there is a great demand to
consider teacher practice – how teachers teach and how students receive or respond to
instruction – in the discussion about student learning.
Cohen, Raudenbush, and Loewenberg Ball (2003) and Loewenberg Ball and
Forzani (2007) press for a more intense examination of teacher practice, particularly of
the dynamics among teachers, students, and content. Because education is a transactional
occurrence that involves an exchange among these elements, these interactions shape
student learning (Loewenberg Ball & Forzani, 2007). Cohen et al. (2003) call for a shift
in dialogue from establishing the effects of conventional resources, such as computers
and class size, on student learning to discussing the instructional interactions and ways in
which resources are used in the classroom. The activation of the three most crucial
resources in the classroom (teacher, student, and content) shape the extent of learning that

11
occurs for each student. Therefore, examining these dynamics reveals valuable insight
into how teachers facilitate learning and how students interpret instruction.
Similarly, Ferguson (2003) articulates a pressing need to examine the intimate,
daily occurrences between teachers and students, as well as how those interactions, which
are shaped by teacher beliefs, impact students’ learning experience:
No matter what material resources are available, no matter what strategies
districts use to allocate children to schools, and no matter how children are
grouped for instruction, children spend their days in social interaction with
teachers and other students. As students and teachers immerse themselves in the
routines of schooling, both perceptions and expectations reflect and determine the
goals that both students and teachers set for achievement, the strategies they use
to pursue the goals, the skills, energy and other resources they use to implement
the strategies, and the rewards they expect from making the effort. (p. 461)

Ferguson (2003) claims that systemic education problems are better served when
researchers spend time scrutinizing student-teacher interactions. The strategies and
resources suggested by researchers to teachers should be offered in tandem with insight
into these daily, interpersonal occurrences that develop into teacher-student relationships.
This study contributes to educational research about effective teaching, classroom
climate, teacher behavior, and teacher-student relationships. Because there is relatively
little research that examines how teacher beliefs translate into teacher practice (Ferguson,
2003; Kagan, 1992), this dissertation highlights the importance of researchers’ presence
in classrooms and of their observations of the social contexts where teaching and learning
occur. The abundance of studies on teacher beliefs through interview and survey
methods has yielded rich and complex literature on teacher perceptions (Ferguson, 2003),
but, as Kagan (1992) pointed out, espoused beliefs may not always be reflected in teacher

12
behavior. This study aims to discover the intersection between teacher beliefs and
teacher behavior in the classroom and the impact of this connection on classroom climate.
Ultimately, the daily interactions between teachers and students are critical to
teaching and learning, so educational research requires increased scrutiny of classroom
occurrences, teacher instruction, and teacher-student interaction. If teachers are as
fundamental as Darling-Hammond (2000) claims, then the bodies of research about
teacher practice need to explore numerous factors, like beliefs, values, and attitudes, that
shape teachers’ identities and roles in the classroom. Also, educational research should
move away from relying exclusively on teachers’ or students’ perceptions about beliefs,
expectations, practices, and classroom climate because these forms of measuring teacher
practice are limited to the participants’ perspectives. Researchers with a trained
observational eye are also needed to observe teacher-student interactions. The research
base on teaching and learning is strengthened by triangulating interview and observation
data, so that researchers can see from the point-of-view of those participating and from an
etic, or outsider’s, perspective. Teachers’ self-reports shed light on their beliefs about
students’ abilities and their practice, but observations also lend an additional frame-of-
reference.
This dissertation addresses implications for teacher education, specifically in the
preparation of teachers for working with culturally and linguistically diverse youth.
Teacher education programs are currently charged with preparing pre-service teachers
with conceptual and practical tools (Grossman, Smargorinsky, & Valencia, 1999).
Conceptual tools are teachers’ frameworks, principles, and ideas about teaching, while
practical tools are instructional strategies that can be used immediately in the classroom

13
(ibid.). Teachers can be taught to use these tools without considering or incorporating
their views, beliefs, or past experiences. Disregarding their positioning in and reasoning
behind the utilization of these tools, teachers may unintentionally misunderstand students,
hold low expectations of them, teach in ways that do not activate students’ prior
knowledge, and inculcate students with their own views. Teacher education programs
may be driven to change their pedagogical practices in order to integrate the identities,
beliefs, and experiences of teachers into their courses. With this shift in teacher
education pedagogy, these programs will change their approaches to teaching conceptual
and practical tools. Results from this study support a change in teacher preparation
programs away from the training of teachers, which involves arming teachers with skill-
building curricula, to the teaching of teachers, or the intentional acts by teachers to
support self-regulation and responsibility over their own learning (Hoffman & Pearson,
2000).
This dissertation extends the current literature by connecting three bodies of
literature: teacher beliefs, teacher behavior, and classroom climate. These bodies are
interrelated but rarely connected through qualitative means. Also, these bodies of
literature cannot stand alone, for each one shapes and is shaped by the others. This
dissertation uncovers how they are connected and the extent to which they relate to one
another. Instead of focusing on an examination of teaching strategies, teaching
outcomes, and teacher attributes, this dissertation focuses on teacher beliefs and
Bartolomé and Trueba’s (2000) notion that these beliefs reflect ideology, which is formed
by teachers’ experiences beyond the training they receive in their preparation programs.

14

Limitations
This dissertation is not designed to produce generalizable findings. Due to its
small sample size, generalizability is impossible. But it is designed to focus on teacher
practice and teacher-student interactions, so it offers an in-depth investigation of several
teachers. It delves into individual practices and perspectives, as well as illustrates the
context of each classroom and the students who populate it. It does not draw universal
conclusions about teacher practice.
Besides the inability to generalize classroom interactions, the lack of students’
perspectives is also a limitation of this study. There are many studies that capture student
perceptions of teacher beliefs and behaviors (Babad, Bernieri, & Rosenthal, 1991; Babad
& Taylor, 1992; Brattesani, Weinstein, & Marshall, 1984; Wayman, 2002; Weinstein,
1983; Weinstein, Marshall, Sharp, & Botkin, 1987). Despite substantial evidence that
students are highly perceptive and accurate in their detection of teacher differential
treatment (Babad et al., 1991; Brattesani et al., 1984), this dissertation takes a different
approach and examines the aspects of classroom climate over which teacher have control,
so that suggestions can be made about how teachers can foster learning and growth by
developing a positive classroom climate.
Another limitation in this study is the absence of discussion about school culture,
which may have a profound effect on shaping teacher beliefs. Changes occur in new
teachers when they emerge from university teacher education programs and become
acculturated into school settings, and these changes are due in large part to the
socialization of teachers in particular school cultures and contexts (Zeichner &

15
Tabachnick, 1981). Although school culture may have a significant impact on teachers’
perceptions of their students and students’ capacity to learn, this study is not an
examination of school culture. Instead, it places its focus exclusively on classrooms as
the contexts for teacher practice and teacher-student interaction.
An additional limitation to this dissertation may be its focus on high school
English teachers. This constraint prevents the drawing of findings about teachers across
subject areas. On the other hand, limiting this dissertation’s scope to the English content
area does not impact observations of classroom climate as it relates to rigor of instruction
and teacher caring. These are all observable aspects of teacher practice regardless of
their content area, and because the focus is on the teacher, not the content, this limitation
does not raise significant concerns. In addition, having been an English teacher myself, I
am familiar with the content presented to students, so my understanding and analysis of
teacher behavior will not be confounded by any confusion or lack of knowledge of the
teachers’ subject area.
Another limitation includes this dissertation’s inability to connect teacher beliefs
and classroom climate to student performance. Given the small sample size and short
duration of observation, its design prohibits me from drawing connections across teacher
beliefs, classroom climate, and student performance. A larger, more complex study that
incorporates both quantitative and qualitative methods for gathering student outcomes
would be able to make these connections.
This present study does not connect teacher beliefs to student outcomes, but it
does examine how teacher beliefs shape teacher-student relationships and teachers’
exhibitions of caring and presentation of rigor as they shape classroom climate. These

16
are aspects of teaching and learning that have been shown by research to affect the degree
to which students feel connected to and invested in learning. Analyzing these intimate
and subtle exchanges sheds light on the ways in which students relate to the school and
classroom community, both of which affect their motivation and level of self-efficacy.
This study yields greater insight into what teachers possess beyond their educational
philosophies, principles, and skill sets. As their ideologies and beliefs about students,
teaching, and learning are formed and established over time, teachers, whose identities
and views are influenced by a host of life experiences, contribute values and attitudes that
shape their classrooms and their students’ learning experiences.
Organization of the Study
Having established the background of the problem, research questions, and the
purpose and limitations of this study, this dissertation reviews research literature in the
following chapter. Specifically, Chapter Two’s review explores three bodies of
literature: teacher beliefs, teacher behavior, and classroom climate. It also presents the
conceptual framework integral to the foundation of this study. Chapter Three explains
the research design, sample, population, methodology, data collection process, and
method of data analysis. Chapter Four presents findings that emerge from the interview
and observation data of three teachers and synthesizes particular patterns and themes
across the cases as they relate to the conceptual framework introduced in Chapter Two.
Lastly, Chapter Five concludes the dissertation with recommendations for pre-service and
in-service teacher education.

17
Definition of Terms
No Child Left Behind: Federal legislation passed in 2001 that enacts standards-based
education reform and measures schools’ performance by standards-based testing.

18
Chapter 2: “There if I grow, the harvest is your own”: Literature about
Teacher Beliefs, Behavior, and Classroom Climate

After a successful and brutal battle with the rebels, King Duncan lavishes Macbeth and Banquo
with praise and appreciation. Banquo responds, “There if I grow,/The harvest is your own”
(1.4.33-34), implying that he owe his achievements to King Duncan. Similarly, through their
instruction, expectations, and behavior, teachers harvest students’ growth. The following chapter
explores research and literature about teacher beliefs, teacher behavior, and classroom climate.

The research question for this study asks, How do teacher beliefs and expectations
impact classroom climate? In order to answer this, I draw on three bodies of literature in
educational theory and research: teacher beliefs, teacher behavior, and classroom climate.
I also draw on literature that explores the intersection of these topics through case studies
and self-studies that relate teacher beliefs, teacher behavior, and classroom climate.
Teacher beliefs about students’ abilities as learners shape expectations, and, by
extension, the goals that teachers set for students. These expectations are based on
teachers’ perceptions of particular groups of students (Ferguson, 1998; McKown &
Weinstein, 2008; Rist, 1970; Valenzuela, 1999; Van der Bergh, Denessen, Hornstra,
Voeten, & Holland, 2010) and are displayed through teachers’ explicit and implicit
behaviors (McCarthey, 1997; Rist, 1970). Beliefs and expectations guide teachers’
pedagogical practices, from nonverbal behavior and ability-level grouping to curricular
decisions and choice of literature (Gill & Hoffman, 2009; Matsumura, Slater, & Crosson,
2008; McCarthey, 2008). Teachers set the tone for classroom climate with their attitudes
and actions, and the nature of this climate can support or discourage student learning.
Bartolomé and Trueba (2000) assert a need in educational research to scrutinize
the ideological frameworks that guide teacher beliefs and behaviors, and they argue that
addressing teacher ideology and beliefs is as important as addressing pedagogical

19
practices and instructional strategies. Before investigating how teachers create supportive
classroom climates that ensure that all students have opportunities to learn, this literature
review first explores how teacher beliefs, expectations, biases, and ideologies inform
their explicit and implicit behavior.
Teachers’ beliefs can be revealed by their behavior in the classroom. Teachers
explicitly and implicitly – verbally and nonverbally – communicate their expectations to
students, and students’ perceptions of those expectations influence their own expectations
and self-efficacy (Bratessani et al., 1984). In other words, students interpret teachers’
explicit and implicit behaviors and respond accordingly (Good & Brophy, 1974; Pringle,
Lyons, & Booker, 2010; Rist, 1970). Teachers’ behaviors and actions, as well as
students’ responses to them, shape classroom climate, or the environment in which
students learn (Crawford, 2008; Matsumura et al., 2008; McCarthey, 1997; Valenzuela,
1999).
This chapter explores how teacher ideology drives teacher beliefs, which in turn
shape teacher expectations. It discusses the ways in which teacher ideology is the
foundation on which teacher beliefs are formed. Next, it presents relevant literature to
understanding teacher behavior and teacher-student interaction and reviews studies that
have been conducted over the past four decades and that examine the impact of teacher
behavior or teacher beliefs on the learning environment. Relatively few of these studies
explore the effect of teacher behavior and teacher beliefs on classroom climate through
observations of actual classroom teaching; as I argue, this suggests a significant gap in
the research base. This chapter also reviews the body of literature regarding classroom
climate, which also lacks comprehensive, seminal writings that define and dissect it as a

20
concept of its own. Indeed, the literature on classroom climate encompasses a variety of
studies and theoretical essays that explore a wide range of topics such as school safety,
social environments, learning environments, student engagement, student connectedness,
grouping and pedagogical practices, and so on. For the purpose of this study, this review
focuses on the following attributes of classroom climate: rigor of instruction and teacher
caring.
As mentioned in Chapter One, this dissertation holds special interest in the
relationships and interactions between White or middle-class teachers and minority or
low-income students. Although this chapter highlights several studies that note the racial,
cultural, and socio-economic characteristics of teachers and students and the impact of
these factors on the beliefs and behaviors of teachers, it also explores studies that look at
teacher beliefs, expectations, and behaviors that do not focus on these factors. Issues of
race, cultural, and socio-economic background may play a role in the relationships
between teachers and students, but this dissertation does not seek to narrow its scope of
factors that impact teacher-student interactions and relationships. Ultimately, it hopes to
find out how teacher beliefs about students’ abilities as learners, regardless of
background characteristics, impact the tone of learning environment that teachers create
for students.
Teacher Beliefs
In order to explore teacher beliefs, I must first address teacher ideology. I use
Bartolomé and Trueba’s (2000) ideas about teacher ideology as the basis for examining
teacher beliefs. They argued that the ways in which teachers make sense of educational
circumstances (e.g., educational inequities, student background and linguistic barriers,

21
and disparities in students’ ability level) reflect and support their beliefs about their
students’ capacity to learn (ibid.). Teachers form expectations for student learning in
response to their perceptions of and beliefs about students’ capabilities as learners (Dusek
& Joseph, 1983; Gollub & Sloan, 1978; Ready & Wright, 2011; Rist, 1970). First, I
define teacher ideology and highlight the political and social forces that influence
teachers. Next, I explore teacher beliefs and the idea of deficit thinking, an example of
an ideological framework that pervades some teachers’ beliefs.
Pajares (1992) and Kagan (1992) are commonly cited in research about teacher
beliefs. Wilkins (2008) used Pajares’s (1992) characterizations of teacher beliefs when
he measured teachers’ perceptions about their knowledge in or attitude toward their
content area. In a discussion about pre-service and in-service teachers’ attitudes and
beliefs about racial, cultural, and ethnic differences, Gay (2010) offered suggestions for
teaching diversity in teacher education based on Pajares’s (2008) assertions that teacher
beliefs are resistant to change and connected to instructional judgments and practices.
Fives and Beuhl (2008) used Pajares (1992) and Kagan’s (1992) characterizations of
teacher beliefs when they investigated pre-service and in-service teachers’ beliefs about
teaching knowledge and teaching ability. Although their works were published two
decades ago, Kagan (1992) and Pajares’s (1992) seminal contributions to teacher beliefs
provide studies with a motive for connecting beliefs to behavior.
Teacher Ideology. Teacher ideology is defined as “a framework of thought that
is used by members of a society [in this case, teachers] to justify or rationalize an existing
social (dis)order” (Bartolomé & Trueba, 2000, pp. 279). In other words, teachers
establish a set of principles that they use to make sense of educational inequities and to

22
justify the existing hegemonic structures in schools that perpetuate social reproduction.
Bartolomé and Trueba (2000) proposed a conceptual framework that connects teacher
ideology to teacher practice and argue that the task of creating effective teachers must not
focus solely on “best practice” strategies and techniques but also on addressing the
personal ideologies that teachers bring into the classroom.
Bartolomé and Trueba (2000) further asserted that teacher beliefs and
expectations are shaped by the particular ideology that they hold about the world and that
ideology is inherently political. They posited that teachers rationalize why their students
perform well or poorly and that this rationalization is grounded in an ideology that fits the
social status quo. For example, teachers may attribute the high performance of his
students to their professional expertise, while attributing the low performance of another
set of students to their limited language skills or socio-economic background. Bartolomé
and Trueba (2000) claimed that discussions about teacher beliefs tend to shy away from
the political aspects of the ideologies that ground teachers’ attitudes toward the role of
education in students’ lives. They also asserted that because teachers hold unconscious
beliefs and attitudes towards the existing social order, they are unable to be critical of
their own ideology and attitudes. In summary, Bartolomé and Trueba’s (2000)
characterization of teacher ideology highlighted the ever-present political and social ideas
that may affect teachers’ ability to critically examine their way of thinking.
Bartolomé (2008) asserted that the invisibility of dominant ideologies prevents
many educators from critically analyzing inequity in schools and pointed out that there is
no research that directly connects teacher ideology to instructional practices, a notion
Kagan (1992) supported when she suggested the difficulty of definitively capturing

23
teacher beliefs as an observable feature. Bartolomé (2008) summed up this dilemma by
identifying a gap: most research avoids tackling the political and ideological aspects of
teacher beliefs and instead attempts to take an apolitical stance that overlooks dominant,
hegemonic views:
We know little about whether or how teachers view and rationalize the existing
social order in terms of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender, and so on,
and whether or not their views influence how they treat and teach subordinated
students. Moreover, it has not yet been acknowledged that teachers’ conscious
and unconscious beliefs and attitudes regarding the legitimacy of the greater
social order and the resulting unequal power relations among various cultural
groups at the school and classroom level are significant factors to take into
account in order to improve the educational processes and outcomes of minority
education. (Bartolomé, 2008, pp. xv)

Bartolomé (2008) called for a deeper examination of the links between ideology and
behavior and asserts that this exploration impacts teaching practices and student learning.
When educational researchers uncover and explicitly address teachers’ invisible
ideologies, they inform teachers’ beliefs, decisions, and actions (Bartolomé, 2008;
Bartolomé & Trueba, 2000). Bartolomé and Trueba (2000) emphasized the need to
reveal all the factors that shape teacher ideology, so that teachers may be more aware of
the ways in which their political and ideological values shape their attitudes and
behaviors toward students. Their ideas about teacher ideology inform this study’s
approach toward teacher beliefs.
Teacher Beliefs. All teachers hold beliefs about their work, their students, their
subject matter, and their role in student learning (Pajares, 1992). They have intentionality
in and justification for their actions. In order to understand the motivations, expectations,
intentions, and actions of teachers, this section explores the beliefs on which they base
their behaviors and decisions. It relies on Pajares (1992) and Kagan (1992) to define

24
teacher beliefs. Pajares (1992) categorized different kinds of beliefs and warned about
the inflexibility of beliefs. Kagan (1992) also pointed out the unwillingness of teachers
to change their beliefs, discussed two categories of teacher beliefs, and proposed ways in
which those beliefs become externalized in the classroom. This discussion about teacher
beliefs included the concept of deficit thinking, a prevailing cognitive frame in urban
schools that allows teachers to justify educational inequities and gives them an
explanation for students’ poor performance outside of their personal responsibility
(Bensimon, 2005). Deficit thinking shapes teacher beliefs and behaviors in the
classroom. From an exploration of teacher beliefs, this section examines the ways in
which teachers’ racial, cultural, and socio-economic backgrounds shape their beliefs
about students, teaching, and learning. Then it delves into several studies that look at the
different aspects of teacher practice, such as teacher-student interaction and teacher
collegial and collaborative discussions, that uncover teacher beliefs.
Pajares (1992) defined teacher beliefs as teachers’ attitudes towards education,
which encompasses teaching, learning, and students. Distinguishing between belief and
knowledge, he posited that beliefs are based on evaluation and judgment and that they are
difficult to examine in empirical studies. He also established that not only are beliefs
disputable, inflexible, and static but also that people manipulate knowledge for a specific
purpose, even if to reinforce a particular belief. All teachers have beliefs about their
work, their students, their subject matter, and their roles in the classroom, and these
beliefs can be preconceptions, implicit theories, or frameworks through which teachers
behave, view the world, and make decisions (Pajares, 1992).

25
Pajares (1992) organized educational beliefs into beliefs about teacher efficacy,
epistemological beliefs, the causes of students’ or teachers’ performance, perceptions and
feelings of self-worth, self-efficacy, and the nature of their subject matter. Teacher
efficacy is the confidence that teachers possess in their own capacity to affect student
performance. Epistemological beliefs are teacher beliefs about the nature of knowledge,
how it is constructed and retained. Teachers also hold beliefs about the causes of teacher
and student performance, like the attributions of failing or successful performance, locus
of control, or motivation. Teacher beliefs are also influenced by their sense of self-worth
and self-esteem and their ability to perform their job. Lastly, teachers have particular
beliefs about how their subject matter should be taught. Pajares’s (1992) claimed that
beliefs operate independently of knowledge and that teachers rely on past experiences to
create screens through which to view teaching and learning. For instance, Valenzuela
(1999) pointed out that some Seguin High School teachers believed themselves to be
caring but in fact unknowingly expressed deficit perspectives when describing their
students.
Pajares (1992) broke down the complex layers of teacher beliefs, from beliefs
about themselves to beliefs about their students, their work, and their discipline. He also
pointed out that beliefs are difficult to infer because people can be unwilling to accurately
express them. Not only does this dissertation present teachers’ contrasting espoused and
enacted beliefs, it also discovers that enacted beliefs can be revealed within the interview
data, even as they are superficially concealed beneath the veil of espoused beliefs.
Furthermore, from observation data, this dissertation connects these various types of
teacher beliefs to teacher instruction and student learning.

26
Kagan (1992) reaffirmed Pajares’s (1992) assertion that teacher beliefs are shaped
by personal experiences and furthered his argument by asserting that teachers carry
preconceived notions about the students into the classroom. Kagan (1992) defined
teacher belief as personal knowledge that is built on implicit assumptions about students,
learning, classrooms, and their subject matter. Arguing that most research focuses on
beliefs about academic content, she contended that making teacher beliefs an external and
observable variable in educational research is difficult and questions the assumption that
observations of teacher behavior will capture beliefs. Although she posed the centrality
of teacher beliefs in teacher practice, she acknowledged the challenge of capturing them
through observing teacher behavior. After the data from this present study has been
analyzed, I address this challenge and reflect on the experience of observing teachers and
inferring their beliefs.
In her survey of research on teacher beliefs, Kagan (1992) presented two
generalizations: teacher beliefs are stable and resistant to change and they are associated
with a teacher’s style of teaching. Teachers’ personal experiences and prior beliefs also
help them form a belief system. She pointed out two categories of teacher beliefs:
teachers’ sense of self-efficacy and content-specific beliefs. Teacher self-efficacy
concerns the extent to which teachers feel that they can have an impact on student
learning. Content-specific beliefs revolve around the teachers’ understanding about the
nature of student learning and how that understanding impacts their curricular and
pedagogical decisions (Kagan, 1992). She concluded that teacher beliefs play a pivotal
role in classroom instruction.

27
Deficit thinking serves as an example of a cognitive frame that shapes teacher
beliefs. According to Bensimon (2005), deficit thinking is comprised of biased
assumptions about students’ racial, cultural, and socio-economic background. Some
teachers believe that the cultural, linguistic, and socio-economic backgrounds of students
of color negatively impact their academic performance. Teachers who carry a deficit
thinking mindset believe that students, their families, and their communities are to blame
for poor student academic performance. Furthermore, when teachers rely on deficit
ideology, they remove personal responsibility from student outcomes and redirect blame
for student failure on external forces out of their control. In accordance to Bartolomé and
Trueba’s (2000) portrayal of teacher ideology, deficit thinking allows teachers to
rationalize instances of ineffectiveness in the classroom without considering the impact
of their agency. Bensimon (2005) used Argyris and Schön (1996) to connect deficit
thinking to single and double-loop thinking: single-loop thinkers attribute problems to
circumstances beyond their control, while double-loop thinkers search for the root of the
problem, think about their own beliefs and attitudes, and reflect on their roles in resolving
the problem. She claimed that deficit thinkers place themselves out of the problem by
perceiving students as the source of the problem, and she implied that these beliefs can be
detrimental to student self-efficacy, engagement, and performance. Bartolomé and
Trueba (2000) would have agreed with Bensimon’s (2005) explanation of the harmful
effects of deficit thinking: it rationalizes the vilification of students’ racial, cultural, and
socio-economic backgrounds and blames their academic failures on perceived inherent
deficiencies.

28
Various studies have examined factors that shape teacher beliefs. These studies
have focused on the ways in which student background – the circumstances in which they
live and the characteristics and qualities that they possess upon entering the classroom –
impact teacher beliefs about students’ capacity to learn. Rist (1970) studied the influence
of teacher expectations on teacher behavior and classroom climate. Ferguson (1998)
connected student outcomes, with focus on the Black-White achievement gap, to teacher
beliefs and behaviors. These studies established that teacher perceptions and beliefs are
shaped by the race and socio-economic status of students.
Gollub and Sloan (1978) reviewed an array of studies that examined teacher
expectations and the race and socio-economic status of students. Their investigation
revealed a significant correlation between teacher expectation and certain socio-economic
and racial characteristics of students. They concluded that teachers’ subjective
predictions of students’ academic success tend to be based on students’ race and
socioeconomic status and proposed that teachers’ “normative reference group,” which is
predominantly White middle class, is the basis for their evaluation of students’ potential,
which then causes teachers to sort students into those who are able to learn and those who
are not able. The authors looked at older studies that took place in schools soon after
civil rights legislation, and this present dissertation seeks to discover how contemporary
studies correspond with their findings.
Expanding on Gollub and Sloan’s (1978) review of the correlation between
teacher expectations and the racial and socio-economic characteristics of students,
Ferguson (1998) surveyed various studies and connected student outcomes, in particular
the Black-White score gap, to teacher beliefs and expectations by looking at studies about

29
student-teacher interaction and differential treatment. Ferguson’s (1998) appraisal of this
literature found that teachers tend to favor White over Black students, and though
teachers predict student achievement with accuracy at the beginning of the school year,
their expectations do not change much over time. Ferguson (1998) also highlighted
contradicting literature regarding the assumption that teacher beliefs and behaviors are
shaped by racial stereotypes and concluded that the interaction among teachers’ beliefs,
expectations, and behaviors and students beliefs, behaviors, and work habits further
perpetuate the Black-White achievement gap. He warned that students’ experiences in
the classroom alter their potential, which may in turn develop into disparities (Ferguson,
1998).
Teacher beliefs impact teacher engagement with other teachers and students.
Teachers reveal their beliefs about students and learning when they interact with students
in the classroom or discuss their teaching experience. Like Pajares’s (1992) assertion that
some teachers are unwilling to share their accurate beliefs, some teachers’ unconscious
belief systems may contradict their espoused beliefs. In other words, while teachers
espouse a set of beliefs, they may actually act contrary to those beliefs. Thus, Kagan’s
(1992) argument about the difficulty of capturing beliefs through the observation of
behavior presents a problem. Teacher ideology may unconsciously color teachers’
perceptions toward urban students.
In a multi-year ethnographic study of a high school with a predominantly Latino
student population and non-Latino teaching population, Valenzuela (1999) found that
while many teachers perceived themselves as caring, they often communicated a different
message when they expressed that their students would amount to little because they did

30
not, could not, or would not try. She also noted that teachers who were unprepared to
deal with or failed to recognize barriers to student learning tended to operate from a
deficit thinking perspective to explain students’ poor performance, instead of
acknowledging the challenges that they faced in the classroom and the needs of students
(Valenzuela, 1999). These implicit judgments about students’ racial and ethnic
background reinforced the idea that students came from deficit cultures that did not value
education.
Rist’s (1970) seminal longitudinal study about teacher expectations and behaviors
sought to determine the importance of a teacher’s initial expectations in relation to
students’ chances for success. He observed a single group of Black children in an urban
school from kindergarten to second grade then proposed a process by which teachers
form initial expectations through subjective interpretations of students’ attributes and
characteristics. A kindergarten teacher first holds a mental template of the characteristics
and attributes that an ideal student possesses, which is related to the teacher’s own social
class and follows similar social-class criteria. Then, upon meeting her students, the
teacher forms subjective evaluations according to whether the students possess those
desired traits. Rist (1970) deduced that the teacher’s criteria for the ideal student
consisted of the following characteristics: one who is from an educated and employed
family of middle class background, presents him/herself neatly and cleanly, speaks
Standard English comfortably, participates often as a leader, and interacts easily with
adults. From Rist’s (1970) observation of the initial meeting between the kindergarten
teacher and her students, the teacher implemented differential treatment in the division of
students into groups that were expected to fail or succeed. In this study, the teacher

31
labeled the groups “fast learners” and “slow learners.” As interactional patterns between
the teacher and the groups solidified, the gap in learning and academic materials between
groups widened over the course of the school year. Although subsequent teachers relied
on past performance to form expectations, past performance was related to the
kindergarten teacher’s initial subjective evaluation (Rist, 1970). This paradox – the
reliance of expectations on past performance, which might have been in part affected by a
kindergarten teacher’s initial subjective evaluation – affected these students’ subsequent
school experiences in later grades. In addition, Rist’s (1970) assertion that teachers use
their own social class background as a “normative reference group” to which they
compare their students supports Bartolomé and Trueba’s (2000) idea that teacher beliefs,
expectations, and behavior are largely shaped by personal ideology.
Rist (1970) also found that the kindergarten teacher formed opinions about her
students based on their behavior, their language, dress, mannerisms, physical appearance,
and performance on early tasks assigned during class. Students’ physical appearance,
such as their body odor, the darkness of their skin, and the condition of their hair, was
related to the teacher’s method of grouping “fast” and “slow” learners. He pointed out
that the teacher subjectively divided the students into “fast” and “slow” categories, a
judgment that was not based on a formal test that determined each student’s potential.
This permanent student grouping led to differential treatment by the teacher and
influenced her proximity to and amount of communication with each group (Rist, 1970).
The ways in which the teacher grouped and treated students clearly showed the impact of
teacher beliefs on teacher behavior.

32
Offering a few conflicting findings, a study by Ready and Wright (2011) used the
Early Childhood Longitudinal Study data set to examine teachers’ perceptions of students
by comparing teachers’ ratings of students and students’ scores on an objective
assessment given in the fall and spring of a school year. Applying a three-level
hierarchical model that used nested data, Ready and Wright (2011) found that teachers’
professional and personal backgrounds do not influence their perceptual inaccuracies
about students. Teachers’ misconceptions were mostly related to students’ social class,
and although they underestimated Black and Latino students’ skills compared to those of
White students, their misperceptions and underestimations dissipated throughout the
school year (Ready & Wright, 2011). In addition, their findings neither supported the
notion that teacher bias is a result of teacher-student socio-demographic disconnect nor
that racial mismatch impacts teacher-student relationships (ibid.).
Although Ready and Wright (2011) contended that teachers’ socio-demographic
background does not impact their perceptions of students’ cognitive ability, researchers
such a Rist (1970) and McCarthey (2003) would have disagreed by asserting that teachers
use their socio-demographic background as a “normative reference group,” form
expectations of the ideal student, and judge their students according that social-class
criteria. Relevant to other studies explored in this chapter, Ready and Wright’s (2011)
central finding was that the context in which teachers work most influences their
perceptions of students. Ready and Wright’s (2011) finding that the socio-demographic
background of students is a more salient factor shaping teachers’ perceptions than
students’ race echoes Rist’s (2000) conclusion that, holding race constant, social class
becomes a determining variable for how students are treated.

33
Ready and Wright’s (2011) conclusions were drawn from examining variables
from a large data set (ECLS-K); with 1,000 schools in their sample, they could generalize
teacher perceptions of racially diverse students. But this study lacked interviews and
observations, and thus Ready and Wright (2011) determined neither the extent to which
teachers impacted student performance nor whether teachers caused or reinforced
perceptual inaccuracies. Furthermore, the study said nothing of the quality of instruction
that occurred in the classroom, which may have impacted student outcomes on the
objective assessment given in the spring. The most interesting finding from Ready and
Wright’s (2011) study was that teachers’ inaccurate perceptions of students come from
the classroom context more than their own socio-demographic background. In other
words, despite their backgrounds, students from higher socio-economic status classrooms
tend to be viewed as more academically advanced than students in low socio-economic
status classrooms (Ready & Wright, 2011). Therefore, the social contexts in which
teachers work are most strongly associated with their biases (ibid.).
Although Dovidio, Kawakami, and Gaertner (2002) did not study teacher beliefs
or behaviors, they examined interracial interactions, which happened regularly between
teachers and students in environments like Valenzuela’s (1999) Seguin High School and
is related to the ways in which teachers form expectations according to their “normative
reference group” (Rist, 1970). Dovidio et al. (2002) alleged that people are unaware of
their own biases, which often manifest in nonverbal interactions with others, and studied
the impact of the implicit racial associations and explicit racial attitudes of Whites on
behaviors in interracial interactions. They hypothesized that Whites are more aware of
their explicit behavior in an interracial interaction, while Blacks are more aware of

34
Whites’ implicit, non-verbal behavior. The authors first measured implicit prejudice by
using response latencies, in which participants paired positive and negative words with
images of Black and White faces. Then, they measured explicit racial attitudes by having
participants converse with someone of a different race. Afterward, both filled out a
questionnaire that assessed the perceived friendliness of their partner. Dovidio et al.
(2002) found that implicit prejudice predicts behavior and concluded that because Whites
do not recognize their own implicit biases, both Whites and Blacks interpret interracial
interactions differently. Dovidio et al.’s (2002) findings supported Valenzuela’s (1999)
remarks that although some teachers advocate and profess caring for students, their
actions are not necessarily perceived by students as showing an understanding of
students’ experiences and perceptions of school. The authors’ findings might also
explain Valenzuela’s (1999) observation that some White Seguin teachers were unaware
that their biases were in part shaped by their views of the Latino students’ racial and
cultural background.
Trawalter, Richeson, and Shelton (2009) used stress and coping literature to
present a psychological framework that provides a way of understanding and predicting
behavior of interracial interactions. Trawalter et al. (2009) proposed that Whites feel self-
conscious, anxious, and uncomfortable in brief interracial interactions and categorized
four actions that they take in response to the induced state of psychological threat:
antagonism, avoidance, freezing, or positive engagement. They cited Dovidio et al.’s
(2002) findings: many Whites exhibit both positive and negative behavior during
interracial encounters; they use positive words but display negative non-verbal behaviors,
such as fidgeting, avoiding eye contact, or increasing distance between themselves and

35
the confederate in the study. In other words, Whites who feel threatened during an
interracial encounter antagonize their partner, avoid eye contact, become inactive, or
exhibit overly positive behavior in order to compensate for perceived prejudice. This
behavior can be observed in a classroom with teachers and students of different race and
cultural backgrounds. According to Trawalter et al. (2009), Whites who are hyper-aware
of prejudice are more likely to self-monitor, and minorities who are hyper-aware of
prejudice are more likely to monitor their partner.
Trawalter et al.’s (2009) framework made sense of Dovidio et al.’s (2002)
assertion that Whites are unaware of their nonverbal behavior and adds that Whites’
nonverbal behavior reveals their methods of coping with induced psychological stress.
Trawalter et al.’s (2009) conclusion might also have reinforced Valenzuela’s (1999)
observations of a disconnect between some teachers’ espoused beliefs and their actual
behaviors in class. In other words, teachers who are aware of racial and cultural
difference in their classroom may unconsciously exhibit the behaviors described by
Trawalter et al. (2009). These behaviors and actions both mirror and inform their biases
towards students.
Instead of relying on self-report methods to capture teacher beliefs, Gill and
Hoffman (2009) studied conversations among four eighth-grade mathematics teachers
during planning periods to uncover the beliefs that drove their pedagogical and content
decisions. They recorded the teachers’ lesson planning discourse, coded the data, and
identified patterns in discussion domains that revealed the teachers’ rationale and
thinking (Gill & Hoffman, 2009). They found that teacher beliefs about instruction fall
into six categories: beliefs about pedagogical content, general pedagogy, subject matter,

36
curricular choices, resources/textbooks, and students’ thinking (ibid.). Teachers’ most
common beliefs revolved around the following: the sources that were designated
authorities in the subject area (namely, textbooks and veteran teachers), the extent to
which students were able to be critical thinkers, the role of fun in delivering instructional
activities, and the degree to which student intelligence and potential were malleable
(ibid.). The teachers exposed their beliefs in their weekly decision-making meetings,
where the researchers were able to attain the rationale behind teachers’ specific
pedagogical decisions (ibid.). Gill and Hoffman (2009) concluded that some teachers
may vocally advocate equal access to rigorous instruction for all students, but their
beliefs about students’ capability as learners significantly drive their pedagogical and
curricular decisions.
Bensimon (2005), Ferguson (1998), and Gollub and Sloan (1978) might have
concurred with Gill and Hoffman’s (2009) claim that teacher perception of students’
capacity to learn shapes their instructional beliefs and influence their pedagogical
decisions regarding instructional methods, curricula, and content. In her complex
ethnography of Seguin High School, Valenzuela (1999) noted that teachers who did not
ascribe to deficit thinking were reminded by some of their peers that their efforts were in
vain and that Seguin students would perpetually fail because they did not care about
school. Ultimately, belief and practice are inextricably linked, so teacher beliefs, and, at
the root of the issue, teacher ideology, must be examined in order to understand and
change teacher practice.
In sum, ideology shapes teacher beliefs, which in turn develop into teacher
expectations and goals that teachers set depending on their perceptions of students’

37
potential. These expectations and perceptions materialize into teacher behavior and
action in the classroom. Teacher’s pedagogical and curricular decisions – what they
choose to teach and how they teach it – are largely driven by their beliefs in the students’
capacity to learn.
Although this dissertation considers Pajares (1992) and Kagan’s (1992)
characterizations of teacher beliefs as inflexible and static ideas that are shaped by
personal experiences and implicit assumptions about students, learning, content, and
teaching, it also considers studies that show that teachers have the potential to change
their beliefs and behaviors. Although it does not delve into the experiences and
ideologies that shape teacher beliefs, it examines the extent to which beliefs relate to
behavior. This dissertation also considers Bensimon’s (2005) warning that the beliefs of
urban teachers are sometimes affected by deficit thinking, which is supported by
Ferguson (1998) and Gollub and Sloan (1978). Rist (1970) supported these claims with
his longitudinal study, which marked the progression of students’ widening performance
disparity from a kindergarten teacher’s perceptual inaccuracies to her differential
treatment of students. While Dovidio et al. (2002) and Trawalter et al. (2009) discussed
the psychological factors that affect a person’s behavior in an interracial interaction,
Valenzuela (1999) and Gill and Hoffman (2009) explored the impact of teacher behavior
on teacher-student interaction and pedagogical and curricular decisions. This dissertation
captures these behaviors in the most basic form – everyday exchanges between teachers
and students – and determines how they impact the learning environment.
Even though Kagan (1992) stated that capturing teacher beliefs through teacher-
student interaction is a challenge, it is possible. This study finds evidence that teacher

38
beliefs can be inferred from teacher behavior. By interviewing teachers and observing
their practices and interactions with students, it reveals teacher beliefs as they relate to
rigor of instruction and teacher caring.
The following section addresses teacher behavior, particularly how it affects
students’ learning experience. Teachers’ actions and decisions impact students’
perceptions of teacher treatment and affect classroom environments for learning.
Unequal teacher treatment towards different groups of students negatively shapes the
opportunity to build a learning environment in which students feel confident enough to
take intellectual risks. Studying three high school English teachers, this dissertation finds
that this unequal treatment exists and explores the extent to which it impacts students’
opportunities to learn.
Most of the research on teacher belief relies solely on perception data.
Investigating teachers’ role in shaping classroom climate cannot be based only on
teachers’ perceptions’ of their own efficacy and the ability of their students. Rather,
observing actual occurrences in the classroom between teachers and students reveals the
complexities of teacher beliefs.
Teacher Behavior
In the previous section, I described factors that shape teacher beliefs and the
impact that teacher beliefs have on the interactions between teachers and students. The
following section explores studies that examine teacher behavior and teachers’
differential treatment of students.

39
Rist’s (1970) study of a single group of children included the observations of
teacher treatment in the classroom. The kindergarten teacher communicated less with
and stood further away from the “slow learners,” and while she taught the same
curriculum to the entire class, activities at each group’s table were perceivably different
(Rist, 1970). The “slow learner”s’ tables were characterized by a lack of communication
with the teacher, a lack of involvement in class activities, and infrequent instruction by
the teacher (ibid.). The teacher’s lack of response to mocking and disparaging comments
by “fast learners” toward “slow learners” indicated to all students that she condoned peer
disrespect, which led to further teasing throughout the school year. Therefore, the
teacher’s behavior – from her grouping of students and frequency of communication with
“fast” and “slow” learners to her lack of response to bullying – shaped classroom climate
and, thus, opportunities for students to learn.
Most studies have looked at teacher differential treatment based on expectations
of high and low achieving students. Brophy and Good (1970) concluded that teachers
demand more from those students whom they expect more and are more likely to praise
their performance. Teachers also demand less from and are less likely to praise the
performance of those from whom they expect less (Brophy & Good, 1970). Thus, the
quality, amount, and tone of interactions between students and teachers can indicate the
degree of differential treatment in the classroom. Brophy and Good (1970) also learned
that teachers are unaware of the impact that their beliefs have on their students, especially
the subtle differences in the ways that they treat various groups of students. They are
also unaware that they constantly communicate their expectations differently to different
students.

40
Blote (1995) compared students’ and teachers’ perceptions of teacher differential
treatment and found that their reporting of it differs. Although both groups
acknowledged that low-achieving students were treated differently than high-achieving
students, teachers insisted that poor students received more support and less pressure and
perceived little differential treatment in the delivery of praise (Blote, 1995). Similar to
Dovidio et al. (2002) and Trawalter et al.’s (2009) findings, where White and Black
participants’ perceptions of implicit biases and behavior are found to be different, this
disagreement between students’ and teachers’ perceptions of differential treatment shows
that students are aware of teachers’ implicit biases, while teachers are unaware of their
nonverbal behavior and biases.
Many teachers testify to the capability of all students to learn and the myriad of
techniques and methods used to differentiate, individualize, and evaluate learning, but,
ultimately, teachers’ biases tend to reveal themselves in various ways. Brattesani,
Weinstein, and Marshall (1984) found that teachers behave in ways that communicate
their expectations to their students. For example, student participants in their study
reported more negative feedback, teacher-directed instruction, and rule orientation
directed toward low achievers, while high achievers received higher expectations, more
opportunities, and more choice of tasks (Bratessani et al., 1984). The students perceived
and interpreted these expectations from their teachers’ behavior, which then influenced
the students’ own expectations and achievement (ibid.).
Babad, Bernieri, and Rosenthal (1991) conducted a study in which students
watched a ten-second clip of a teacher interacting with an unseen student and rated the
video on ten characteristics (e.g., warmth, hostility, and clarity of communication, etc.)

41
based on the teacher’s verbal and nonverbal cues. Babad et al. (1991) concluded that
students could easily detect teacher differential treatment toward high and low-achieving
students. Even though teachers might attempt to treat all students fairly and equally,
research suggests that their words and actions reflect beliefs and ideologies that reveal
their unconscious beliefs:
Many people believe that they can deceive others (particularly children) and
successfully conceal their true feelings. Such belief is probably based on the
(empirically proven) ability to control speech and verbal content, and people are
less conscious of their facial and bodily expressions. (Babad et al., 1991, p. 230)

Similar to Dovidio et al.’s (2002) finding that Whites are more unaware that their
prejudice manifests in implicit, nonverbal behavior, Babad, Bernieri, and Rosenthal
(1989) discovered in another study that biased teachers show a greater amount of
“negative leakage,” or negative affects, in nonverbal behavior. In other words, even
though some teachers insist that they treat all students equally, their biases emerge in
ways that are detectable by students. Teachers may think that they control their behavior,
but Babad et al.’s (1989, 1991) studies showed that they inevitably reveal, or leak, their
true beliefs and expectations to the students. Although my observations of teachers’
behavior reveal the ways in which their conscious and unconscious beliefs manifest in
their exhibition of caring and expectations of rigor for their students, I cannot draw
conclusions about the effects of teacher behavior on students because I do not interview
or survey them.
Rigor of instruction plays a role in what and how students learn because teachers
set expectations based on their beliefs about students’ capacity to learn. These factors
shape classroom climate, which forms the environment in which students feel connected

42
to and supported by the teacher and peers. The next section discusses the facets of
classroom climate that are shaped by teachers’ behavior and examines how teachers
create environments that welcome academic risk-taking, respect, and rigor.
Classroom Climate
Teachers are responsible for creating learning environments that promote
opportunities for student learning. There are factors out of teachers’ control, such as
students’ prior knowledge, attitudes toward school and the subject matter, and past
experiences with other teachers. But teachers can influence motivation and academic
performance by encouraging positive social interactions and helping students’ self-
perceptions and self-efficacy. In particular, teachers actively shape the quality of their
relationships with students and the rigor of instruction and thus have an effect on
classroom climate. An increasing number of research findings assert that classroom
environment is a strong determinant of student outcomes (Gettinger, Schienebeck, Seigel,
Vollmer, 2011; Jennings & Greenberg, 2008). This section examines the features of
classroom climate that teachers create and maintain.
In a review of research findings and assessment tools related to classroom
climate, Gettinger, Schienebeck, Seigel, and Vollmer (2011) defined classroom climate
as the affective tone of the classroom, including structural, organizational, and
instructional features. Classroom climate also relates to the interactions and behaviors
within classrooms, how students experience being in the classroom, and what teachers do
to create productive learning environments (Gettinger et al., 2011). The researchers
distinguished between two methods of assessing classroom climate: from the perception
of the participants and from direct observation.

43
According to Gettinger et al. (2011), a predominance of research focuses on
linking the quality of classroom climate to academic, affective, and behavioral student
outcomes. They assembled eight dimensions of classroom climate that shape student
performance: effective teaching behaviors, classroom management, teacher-student
relationships, academic learning time, emotional climate and support, grouping format,
class size, and physical characteristics (ibid.). This dissertation’s focus on two features of
classroom climate somewhat overlaps with Gettinger et al.’s (2011) eight dimensions.
Teacher caring is related to teacher-student relationships and emotional climate and
support, while rigor of instruction is associated with many of the eight dimensions, such
as effective teaching behaviors, grouping format, and academic learning time.
Regarding teacher-student relationships, Gettinger et al. (2011) repeatedly cited
Hamre and Pianta (2001) when they stated that caring and supportive teachers have a
positive impact on productive learning environments. These teacher-student relationships
also involve close interactions full of warmth, caring, and open communication
(Gettinger et al., 2011). The authors characterized positive classroom climates as places
where teachers respect students, create pleasant and supportive ambience, promote
positive feelings toward learning, and build a strong sense of community (Gettinger et al.,
2011, citing Dorman, 2002). Teachers are who sensitive to individual needs and know
the students personally are also highly likely to contribute to positive learning
environments (ibid.).
Classroom climate was defined by Adelman and Taylor (2005) as a social
psychological construct created by teachers and schools that hinders or fosters student
learning. Not only is it grounded in the values, philosophy, and culture of the school, but

44
it is couched in political, social, economic, and cultural contexts (Adelman & Taylor,
2005). Matsumura, Slater, and Crosson (2008) used Brand, Felner, Sim, Seitsinger, and
Dumas (2003) to identify the components of classroom climate: teacher support,
consistency and clarity of rules and expectations, student commitment, positive and
negative peer interactions, disciplinary procedures, student autonomy, instructional
innovation and relevance, cultural relevance, and safety. Bondy, Ross, Gallingane, and
Hambacher (2007) also created categories for classroom climate: teacher-student
relationships, expectations, accountability, and cultural responsiveness. With the
countless factors that shape classroom climate, the research in this particular body of
literature contains both broad and narrow views and multiple methods for evaluating and
measuring its success. The following sections seek out ways to organize the research on
classroom climate, so that the study can focus on a few significant aspects extracted from
the literature.
A Complex Construct. The research on classroom climate has produced studies
with disparate focuses. Researchers have created a multitude of terminologies that
encompass the learning environment and student and teachers’ relations to the
environment. Researchers study range of topics that affect to classroom climate, such as
environmental factors (e.g., school culture, school safety, etc.), teachers’ attributes and
actions (e.g., self-efficacy, caring, beliefs about students, beliefs about content, and
knowledge about content), interactional factors (e.g. teacher-student relationships and
interactions), and the content of the course itself (e.g. level of rigor, pedagogical
practices, etc.). Classroom climate is a layered onion that relies not only on personal
relationships between teachers and students and among students themselves but also on

45
the community within the classroom and the school. The cultures and values within a
school may permeate through teacher-student interactions in the classroom, so the larger
context of the school environment may affect classroom climate. Avoiding the larger
school context, this dissertation opts to focus on contexts within the classroom.
The literature that embodies classroom climate consists of both broad and narrow
topics with researchers either focusing on specific concepts or connecting concepts to
general claims about classroom climate. Through student self-reports, Battistich,
Solomon, Watson, and Schaps’s (1997) identified the qualities of caring school
communities and results of creating them. Fredericks, Blumenfield, and Paris (2004)
explored types of school engagement and its outcomes. Cohen, Raudenbush, and
Lowenberg Ball (2003) scrutinized misconceptions about the benefits of various
resources (e.g., money, curriculum material, facilities, and class size) and claimed that
teacher-student interactions and classroom climate shape access to resources.
Some researchers have also looked broadly at classroom climate and made
connections between subcategories within classroom climate. Matsumura et al. (2008)
drew conclusions about classroom climate from assessing rigorous instruction,
curriculum, and student interactions in several classrooms. Hughes and Kwok (2007)
studied the influence of teacher-student and parent-teacher relationships on student
engagement and achievement, which in turn impacts classroom climate. Furrer and
Skinner (2003) connected student relatedness, as reported through student self-reports, to
academic engagement and achievement. Perry (2008) looked at student engagement for
urban youth of color and its relation to racial identity. Hamre and Pianta (2001) followed
the impact of early teacher-child relationships on eighth grade outcomes.

46
Because researchers capture classroom climate in so many different ways, the
results of their studies are often unrelated, except in their common link to the role of the
classroom environment in student learning. Therefore, literature on classroom climate
lacks a common conceptual framework. The presence of both quantitative and
qualitative research on classroom climate further complicates the organization of its
categories and ideas. Quantitative data offer the ability to generalize to a larger
population, and many studies use student or teacher self-reports to capture aspects of
classroom climate. Researchers have created scales that rely on students’ self-report to
capture classroom climate (Evans, Harvey, Buckley, & Yan, 2010; Fraser, 1998), and
Fraser (1998) described nine major questionnaires for measuring student perceptions of
the learning environment, such as the Classroom Environment Scale and the What Is
Happening In This Class Questionnaire. On the other hand, qualitative data offer a deeper
examination of classroom interactions and paint a more complex picture of contextual
circumstances and relationships. Because the type of study impacts the results and
interpretation of data, this section is organized by methodology. Both quantitative and
qualitative studies yield assorted views of classroom climate that are worth discussing.
This dissertation focuses on two aspects of teaching that shape classroom climate:
rigor of instruction and teacher caring. Rigor of instruction refers to the ways that
teachers intellectually engage students through higher-order thinking in discourse and
interaction. It is set by the teacher, shapes the types of activities and lessons that engage
students, and essentially speaks to effective teaching behavior. Positive classroom
climates are associated with teachers who give informative feedback, are knowledgeable
about the subject matter, allot a large amount of time to learning, teach actively and

47
coherently, encourage student involvement, and conduct guided practice (Gettinger et al.,
2011). Small-group instruction, cooperative learning, and peer tutoring foster
interdependence and autonomy, which positively affect classroom climate (ibid.).
Gettinger et al. (2011) drew on a plethora of studies to show that the quality of classroom
climate impacts student achievement.
Caring is characterized by a sense of belonging, the equal influence of
participating members, and common values (Battistich, Solomon, Watson, & Schaps,
1997). In a caring environment, students can identify with the group’s needs but also
maintain individual commitment: “Students' needs for competence, autonomy and
belonging are thus met when they are able to participate actively in a cohesive, caring
group with a shared purpose; that is, a community” (Battistch et al., 1997, p. 138).
Teacher behavior, which includes exhibitions of caring, shapes the degree to which
students feel a sense of connectedness and belonging to school.
Upon reviewing a myriad of studies, Evans, Harvey, Buckley, and Yan (2010)
presented three dimensions with which to view classroom climate: academic,
management, and emotional. The academic dimension refers to the pedagogical and
curricular elements of the learning environment (Evans et al., 2010). This includes
instructional style, which is most effective when procedures are clear and well structured,
opportunities for active participation are provided, and predictability is present in the
teachers’ behavior (ibid.). The management dimension refers to the discipline styles of
maintaining order, and teachers who are mindful – or both self-aware and aware of others
– are more likely to foster self-regulation in students (ibid.). Lastly, the authors claimed
that the emotional dimension is a significant element that links positive classroom climate

48
to academic motivation, engagement, and participation and is the least studied but equally
consequential (ibid.). A trusting and caring relationship between teachers and students
leads to respectful exchanges where teacher feedback is less likely to have excessively
significant emotional consequences (ibid.). They noted that there is a stronger connection
between the effects of classroom climate on attitudinal and motivational measures than
on achievement (ibid.). Noddings (1986) and Valenzuela’s (1999) assertion that
reciprocity is necessary in caring relationships between teachers and students supports the
authors’ notion that trusting relationships impact student attitude and motivation. Evans
et al.’s (2010) delineation of the three dimensions of classroom climate underscores my
attempt at capturing acts of caring and rigor and linking them to the academic and
emotional dimensions of classroom climate.
The methods that researchers use to measure teacher caring and rigor of
instruction yield a variety of outcomes and interpretations of outcomes, so the following
sections explore quantitative and qualitative methods that capture these two selected
dimensions of classroom climate.
Quantitative Studies on Classroom Climate. Quantitative methods used to
illustrate classroom climate have found that teacher caring emerges from the quality of
student-teacher relationships, which in turn have consequences for students’ academic
achievement. Hughes and Kwok (2007) used latent variable structural equation modeling
to test a theoretical model that spoke to the effects of teacher-student and parent-teacher
relationships as mediated by student background characteristics and child classroom
engagement, which facilitated relationships and impacted student achievement. Studying
443 participants who were ethnically diverse and low achieving first graders in a Texan

49
school district, Hughes and Kwok (2007) gathered data from student achievement tests
and surveys about their teachers’ perceptions of student-teacher support, parent-teacher
alliance, parent involvement, and student ability. They found that background
characteristics, such as race and socio-economic status, predict student-teacher
relationships and that minority students of low socio-economic status are less likely than
White, middle-class students to have supportive relationships with their teachers (Hughes
& Kwok, 2007). Students who have close relationships with their teachers are more
engaged, work harder, persevere in the face of obstacles, accept teacher criticism, and
cope well with stress (ibid.). Students who are at risk for failure due to behavioral
problems, family life, low socio-economic status, or minority status are most impacted by
the quality of their relationships with their teacher (ibid.). Like Evan et al. (2010),
Hughes and Kwok’s (2007) findings highlighted the pivotal role that teacher-student
relationships play in student motivation and outcome.
Hamre and Pianta (2001) followed 179 kindergarten students through the eighth
grade and studied the relationship between early teacher-child relationships and student
outcomes in the eighth grade by collecting quantitative data that included student
achievement tests, students’ disciplinary records, and teacher surveys on students’
classroom behavior, work habits, and their perceptions of relationships with particular
students. Correlating with Hughes and Kwok’s (2007) findings, Hamre and Pianta
(2001) emphasized that positive student-teacher relationships are powerful in protecting
against poor school performance associated with unsupportive home environments. They
found that student-teacher relationships may be important in predicting outcomes for

50
students at the highest risk of school failure, a notion that follows the hypothesis that
vulnerable students are highly influenced by school experiences (Hamre & Pianta, 2001).
Furrer and Skinner (2003) used student self-report to show that student
relatedness predicts classroom engagement. This longitudinal study about student
motivation and coping surveyed students on their perceived control over their academic
performance and their emotional and behavioral engagement in class (Furrer & Skinner,
2003). Similar to Hamre and Pianta’s (2001) findings, Furrer and Skinner (2003)
concluded that feeling secure in a relationship with a teacher allows students to learn
without fear and with high self-efficacy: “Secure attachments …function as a safe haven,
allowing children the freedom to explore and to engage constructively in activities and
interactions with others” (Furrer & Skinner, 2003, p. 148). Children who have secure
attachments to caregivers function well through childhood and adolescence in areas such
as peer relations, school performance, and healthy relationships with non-familial adults
(ibid.). When students feel special and important to their peers and teachers, they give
more effort, persistence, and participation, and have more interest and enthusiasm (ibid.).
Students who feel appreciated by their teachers are more academically involved,
interested in learning, and happy and comfortable in the classroom (ibid.). Related to
Evans et al.’s (2010) assertions, strong teacher-student relationships result in students’
resilience and self-efficacy, and teacher feedback does not lead to severe emotional
consequences for students.
Beyond teacher-student relationships, classroom climate is impacted by the rigor
of instruction, or the extent to which students are challenged. Rigorous instruction
invites students’ cognitive engagement, which Fredricks, Blumenfeld, and Paris (2004)

51
described as the thoughtful and willing effort that students exert to grasp complex ideas
and master difficult skills. Cognitive engagement is related to motivation and self-
regulated learning, and it can range from simple memorization to acquiring strategies that
lead to deep understanding and expertise (Fredricks, Blumenfeld, & Paris, 2004).
Matsumura et al. (2008) conducted both a qualitative and quantitative study of
teacher practice by creating rubrics that measured the quality of classroom climate, rigor
of instruction and curriculum, and students’ interactions, specifically verbal exchanges.
Their research team underwent an intense rater-training program to study the rubrics,
practiced taking field notes and scoring, and visited 34 sixth- and seventh-grade teachers
in five middle schools for two weeks. Matsumura et al. (2008) drew the following
conclusions: the degree of respect between teacher and students predict the students’
behavior toward one another; explicit rules about respectful prosocial behavior predict
the number of students who participated in class discussions; and the quality of students’
participation in discussions is predicted by the rigor of the teacher’s questions that require
students to explain their thinking. The quality of classroom climate determines the
degree to which students feel supported and nurtured (Matsumura et al., 2008). A
classroom with rigorous instruction and high-quality teacher-student interaction
maintains rules that focus on the students’ comments and how they contribute, and the
quality of discussion depends on the extent to which the teacher urges students to explain
their thinking and support it with evidence (ibid.). In other words, teachers’ abilities to
manage classroom interactions, set routines that support students’ academic risks, and
support students in positive peer interactions foster classroom climates that enhance
learning opportunities for students.

52
Although quantitative studies on classroom climate offer generalizability, they are
not without their limitations. Hughes and Kwok (2007) did not document actual teacher-
student exchanges but looked only at student achievement data and teacher perception.
They acknowledged that students’ initially high achievement scores may have affected
their classroom engagement, and thus their relationships with teachers, and they were
unable pinpoint the teachers’ role in classroom engagement and teacher-student
relationships (Hughes & Kwok, 2007). Similar to Hughes and Kwok’s (2007) study,
Hamre and Pianta’s (2001) relied mostly on school records, teacher perceptions, and
student achievement data, and they failed to look at the close nature of teacher-student
relationships that influenced or were influenced by teacher perceptions and students
outcomes. Furrer and Skinner (2003) relied solely on student self-report without
exploring other factors in the classroom that might have impacted student engagement
and teacher-student relationships. Matsumura et al.’s (2008) study involved a
quantitative aspect where researchers created a complex rubric with detailed descriptions
that characterized high, medium, and low scores, but instead of using the raw data of
teacher-student and student-student interactions, the authors filtered their interpretations
through the rubric, which determined the categorization of exchanges and interactions.
These quantitative studies yielded meaningful and interesting results, but they lacked the
depth and context necessary to portray the complex and minute interactions between
teachers and students in a classroom.
Qualitative Studies on Classroom Climate. Qualitative studies on classroom
climate begin to address the gap that quantitative studies present. They offer a contextual
background that explains teacher and student behavior and teacher-student interactions.

53
They also tell a more complete story specific to a particular school or classroom.
Although qualitative studies address classroom climate in various and assorted ways, they
examine these ways with depth and complexity. Noddings (1986, 1988) discussed the
ethic of caring and called on teachers and teacher education programs to consider that the
act of modeling and practicing care towards students fosters their moral and ethic
development. Valenzuela (1999) expanded on Noddings’s works and discussed the lack
of mutual care between teacher and students in her book Subtractive Schooling. She
distinguished between authentic and aesthetic caring, two types of caring that shape
teacher-student relationships and instruction. In Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of
Hope, bell hooks (2003) wrote, “At its best, teaching is a caring profession. But in our
society all caring professions are devalued” (pp.86). A learning community that glorifies
competition and upholds hierarchical roles excludes a teaching practice based on an ethic
of caring. The following studies explore the concept of teacher caring, particularly
pedagogical practices and teacher behavior that affect classroom climate.
Lamenting the lack of moral education in schools, Noddings (1986, 1988) wrote
extensively about the ethic of caring, in which the teacher-student relationship is based on
the idea that each individual is valued with mutual respect and self-worth. Her vision of
care relies on a sense of duty and moral obligation and manifests in caring occasions,
moments when a person engages with another (Noddings, 1986). She proposed, “An
ethic of caring guides us to ask, What effect will this have on the person I teach? What
effect will it have on the caring community we are trying to build?” (Noddings, 1986, p.
499). Noddings (1988) criticized that our schools’ current emphasis on students’
academic growth, represented by test scores, and obsession with individualism and

54
competition overlook the need for teachers to attend to students’ moral growth. Instead,
she suggested, schools and teachers should practice, model, confirm, and have dialogue
about caring (Noddings, 1988).
In order to feel committed to and invested in school, students need to feel that
teachers care about them (Valenzuela, 1999). Based on ethnographic data collected over
three years, Valenzuela told the story about Seguin High School to make a point about
the toxic relationships of teachers and students that stemmed from the mutual perception
that each group lacked caring. The non-Latino teaching staff believed that the students
did not care about school, whereas the students believed that the teachers did not care
about them (Valenzuela, 1999). Teachers perceived that students exhibited uncaring
attitudes through their dress and behavior, and few bridged the cultural and language
barriers that existed between the school and its students (ibid.). The teachers felt
disconnected from their students, and their students felt disconnected from school. Some
teachers were explicitly disdainful or dismissive of students’ academic performance
(ibid.), so distrust between teachers and students led to distrust in a classroom, and low
quality student-teacher relationships rendered students unwilling or afraid to take
academic risks.
Also studying caring in a minority-majority school, Roberts (2010) captured the
relationship between two specific groups of teachers and students and examined the
teachers’ perceptions and beliefs. She coined the term “culturally relevant critical teacher
care” after interviewing eight successful Black teachers about their definitions,
philosophies, and perceptions of teacher care for Black students (Roberts, 2010). She
discovered two themes in their responses: political clarity/colour talk and concerns for the

55
students’ futures (ibid.). Not only did these teachers openly address the realities of
racism, they also reported feeling a commitment to helping students negotiate their roles
in a society rife with racial inequality (ibid.). They showed caring by acknowledging the
students’ future challenges and offering counter narratives that refuted the perception that
they lived in a colorblind, equal-opportunity society (ibid). This study revealed particular
beliefs and behaviors of Black teachers who worked with Black students and gave insight
into how teachers consider students’ backgrounds when addressing their needs.
Wong (2010) referred to Valenzuela’s (1999) term “authentic caring” when she
interviewed Chinese-American youth and mentors at a youth center. She showed
authentic caring, defined by Valenzuela as reciprocal relationships between adults and
youth, not only among the mentees and mentors, but among the mentees as well (Wong,
2010). The mentees reported uncaring teachers and administrators who failed to form
meaningful relationships with them. The youth center represented a successful caring
community, which Valenzuela described as a place where all members are valued and
respected. These qualities of the ethic of caring and teacher care offer insight into the
ways in which classroom climate can support positive student outcomes.
In another study about teacher caring toward minority students, Cooper (2003)
found that successful White teachers of Black students displayed an authoritative
disciplinary style, where rules and expectations were explicit and teachers employed
overt classroom management techniques. Although researchers emphasize the need for
clear expectations for behavior (Bondy, Ross, Gallingane, & Hambacher, 2007;
Matsumura et al., 2008), Noddings (1986) did not point to authoritative teaching
techniques as the answer to students’ emotional and ethical needs, and the notion that

56
Black students need authority and discipline more than other groups of students might be
reflective of deficit thinking. Beyond viewing themselves as authoritative disciplinarians,
these teachers saw themselves as second mothers and worried about their students’
physical healthy and comfort. They cared about and recognized each student
individually. These teachers’ manifestations of caring emerged from their commitment
to teaching content-based reading instruction that focused on skills in the early grades.
Unlike Roberts’s (2010) participants, who were Black teachers working with Black
students, Cooper’s (2003) White teachers did not engage in overt discussions about race
and racism in the students’ lives, one difference that Cooper (2003) noted when she
compared students about successful White teachers of Black children to successful Black
teachers of Black children.
Researchers often pair the ethics of caring with culturally relevant pedagogy
(Bondy et al., 2003; Delpit, 1995; Ladson-Billings, 1994; Valenzuela, 1999). Because
some teachers practice culturally relevant pedagogy as a way for students to maintain
their cultural identity and to experience intellectual, social, and political empowerment,
teacher caring is fundamental to its ideology. Bondy et al. (2007) observed three
effective novice teachers of low-income Black students in the first two hours of the first
day of school in order to determine how the teachers established safe and productive
learning environments. The teachers employed culturally relevant classroom
management strategies in developing relationships and establishing expectations (Bondy
et al., 2007). According to Bondy et al. (2007), teachers who create positive classroom
climates
1. Develop personal and mutually caring relationships;

57
2. Set clear expectations and explicit rules that expect success;
3. Establish accountability that give students opportunities to improve and deliver
consequences for those who deviate from the rules; and
4. Use culturally responsive language and strategies.
Teachers have control over these aspects of classroom climate, and fostering them
increases students’ beliefs in their ability to achieve academically (ibid.). According to
Bondy et al. (2007), the teachers’ methods of setting a tone that fostered task engagement
and effort supported students’ resilience, encouraged autonomy, and improved social
competence. These culturally relevant classroom management strategies have a positive
impact on classroom climate. Culturally relevant teaching is further explored in the next
section.
Caring is also captured through the qualitative methods of McCarthey’s (1997)
study, which involved the observations of teachers who mistakenly assumed that students
could make connections between school and home. This study discovered that White,
middle-class students have an advantage over non-White students because for them
school and home are extensions of one another. Teachers’ selection of books, which
were not relevant to minority or low-income students’ lives and excluded some students
from class discussions, were based on the teachers’ knowledge of middle-class students’
lives more than working-class or culturally different students (McCarthey, 1997). The
structures of teachers’ curriculum were better suited for the White students who came
into the classroom with strong connections between school and home literacy practices.
Teachers who connected school and home through literacy tended to call on the White,
middle-class students more often than on non-White students (ibid.). Minority students’

58
home experiences did not match their school experiences, and they were more reluctant
to share than the White students. McCarthey (1997) observed that most of the talkers in
literature discussions were White, even though White students made up 30% of the
student population. The teachers’ neglect of bridging students’ home and school lives
and their assumption that a seamless link existed between these two worlds showed that
they did not consider how the non-White students experienced learning in their class.
Therefore, the ways in which the teachers exhibit caring to make learning engaging and
accessible to all students influence their instructional strategies and curriculum decisions
and affect the students’ ability to make school-home connections.
Crawford (2008) gave further evidence of the impact of the ethic of caring on
classroom climate when she explored the implications of constructivist learning.
Namely, she focused on the role of authority in the classroom. Constructivist learning
deems knowledge as relative, contextual, and socially constructed (Crawford, 2008).
Teachers are not the omnipotent authorities of knowledge but share authority with
students or designate authority to books or parents. Students also serve as co-
constructors of knowledge, and they use prior knowledge, collaboration with peers, and
guidance from teachers. Teachers create a classroom culture through language and
action, but Crawford (2008) pointed out, “Merely constructing an opportunity for
learning does not, however, ensure that learning takes place…Learning depends on what
students do, or are able to do, with the opportunities created” (p. 1712). This view of
authority reflects caring because it is built on a reciprocal relationship that relies on
mutual respect and student autonomy. Valenzuela’s notions of caring (1999) also
involved reciprocity, which Crawford’s (2008) teacher demonstrated when she made her

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students authorities of knowledge and encouraged that they assume autonomy over their
own learning.
Crawford’s (2008) study was also related to rigorous instruction. As the passage
above states, student success is dependent on the teacher’s ability to create opportunities
for students to learn; the opportunity itself does not guarantee that students will achieve.
With this ideology in mind, Crawford (2008) studied one teacher who created a
classroom climate based on constructivist methods. The teacher explicitly used language
that demonstrated shared authority and urged the students to make the decision to
participate or not in learning. She also implicitly shared authority in a constructivist
manner when she allotted class time for students to read and teach the class. When they
shared their knowledge, she questioned and required them to provide sound reasoning for
their interpretation of the knowledge. Matsumura et al. (2008) would label this practice
as highly rigorous because the teacher pressed her students to provide accurate
knowledge and supporting evidence to explain their reasoning. This classroom contained
a climate that promoted student autonomy and put students in charge of their own
knowledge construction. Although Crawford (2008) did not interview the teacher, the
teacher’s promotion of self-regulated learning and her malleable role as an authority
implied a belief that her students were capable of monitoring and reflecting on their own
learning. Thus, this belief impacted her constructivist approach to instruction and her
interactions with students.
Relating classroom climate to pedagogical practices and rigor of instruction,
Mathews and Lowe (2011) selected various studies to discuss learning environments that
facilitate dispositions for critical thinking. The authors asserted two factors necessary in

60
one’s disposition for critical thinking: the ability to transfer skills and generalize beyond
the context in which one has learned them and self-confidence in one’s ability to engage
in critical thinking. Good instruction emerges when strategies are easily communicated,
learning is connected to real-world contexts, and students are given opportunities to
examine their personal experiences, thus feeling more control over their own learning
(Mathews & Lowe, 2011). According to the authors, classroom environments that foster
dispositions for critical thinking provide students with numerous opportunities to practice
strategies in different contexts, use high-level questions, and create opportunities for
students to participate in various roles (ibid.). Teachers also play a significant role in
encouraging the disposition for critical thinking when they give challenging tasks that
have attainable successful outcomes, provide constant feedback, and maintain a positive
emotional climate (ibid.). Therefore, Mathews and Lowes (2011) showed that the rigor
of instruction and pedagogical practices of teachers, both of which shape classroom
climate, have an impact on the students’ level of critical thinking.
This dissertation contends that using qualitative measures, such as observations
and interviews, to explore classroom climate, is the most appropriate way to identify
teacher beliefs and their connections to teachers’ actual practices. By collecting
qualitative data and focusing on the two aspects of classroom climate discussed above,
rigor of instruction and teacher caring, and this dissertation captures the contextual
factors and relational nuances between individuals to give thick description and sound
interpretations to classroom interactions. This dissertation maintains that teacher beliefs
and the ideologies behind those beliefs cannot be obtained only through the analysis of
numbers processed through a software program. It illustrates the contextual depth of its

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case studies and becomes acquainted intimately with the beliefs of particular teachers and
their interactions with students.
From the literature discussed above, teachers play a crucial role in creating a
classroom climate that supports student learning. These behaviors can be recorded using
both quantitative and qualitative measures. Researchers are able to measure positive or
negative classroom climate using surveys and student achievement data (Furrer &
Skinner, 2003; Hamre & Pianta, 2001; Hughes & Kwok, 2007; Matsumura et al., 2008),
but these types of data disguise the authentic and subtle ways that contextual and
individual factors affect classroom interactions. These nuances and multi-layered factors
that capture classroom climate are better obtained through qualitative measures.
Organized by type of methodology, this section has examined a few features of
classroom climate that are within teachers’ control. Related to classroom climate, several
studies show that teacher-student relationships impact student achievement and
motivation (Furrer and Skinner, 2003; Hamre and Pianta, 2001; Hughes and Kwok, 2007;
Valenzuela, 1999). Teachers play a role in creating spaces for students to feel safe,
comfortable, willing to take academic risks (Cooper, 2003). They also impact classroom
climate by setting explicit classroom rules and clear guidelines for prosocial and
respectful behavior (Cooper, 2003; Matsumura et al., 2008). Furthermore, teachers who
neglect to consider or integrate the backgrounds and experiences of minority or low-
income students may prevent those students from relating to the curriculum and
participating in class discussions (McCarthey, 1997). Teachers’ language and
pedagogical practices also shape students’ experiences in the classroom (Crawford,
2008). Influencing teacher-student relationships, the ways in which teachers speak,

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behave, create space, and consider students’ voices and experiences impact the climate
that they build in the classroom. Successful classroom climates involve teachers who
deliver quality instruction that is rigorous and requires students to explain their thinking
(Crawford, 2008; Matsumura et al., 2008). Therefore, classroom climates, in which
teachers create through setting a particular tone, can be places where students thrive or
wilt.
An Approach that Links Beliefs to Behavior: Culturally Relevant Teaching.
Culturally relevant teaching serves as an example of the relationship among teacher
beliefs, teacher behaviors, and classroom climate. It warrants its own section in this
dissertation because studies that examine culturally relevant teaching illustrate a
particular way in which these bodies of knowledge intersect. The following literature
explores the ways in which successful culturally relevant teachers deliver instruction,
interact with their students, and set expectations for academic achievement. It also
illuminates upon the beliefs systems that impact these teachers’ attitudes toward students’
capacity as learners, as well as teachers’ curricular and pedagogical decisions.
Lasdon-Billings’s (1994) seminal work on culturally relevant pedagogy was
grounded in the belief that students have identities, cultures, and experiences that must be
maintained and validated in the classroom, so that they may transcend the negative
effects of the dominant culture that manifest in schools and in society. In Dreamkeepers,
Ladson-Billings (1994) studied the ideologies and behaviors of effective teachers of
Black students and gave a plethora of examples of culturally relevant teachers who
successfully enacted their beliefs about students in their everyday practice. Culturally
relevant teachers believe that students should feel that what they do in school is relevant

63
to their identities, backgrounds, and goals. Believing that all students can achieve, these
teachers build communities in which students feel responsible for each other. One
culturally relevant teacher made goals explicit at the beginning of class every day and
revisited them with students at the end of class, so that they could assess how well they
had met them. Another culturally relevant teacher structured her classes in such a way
that students were encouraged to identify for themselves what they knew they could do
and then set out to accomplish it. Ladson-Billings (1994) showed the ways in which
teacher beliefs are aligned to teachers’ instructional decisions and demonstrations of
caring toward students.
In a self-study about his students’ experience writing an autoethnography (critical
self-reflection), Carmangian (2010) explored his beliefs about his students and the result
of having students write and share their autoethnographies in class. Carmangian (2010)
called for teachers to exhibit caring by finding ways to understand students, their lives
outside of school, family circumstances, interests and desires. By framing the
autoethnography as being situated in a larger society, students saw themselves as
valuable members of their community. The sharing of autoethnographies built tolerance
in the classroom and a unified space where students were able to understand their own
prejudices toward one another. It also led students to make meaning from their
experience and recognize commonalities with their peers’ experiences. Carmangian’s
(2010) self-study represents one example of the degree to which culturally relevant
teaching – and the beliefs that culturally relevant teachers hold – can affect instruction
and classroom climate.

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After presenting three types of teachers that represent different degrees of caring,
Duncan-Andrade’s (2007) study followed four effective urban schoolteachers and
compiled five characteristics of these culturally relevant teachers. The most effective
urban teachers possessed a critically conscious purpose and saw their work in urban
schools as combatting social injustice; lived in and saw themselves as members of the
community; spent an inordinate amount of time preparing and revising lessons; upheld a
Socratic sensibility that gave students opportunities to be authorities of knowledge; and
exuded trust, with an understanding that people from the school’s community might not
trust schools and that schools historically perpetuated inequality (Duncan-Andrade,
2007). These teachers also understood that their students’ academic success was
predicated on high academic expectations (ibid.). Duncan-Andrade (2007) concluded,
I have discovered nothing groundbreaking about effective teaching in urban
schools. It is hard work and there are no shortcuts. We will never develop some
ideal instructional program that can be exported from classroom to classroom. In
the end, programs that come out of boxes do not work. Great teaching will
always be about relationships and programs do not build relationships, people do.
(p. 636)

Echoing Bartolomé’s (2008) assertion that a strict focus of educational research on
gathering effective instructional strategies overshadows the need to examine teacher-
student relationships and classroom interactions, Duncan-Andrade (2007) believed that
ideal teaching strategies or “instructional programs” would not be uniformly effective for
all school contexts and all students. He pointed to the significance of considering
teacher-student relationships when discussing effective teaching. Thus, there is a need
for educational research to link quality instruction to teacher-student interactions and
teacher-student relationships.

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The exploration of culturally relevant teaching and the interactions within
successful culturally relevant classrooms is one approach to examining the ways in which
teachers’ conscious and unconscious beliefs manifest in teacher behavior. The culturally
relevant teachers described above made deliberate instructional and pedagogical
decisions that effected classroom climate, which affected the teacher’s establishment of
rigor and caring. Many studies illustrate the operationalization and consequences of
culturally relevant teaching (Ford & Kea, 2009; Jones, 2007; Milner, 2010), and although
this present study does not look specifically at this pedagogical method, culturally
relevant teaching represents a strong body of literature that links teacher beliefs to teacher
behavior.
Conceptual Framework
Teachers hold conscious and unconscious beliefs about their students’ capacity as
learners. These beliefs are formed by their ideologies about their role in the classroom,
the purpose of schooling, what and how their content should be taught, and their
perceptions of their students and the communities in which they work (Bartolomé &
Trueba, 2000). Teacher beliefs impact numerous facets of teaching and learning, such as
the quality of instruction, teacher behavior, teacher-student relationships, curricular and
pedagogical decisions, rules for classroom behavior, and peer-to-peer interactions. Thus,
teachers’ conscious and conscious beliefs are manifested through the way teachers shape
classroom climate.
In examining the relationship among teacher beliefs, teacher behavior, and
classroom climate, conclusions about teacher behavior will emerge from the observations
of teachers’ instruction, students’ responses to instruction, teachers’ responses to

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students, and teacher-student interaction. Teachers’ conscious and unconscious beliefs
are uncovered from the observations of these behaviors, and further conclusions about
classroom climate can be drawn from classroom observations.
Classroom climate is the tone of an environment in which teachers interact with
students and students interact with each other. Because an account of classroom climate
encompasses an array of characteristics, this dissertation looks specifically at rigor of
instruction and teacher caring, two dimensions that are related to Gettinger et al. (2011)
and Evans et al.’s (2010) characterizations of classroom climate. Rigor of instruction
addresses the degree to which teachers intellectually challenge their students. This study
relies on the work of several authors in characterizing the operationalization of rigor.
Rigorous teachers
1. Pose open-ended questions that require critical thinking (Mathews & Lowe, 2011;
Matsumura et al., 2008);
2. Allow students opportunities to make connections to abstract concepts and themes
and to other sources of knowledge, such as prior knowledge and other texts
(Mathews & Lowe, 2011; Matsumura et al., 2008);
3. Urge students to explain their thinking with reasoning and supporting evidence
(Crawford, 2008; Matsumura et al., 2008);
4. Offer opportunities for students to construct knowledge (Crawford, 2008); and
5. Present challenging tasks with attainable outcomes (Mathews & Lowe, 2011)
Because this dissertation focuses on English Language Arts instruction, it looks at the
quality of discourse around literature, particularly at how teachers and students interact
with texts and opportunities for students to analyze texts and relate them to larger

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concepts and themes. It also looks for opportunities for students to make assertions about
texts and the degree to which teachers press them to provide supporting evidence. In
addition, rigorous instruction emphasizes the need for attainable outcomes. It is not
simply the presentation of difficult material without guidance; rigorous teachers create
conditions for students to reach the teachers’ intended outcomes through scaffolding, a
concept that is elucidated upon by Tharp and Gallimore (1991). Although its framework
is grounded in the notion that scaffolding is necessary for rigorous instruction, this
dissertation does not explore Tharp and Gallimore (1991) in depth. In sum, this
dissertation captures the ways in which teachers deliver rigorous instruction through
intellectual engagement around the English content area.
Teacher caring is defined as the amount of emotional support that a teacher
provides beyond academic growth. Because caring can be defined as emotional support
and teachers’ feelings towards their students, this dissertation narrows caring to
Valenzuela’s (1999) depiction of authentic caring but also draws from Ladson-Billings
(1994) and Noddings’s (1986) extensive writing about the role of teacher caring in the
classroom. The operationalization of authentic caring is characterized by teachers who
1. Build mutual respect and sense of belonging (Noddings, 1986);
2. Do not characterize students as belonging to homogenous groups (Valenzuela,
1999);
3. Maintain close physical proximity to students (Mathews & Lowe, 2011);
4. Frequently interact with individual students one-on-one (Noddings, 1986);
5. Consider the students’ lives outside of the classroom (Valenzuela, 1999);
6. Value student input and show interest in students’ lives (Noddings, 1986);

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7. Show a commitment to students’ academic achievement (Valenzuela, 1999);
8. Discuss students’ future challenges with honesty and an awareness of institutional
inequities (Roberts, 2010); and
9. Possess a sense of duty and concern about students’ moral growth (Ladson-
Billings, 1994; Noddings, 1986; Roberts, 2010)
Though these characteristics are culled from various readings that describe caring
teachers, this dissertation’s view of caring relies heavily on Valenzuela’s (1999)
definition of authentic caring. Authentically caring teachers create positive emotional
environments where students are unafraid to take academic risks (Furrer & Skinner,
2003; Hughes & Kwok, 2007; Mathews & Lowe, 2011). Their classrooms also include
the presence of rigorous instruction, which moves authentic caring beyond caring as
simply emotional support. Aesthetically caring teachers may espouse commitment to
student achievement, but they do not exhibit actions that demonstrate this commitment
(Valenzuela, 1999). They are well meaning and maintain positive relationships with
students but do not deliver instruction that helps students master the content area. This
dissertation poses authentic caring, aesthetic caring, and lack of caring on a continuum of
caring that will be further discussed in Chapter Four.
Although Pajares (1992) and Kagan (1992) asserted that teacher beliefs are be
static and inflexible, this dissertation does not cleave to the notion that teachers are
unable to change their beliefs and, thus, their behavior. The scope of this dissertation
does not allow for an exploration of studies that document changes in teacher beliefs, but
there is research that shows that teachers will change when given the opportunity to
thinking critically about their beliefs and behaviors (Lazar, 1998).

69
Furthermore, although this dissertation illuminates on the deficit thinking
cognitive framework (Bensimon, 2005) as an example of a belief system that can shape
teacher behavior, it does not presuppose that all teachers, particularly urban teachers,
maintain deficit-thinking notions about their students. The purpose of this dissertation is
to not only explore the ways in which teacher beliefs might shape and inform teacher
behavior but also the ways in which beliefs might be manifested in complicated ways.
Therefore, this dissertation avoids making sweeping judgments about teacher beliefs and
behavior. In addition, although the case studies offer some contextual background about
the teachers’ lives, this study does not attempt to relate teachers’ “normative reference
group” (Rist, 1970) to their behaviors in class and interactions with students.
This dissertation relies on a few principles that reflect its findings on classroom
climate and effective instruction. First of all, a positive classroom climate is one that
includes rigorous instruction and teacher caring (Crawford, 2008; Evans et al., 2010;
Ladson-Billings, 1994; Matsumura et al., 2008; Valenzuela, 1999). A positive classroom
climate must include teacher warmth and caring because students who experience secure
attachments to their teachers are motivated to learn, feel emotionally safe, take academic
risks, and experience higher levels of student relatedness (Furrer & Skinner, 2003).
Secondly, rigorous instruction is necessary to challenge and provide students with
opportunities for intellectual engagement (Kennedy, 2004). It encourages students to
engage in rich discussions that require analytical thinking about academic content
(Matsumura et al., 2008). Lastly, given that learning occurs in a social context,
constructivist and socio-cultural teaching methods are examples of effective pedagogical
practices that present a participatory model of learning, where both teachers and students

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hold knowledge and knowledge is relative, contextual and socially constructed
(Crawford, 2008, as cited in Hofer & Pintrich, 1997). A constructivist philosophy allows
students to co-construct knowledge and invites student involvement and autonomy
(Crawford, 2008), while socio-cultural theory links learning to social contexts and posits
that learning occurs in social interactions (Chazan & Ball, 1995).
Summary
This literature review explores ways in which teacher ideology and beliefs impact
teacher behavior and action, which in turn shape classroom climate. Beliefs and ideology
shape teachers’ conscious behavior, but teachers also share their beliefs and ideology
through implicit, non-verbal behavior. No matter how much teachers might preach about
the potential of every student, they implicitly reveal their expectations through their
delivery of instruction and their interactions and relationships with students. Ultimately,
what teachers do and how they behave in the classroom reveal their beliefs about their
students’ capacity for learning. Teacher-student relationships are crucial to building a
cohesive and successful classroom climate. Teachers have agency over the tone of
students’ learning environment, which can be a place that nourishes and supports student
learning and intellectual risk.
The following chapter describes this dissertation’s methodological procedure,
which included interviewing teachers and observing classrooms. Interviews established
teacher beliefs about their students’ capacity as learners. Classroom observations that
captured teacher-student interaction and teacher instruction revealed their enacted beliefs.
The observations discovered whether patterns of behavior documented from classroom
observations were accurate indicators of teachers’ conscious and unconscious beliefs.

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Chapter 3: “You shall put this night’s great business into my dispatch”:
The Methodology for a Study of Teacher Beliefs and Behavior
When Lady Macbeth hears of the witches’ prophecy, she ambitiously plots King Duncan’s
murder. Although Macbeth expresses apprehension and hesitation, she steadfastly assures him
that she will handle the tasks of preparing for the King’s arrival to their home and scheming his
demise for that very night: “You shall put this…business into my dispatch” (1.5.69).
The following chapter describes the methodology utilized in this dissertation and
explains the plan for accessing, collecting, and analyzing data.

Changing teacher practice requires a close study of the beliefs that underlie
teachers’ daily and pedagogical practices. Despite Pajares (1992) and Kagan’s (1992)
notion that teacher beliefs are as a set of static, inflexible principles shaped by personal
experiences and implicit assumptions, researchers have shown that change in teacher
beliefs also cause change in teacher practice (Bausch & Voorhees, 2008; Duncan-
Andrade, 2005; Lazar, 1998). Before searching for ways to change beliefs and practice,
capturing teacher beliefs as an external, observable variable is a challenging (Kagan,
1992), but necessary task for uncovering the basis of teacher practice.
This study captures teacher beliefs that are both espoused by teachers and enacted
through their behavior in the classroom. It connects teacher beliefs to classroom climate,
which is shaped by factors such as instruction, caring, and teacher behavior. This chapter
focuses on the utilization of qualitative methods to document teacher behavior and
teacher-student interaction.
The research questions for this study are the following:
1. How do teacher beliefs impact classroom climate as they related to rigor of
instruction and teacher caring?

2. What are teacher beliefs about their students’ capacity to learn in relation to the
English content area?

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3. How do those beliefs influence their practice, pedagogical and curricular
decisions, and responses to students?
Research Design
The data for this study were best collected through the qualitative methods of
observation and interview. Their purpose was meant to take moments of teacher
behavior and teacher-student interaction within an ongoing learning environment and
infer larger beliefs and ideologies. Using the case study method, this dissertation views
each class as a unit of analysis and examines the connection between teacher beliefs and
classroom climate in real-life contexts.
The research for this study relied on the case study design, which, according to
Merriam (1998), is ideal for understanding and interpreting the observation of an
education phenomenon. Case study research is holistic in description and explanation
and works well in situations where multiple variables are influenced by a particular
phenomenon (Merriam, 1998). A few philosophical assumptions underlie case study
research: the researcher brings meaning to the experiences through his interpretation and
multiple realities exist because the world cannot be viewed objectively but through
personal interaction and perceptions (ibid.). Each classroom served as case study to be
described and interpreted, and I used ethnographic techniques as the means to analyze
sociocultural aspects and cultural contexts.
Rist (1970) argued that qualitative research is fundamental to showing the
complexities of American society through the lens of the urban classroom. In his
reflection preceding a reprinting of his seminal study in the Harvard Educational Review,
Rist (2010) asserted that observation is a necessary form of methodology that gives

73
researchers a window into people’s lives and informs policymakers who may have little
knowledge of the impact that their decisions have on overlooked participants. Following
a constructivist and socio-cultural paradigm, in which multiple realities exist and are
unique because they are constructed by individuals who view the world from a particular
vantage point (Hatch, 2002), this study both documents teachers’ perspectives and
opinions as well as actual occurrences in the classroom.
The first research question, “How do teacher beliefs impact classroom climate as
they relate to rigor of instruction and teacher caring?,” is the overarching question and is
answered by interview, observation, and artifact data. The subsequent research questions
are split into parts that encompass the essence of the first question. The second, “What
are teacher beliefs about their students’ capacity to learn in relation to the English content
area?,” is answered mostly through interview data, in which teachers described their
knowledge and beliefs about their students and explained the ways in which their
knowledge informed their practice. The third research question, “How do those beliefs
influence their practice, pedagogical and curricular decisions, and responses to
students?,” is answered through interview and observation data. For example,
expectations for mutual respect among students related to the teachers’ explicit rules and
establishment of pro-social activities. Documentation of teachers’ speech, body
language, and movement around the classroom revealed the tone that they set for the
learning environment.
Population and Sample
This study enrolled three high school English teachers in two urban public
schools. I observed each teacher with two sets of classes. I had planned on observing

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each teacher with two sets of students on different tracks (e.g., honors and college
preparatory levels), so that I could discover how teacher behavior varied in classrooms
with students of different ability levels. But due to my limitations in finding voluntary
teachers, one of the three teachers taught all college preparatory ninth graders, so I was
not afforded the opportunity to document her behavior with differently tracked students.
The teachers from this sample were drawn from urban high schools with racially
and culturally diverse student populations in Los Angeles, California. Both high schools
had a sizeable Latino student population, but Baldwin City High School
1
was situated in
a suburban pocket of urban Los Angeles, while Petry High School was located in a low-
income city within Los Angeles County. I did not set criteria for the schools’
standardized-tests performance because my unit of analysis is the classroom, and teacher
beliefs about students exude regardless of the schools’ academic ranking. Even though I
mention in the previous chapters that the ethnic demographic disparity between teachers
and students might reveal a racial, ethnic and cultural disconnect, as illustrated by Gay
(2000), Howard (2003), and Johnson (2000), for the purpose of this study, I did not limit
my sampling of teachers by race or ethnicity. As discussed in Chapter Two, teacher
beliefs are not solely influenced by students’ ethnic background, and opening up my
criteria for selecting teachers allowed for complexities that emerged from teachers with
various backgrounds and life experiences. I selected teachers from diverse urban schools
because I wanted to examine teachers’ beliefs as they related to minority students.

1

The names of schools, teachers, and students were given pseudonyms.

75
Participants
Participants were three high school English teachers, each with two sets of
students. This present study did not place parameters on teachers’ years of experience.
Teachers of all experience levels reveal their beliefs towards particular groups of students
through their interactions with students, curricular decisions, and expectations of rigor.
Several sampling conditions affected the collection and analysis of data. My
narrowing of teachers in the English content area limited access to a larger pool of
teachers. I chose the English content area because it is my area of expertise, having been
an English teacher myself. I understand the curriculum content well enough to focus on
the teachers’ instruction and interactions with students. Lastly, my search for participants
who were receptive to my presence and willing to participate in the interviews may have
pointed me in the direction of certain types of teachers, such as those who might have
been more comfortable and confident in their own practice. Appendix A gives the
demographic background information of each teacher as well as the courses and grade
that s/he taught.
Instrumentation
My goal in this study was to capture teacher beliefs from teachers’ perspective
and from the perspective of a classroom observer who watches the beliefs exhibited
through teacher-student interaction. Approaching this as a qualitative case study, my
instrumentation consisted of classroom observations and two interviews.
I observed each English teacher with two sets of students for two weeks, which
totaled approximately 10 hours with each class. This period of time allowed me to see
the following: a unit plan unfold over the course of two weeks; the teacher’s facilitation

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of student learning and responses to struggling students; patterns of teacher behavior;
characteristics of teacher-student relationship in a particular setting and with a particular
set of students; and the completion of student work as a result of instruction. Because I
observed one teacher with two sets of students, I spent a total of 20 hours of class time
with each teacher.
The first set of data consisted of an extensive initial interview that uncovered
underlying teacher beliefs and ideologies that impacted practice (See Appendix B). This
was followed by pre-observation interviews on each day before class (See Appendix C).
These consisted of a few brief questions that gave me insight into what would happen
during the observation, and teachers had the opportunity to give me a sense of the content
and activities presented. Despite my early arrival to classroom observations, oftentimes
teachers were too busy or arrived too late for me to conduct this short interview. Other
times, I asked the teachers my brief questions, and they would wave my attention toward
the daily agenda on the board, which was occasionally outdated or inaccurate. Before the
first pre-observation interview in the classroom, I made note of the classroom
arrangement by drawing a layout of students and teachers’ desks (See Appendix D).
Documenting the physical environment enriched my descriptions of social interactions
(Patton, 2002), and with a map of the classroom, I easily marked the movements of the
teacher and the placement of the students. The pre-observation interview also gave me a
chance to pay attention to the aesthetics of the classroom – the appearance of the room,
student work on the wall, and the writing on the board – which gave me insight into what
would occur in the classroom and how students were organized or would interact (Patton,
2002).

77
I had planned on using a classroom observation protocol that took the form of an
open-ended narrative (See Appendix E). The margin of the observation protocol
included ways in which the teacher might demonstrate teacher caring and rigorous
instruction. Rather than serve as a checklist, these notes helped me focus my
observations on these specific dimensions of classroom climate, and this protocol also
contained time stamps and lines for writing. After my second classroom observation with
the first teacher, I discovered that I could not keep up with his speech and actions because
my writing speed was too slow. Because this teacher spent the entire period at the front
of the classroom and because there was little room to navigate changes in my location, I
began to bring a laptop and plant myself in a few different areas in the back of the room.
I was able to capture his speech and actions more quickly and accurately, though from
my stationary position, I would look at the back of students’ heads. I followed the
classroom observation protocol template as I typed, noting the date and time, particular
class period, number of students present, daily agenda, occasional pre-observation
interview responses, time stamps, and open-ended narrative notes. I am not certain that I
made the right decision to anchor myself in the back of the classroom for the
observations of the three teachers, but I feel confident that I was able to capture teacher
speech and actions with the entire class and with some individual students.
Direct quotations from the teachers were most valuable to the field notes, but non-
verbal methods of communication, such as the teachers’ movements during an activity or
instruction, also uncovered aspects about teacher-student relationships (Patton, 2002). I
made observations of students only in relation to teacher instruction or teacher-student
interaction. My field notes mostly consisted of descriptive accounts of the teachers’

78
speech and interaction with students. They also included “observer’s comments,” which
were made up of immediate reflective notes aimed at revealing my reactions, personal
biases, opinions, and interpretations (Patton, 2002).
I also gathered any materials that were handed out to the students, so that I had a
record of the documents that students received. These artifacts were analyzed during the
data analysis process of examining interview and observation data and spoke to the
teachers’ academic expectations and level of rigorous instruction.
After each class observation with one set of students, I completed the reflective
notes protocol (See Appendix F). In addition to the “observer’s comments” space in my
field notes, this protocol contained my personal responses and reactions to particular
instances and actions that I observed in the classroom. This protocol allowed for deeper
reflection outside of the observational setting and captured any personal or immediate
connections that I felt to the observation experience. Patton (2002) recommended that
the observer be both reflective and reflexive because “the personal, perceptive-dependent
nature of observations can be understood as both a strength and a weakness, a strength in
that personal involvement permits first-hand experience and understanding, and a
weakness in that personal involvement introduces selective perception” (pp. 329). As a
researcher, I intended to record objective descriptions but also reflect on the opinionated
comments that I jotted down while observing. As the primary and sole researcher, I was
the primary instrument for the collection of data and data analysis. As I made meaning
from my observations of teacher practice, I kept in mind that the sensitivity and integrity
of the investigator was a fundamental characteristic of qualitative research (Merriam,
1998). This reflective protocol also gave me an opportunity to think about the ways in

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which my observations corresponded to the components of classroom climate that were
highlighted in this study, teacher caring and rigor of instruction. Analytical reflection on
these specific components helped me prioritize and classify my observations, as well as
distinguish the significant from the insignificant.
After two weeklong observations of two classes, I conducted a post-observation
interview with the teachers to gain insight into their thoughts about student engagement
in the content of the lessons, their interactions with and responses to students, their
interpretation of the outcome of the lessons, and their assessment of student work. These
open-ended questions revealed the teachers’ thought process and level of satisfaction
about the outcome of the lessons and allowed me to witness the teacher’s initial reflective
process. Most of the post-observation interview questions were especially designed for
the teachers, and they were created after my initial analysis of the observation and
interview data (See Appendices G, H, and I). The post-observation interview allowed
them to express intended goals or thoughts on students’ responses to the lessons. I used a
few pieces of student work of different quality and asked the teachers to informally
evaluate them. These responses would provide yet another opportunity or medium
through which to identify teacher beliefs about students’ capacity to learn. Because Mr.
Emerson’s post-observation interview lasted a few hours and because he did not give me
copies of student work, I was unable to question him about the quality of their writing.
Nonetheless, during the data analysis stage, I did not refer to the particular pieces of
student work nor to the teachers’ responses to the quality of work. The interview and
observation data offered ample evidence of patterns, and I did not feel a need to examine
the teachers’ evaluation of student work to reaffirm my findings.

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Appendix J presents possible interactions and behaviors to spot during
observations and post-observation interview questions that related to rigor of instruction
and teacher caring present in the classroom. In other words, I linked observed behavior
and interview questions to the two selected dimensions of classroom climate. Although I
did not use the rubric protocol by Matsumura et al. (2008) to measure classroom climate,
I relied on their characterizations of rigorous instruction in classroom activities and
students’ tasks. I also used Crawford’s (2008) study regarding the ways in which a
teacher positions the role of authority in a constructivist classroom. I used teacher caring
as characterized by Ladson-Billings (1994), Noddings (1986, 1988), Roberts (2010), and
Valenzuela (1999).
Data Collection
Contacting teachers and schools. Upon receiving IRB approval from the
university and the school district in which the schools were located, I established
relationships with schools different ways. For Baldwin City High School, I first searched
the school’s website and perused the contact information of the English Department. I
emailed the chair of the English Department with a solicitation for voluntary teachers. I
informed her of my status as a student, the purpose and parameters of the study, the
amount of time that teachers would have to allot for the introductory and post-
observation interview, and an assurance of confidentiality. She forwarded my email to
the English faculty and received a voluntary response from Mr. Abraham. Upon his
agreement, I contacted the principal of Baldwin High School, requested permission to
enter campus for the classroom observations, and assured him that my study did not
involve collecting data from students. He contacted administrators of the Baldwin City

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School District and returned with a message requesting that I subject myself to
fingerprinting at the local police department. After I complied, I received admittance to
Baldwin City High School and Mr. Abraham.
For Petry High School, I contacted a friend who worked in its the Social Studies
Department. I sent him a description of my study, and he forwarded it to the English
Department. Two willing teachers responded to his email. After receiving verbal
permission from the principal, I was given access to Ms. Leslie and Mr. Emerson.
I contacted all of the teachers through email and set up visits before the
introductory interview, so that I could introduce myself and give them a brief overview of
my study. I reassured them that my observations were not evaluative and that I would
not share the findings with their principal. I made my purpose clear: my presence was
not a critique or evaluation of their performance. The data collected supported the
construction of my study, and I would be willing to share my findings with the teachers,
at their request, after the observations and interviews was over at their school. Although
I solicited feedback after the post-observation interviews, only Ms. Leslie requested
information about my findings. Her desire for feedback gave me insight later in the data
analysis stage when I compared the teachers’ attitudes toward their practice.
Timeline. Data collection occurred during the months of October and November.
Introductory interviews were conducted within two weeks prior to classroom
observations, and post-observation interviews occurred within one week after the last
classroom observation, so that the teacher’s memory of class events were still fresh and
recent.

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With sequential days of classroom observations, I was able to see a curriculum
unfold and the fruition of a student product. A minimum of ten hours with a teacher and
one set of students allowed me to gain a solid sense of the teacher’s unit, particularly
his/her goal for and student responses to the unit. This also gave me ample time to gather
data and discover patterns of behavior and relationships. I did not examine student work
as a result of instruction, but I recorded other ways, interactional and verbal, in which
students showed understanding about the content and the teacher’s instruction. Also,
because I observed Mr. Abraham and Mr. Emerson with two sets of students on different
tracks, I was able to document differential teacher treatment of perceived high and low-
achieving students between and within classes. By spending a minimum of 20 hours with
one teacher, I was able to identify aspects about teacher-student relationships. I observed
a total of three teachers, each with two sets of students, so I conducted approximately 60
hours of classroom observations.
Interviews. Interviewing teachers can capture their perceptions of students and
the school community, their philosophy about teaching and learning, and their
perceptions of effective teaching. Asking teachers how they view their school context
and their students reveals the set of beliefs by which they conduct their everyday
practices and decide on curricular materials (Gill & Hoffman, 2009; McCarthey, 1997).
Interviews record and make concrete a teacher’s perspective and motives. Many factors
that shape interaction – e.g., belief systems, values, thoughts, and emotions – can be
articulated through interviews. Teachers are also able to express these internal aspects in
their own words, and through interviews, I gain additional background information on the
teachers’ experience that helps me understand their perspective.

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The introductory interview (See Appendix B) was a uniform protocol that gave
me a sense of the teachers’ identity and experiences that might have shaped the teachers’
view of their practice. Interview questions addressed the teachers’ knowledge about
students, their academic expectations, their views on rigor and caring, and examples of
rigorous instruction and acts of teacher caring. The introductory interview also gave me
a sense of the teachers’ methods of instruction and how they viewed their role in the
classroom. I also asked how they handled the range of ability levels and how they
instructed struggling students. The interview also allowed me to gather information
about their personal and professional background.
The pre-observation interview protocol (See Appendix C) allowed me to
anticipate activities and dynamics in the classroom. It gave me insight to teachers’
development of lesson plans and what they expected to see. The pre-observation
interviews consisted of two standard, open-ended questions that addressed what I, as the
observer, might see that day and asked for any materials that might help me better
understand the lesson. As mentioned above, oftentimes, I did not have time to ask these
questions before class because the teachers were busily preparing for class. Mr. Emerson
usually entered class a few minutes before the bell rang, so I had only enough time to
arrange my position in the classroom while he prepared materials and greeted students.
Other times, teachers pointed to or read aloud the agenda on the board, which did not
sufficiently answer the questions.
The post-observation interview (See Appendix G, H, and I) delved into teachers’
thoughts about the progress or outcomes of the lessons, as well as their successes and
struggles with a particular unit. These questions were tailored to individual teachers and

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related directly to my observations in class. They often invited teachers to explain their
reasoning behind certain patterns of behaviors and curricular and pedagogical decisions.
The respondents’ beliefs about students’ capacity to learn emerged as they discussed
classroom climate, instructional strategies, and expectations for rigorous instruction and
student work. I did not use teachers’ informal assessments of a few pieces of students
work in the data analysis stage, though these questions were included in the post-
observation interview protocol. Lastly, I collected artifacts, which consisted of handouts
to the students, which revealed aspects of the teacher’s beliefs and pedagogical and
curricular decisions surrounding rigorous instruction. The artifacts revealed the teachers’
expectations of anticipated student products.
Observations. Self-reports are valuable because they reveal the respondents’
perceptions of a particular phenomenon or experience. They allow researchers a glimpse
into the respondents’ thinking that is otherwise inaccessible through observation or
survey. But Gill and Hoffman (2009) warned that self-report measures may be
problematic because they could represent teachers’ ideal beliefs. Similarly, Patton (2002)
warned that perceptions are selective and that people’s responses are dependent on their
biases, interests, and backgrounds. On the other hand, because people’s actions are in
part driven by biases, interests, and backgrounds, uncovering their perspective and
rationale is valuable asset to understanding how they behave and make decisions.
Therefore, the triangulation of data is essential to capturing multiple vantage points.
Although self-reports may be inaccurate measures of teachers’ true beliefs (Gill &
Hoffman, 2009), teachers’ interpretations help researchers understand interactions as they
are experienced by those involved.

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Considering the limitations of relying solely on teachers’ perspectives, the
inclusion of classroom observations helped this present study gain more insight into
teacher beliefs and behaviors. Data gathered from observations documented ways in
which teacher behavior impacted opportunities for students to learn. As an observer, I
focused on mainly setting and the human social environment. Describing the setting
showed what happened in the environment as well as how people were organized (Patton,
2002). Focusing on the human social environment showed people’s interactions and
behaviors, the patterns and frequencies of interactions, direct and indirect communication
patterns, and grouping tendencies (ibid.).
Patton (2002) advised researchers to pay close attention to formal and informal
interactions. Formal interactions include instructional time and take into consideration
who is involved, what is being done, how students go about doing the activity, when it
happens, and how the teacher brings closure to the activity (Patton, 2002). Informal
interactions include student responses to instruction and one-on-one interactions between
students and teachers. They are significant to understanding the phenomenon being
studied because they are moments when students and teachers exchange views and ideas
(ibid.). In these formal and informal interactions, I paid attention to the teachers’ word
choice and nonverbal communication towards the students. Nonverbal communication
included teachers’ hand gestures, facial expressions, movement around classroom, and
physical contact with students.
Observations capture context and give a holistic view of the subject matter, which
interviews and quantitative measures cannot. They reveal dynamics that might escape
the participants in the setting, and they highlight topics that respondents are unaware of

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or unwilling to discuss (ibid.). Nevertheless, despite the accuracy of descriptive details
that observations offer, they are interpreted through the perspective of the observer, who
herself is an instrument that contains subjectivity and bias (ibid.). The observer’s own
awareness of bias can mitigate its presence in the interpretation of the data.
The observations of this study served two purposes. First, beyond the
perceptions, feelings and opinions of teachers captured through interview, they served as
an additional data source for understanding teacher beliefs and behaviors. Observations
give insight that may reveal an aspect of interaction of which the teacher is unaware
(Patton, 2002). It also may discover a dynamic that the participants do not see or that the
respondent ignores (Merriam, 1998; Patton, 2002). Secondly, an ethnographic technique
such as observing is a key primary source for seeing authentic interactions in a natural
environment like the classroom (Hatch, 2002; Patton, 2002). The context of the setting
offers a better understanding of the environment in which the activities take place.
Because this study focused on teacher behavior and practice, classroom observations was
a necessary form of methodology.
Artifacts. I also collected artifacts that were distributed to students, such as
assignments and handouts created by the teachers. These artifacts further supported
inferences drawn about the context of the classroom, the teachers’ expectations, and
pedagogical practices, all of which influence classroom climate (Hatch, 2002). This type
of data offered more insight to my observations of teacher-student interaction, teacher
behavior, and teacher interviews.
Upon collecting the data through field notes, interview protocols for pre- and
post-observation interviews, and protocol for the examination of artifacts, I properly

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transcribed and secured them safely according to IRB guidelines. They were located on
my personal computer, which is password protected. I will destroy the data five years
after the study is completed.
Data Analysis
According to Hatch (2002), data analysis is a systematic search for meaning and a
way to process data so that conclusions and lessons can be communicated to others.
Merriam (1998) described this process of meaning-making as moving between the
concrete and abstract, between description and interpretation. Creswell (2009) pointed
out that data analysis is an ongoing process that requires continual reflection and
returning to and revising analytic questions. Most importantly, Merriam (1998)
emphasized that the process of data collection and analysis is recursive and iterative and
should be done simultaneously. The ways in which I make sense of my first set of data
on the first day will influence how I approach the collection of data on my second day.
Thus, as Creswell (2009) suggested, one aspect of qualitative research is the idea of
emergent design, that the process of collecting and analyzing data may change as the
researcher is immersed in the process.
Case study analysis best fits this particular study because my collection of
interview and observation data allows me to build complex stories that revolve around
each distinctive teacher. Each teacher offers a unique story. With an introductory
interview that establishes his/her beliefs and views about students, classroom
observations that capture teacher-student interaction and his/her essence as a teacher, and
a post-observation interview that allows me to probe the teacher’s thinking, each
classroom deserves an within-case study analysis, in which each case is treated in

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isolation of the others and I am able to explore contextual information more freely
without comparing specific categories in a cross-case analysis. Following Creswell
(2009) approach, I documented detailed descriptions and followed it by an analysis of
data for themes and issues. With a with-in case study analysis, each analysis posed
various themes specific to the teacher.
The data analysis for this study followed Merriam (1998) and Creswell’s (2009)
analytic techniques. The first stage of analysis occurred after the first introductory
interview, in which I documented the teacher’s interesting viewpoints and responses.
The first classroom observation, and each subsequent observation, was followed by a
reflective notes protocol (See Appendix F), in which I answered a set of questions about
the teacher’s instruction, students’ responses to instruction, and teacher-student
interactions. The reflective notes protocol also served as a tool for me to reflect on the
degree of rigorous instruction and acts of caring exhibited by the teacher. I always
completed the reflective notes protocol immediately after the observations period, and
sometimes I reviewed my notes as I answered the reflective questions. Each post-
observation interview contained questions that were carefully crafted after reviewing my
observation notes. Because I reread the data as I wrote the post-observation interview
questions, each teacher received a different set of questions that were specific to my
observations of their behavior.
After collecting a complete set of data from my work with one teacher, which
included an introductory interview, two weeks of classroom observations, and a post-
observation interview, I color-coded instances of rigorous instruction, lack of rigorous
instruction, caring, and lack of caring. For Ms. Leslie, I used a color-coded moments of

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her classroom management strategies because I wanted a general sense of the proportion
of class time that she spent admonishing misbehaving students. Along with color-coding,
I also made notes in the margins that were color-coded. As I spotted themes and patterns
in the observation data, I would revisit interview data to find excerpts about teacher
beliefs that reflected or contradicted teacher behavior. I also color-coded interview data
by excerpts about rigor and caring and made notes that summed up or interpreted the
teachers’ responses.
The analysis of these case studies required interpretation of raw data. Being open
and willing to explore and make connections between different types of data, my goal
was to link teacher beliefs to the particular components of classroom climate of teacher
caring and rigor of instruction. These linkages required the triangulation of data and
strengthen the analysis (Hatch, 2002). Different types of data yielded different results,
and triangulation helped me understand the inconsistencies that arose across data (Patton,
2002).
This type inductive analysis led to findings that were grounded in data (Hatch,
2002). My goal in analyzing the observation and interview data was to make sound
connections among teacher beliefs, teacher behaviors, and classroom climate. These
inferences depended entirely on the patterns of behavior that I observed between teachers
and students. The patterns emerged solely out of my raw data, which consisted of
detailed descriptions of teacher instruction and students’ responses to the instruction.
The rich descriptions that came from teacher observations yielded interesting insight into
actual interactions in the classroom, and the introductory and post-observation interviews

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helped me better understand who the teachers were and how their beliefs about students’
capacity to learn impacted what they said and did in class.

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Chapter 4: “To you they have show’d some truth”:
Case Studies and Findings about Three Teachers

Banquo confesses trepidation about the witches to Macbeth after one part of their prophecy has
come true, while Macbeth nonchalantly dismisses their predictions and disguises his own
ambitions for power. The following chapter consists of an interpretation and analysis of data
collected from interviews with and observations of three high school English teachers. Interview
data reflect teachers’ explicit perceptions and beliefs, but observation data of their nonverbal
behavior reveal their true or enacted beliefs about students’ abilities.
This dissertation examines how all of these beliefs affect classroom climate.

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the ways in which teachers’
conscious and unconscious beliefs impact their interactions and relationships with
students, which in turn create a particular classroom climate. Because classroom climate
encompasses numerous factors that range from class size to pedagogical methods, this
study looks only at two factors: rigor of instruction and teacher caring. The first three
chapters presented the statement of the problem, the purpose of the study, the research
questions, a review the literature relating to teacher beliefs, teacher-student relationships,
and classroom climate, and a description of the methodology employed in the study. This
chapter presents the findings from an analysis of the collected data.
This qualitative study utilized a case study methodology that involved interviews,
observations, and the collection of artifacts. Each school, teacher, and student presented
was given a pseudonym to ensure confidentiality. The findings are presented using a
with-in case study analysis and are presented by separate case studies, and they consider
contextual background, examine teachers’ beliefs about students’ capacity as English
Language Arts students, and catches exchanges between teachers and students regarding
rigor and caring that reveal teachers’ beliefs. The findings also include information about
school and community, background of each teacher, and a description of each class.

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Looking at the degree of rigor and caring in the teachers’ classrooms, these findings seek
to answer the following research questions:
1. How do teacher beliefs impact classroom climate as they relate to rigor of
instruction and teacher caring?
2. What are teacher beliefs about their students’ capacity to learn in relation to
the English content area?
3. How do those beliefs influence their practice, pedagogical and curricular
decisions, and responses to students?
A Return to the Conceptual Framework
The ways in which a teacher makes sense of his roles in the classroom, the
purpose of schooling, the way his content should be taught, and his perceptions of his
students and the communities in which he works inform and shape their ideology
(Bartolomé & Trueba, 2000). Teacher ideology includes beliefs that a teacher holds
about his students’ capacity as learners. These beliefs impact many facets of teaching
and learning: teacher-student relationships, teacher instruction, curricular and
pedagogical decisions, rules for classroom behavior, interactions between teachers and
students, and interactions among students. Thus, a teacher’s conscious and unconscious
beliefs about students’ ability shape classroom climate.
These beliefs impact two dimensions of classroom climate: rigor of instruction
and teacher caring. Rigorous instruction is characterized by the extent to which a teacher
intellectually challenges students, and it relates to the quality of teacher-student
interactions (Matsumura et al., 2008), the degree to which a teacher probes students’
thinking and demands evidence (Crawford, 2008; Matsumura et al., 2008), opportunities

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for students to be authorities in the construction knowledge (Crawford, 2008), the
presence of critical thinking (Mathews & Lowe, 2011; Matsumura et al., 2008), and
chances for students to make connections between their content and other sources of
knowledge. Rigorous instruction also requires that a teacher present challenges tasks
with attainable outcomes (Mathews & Lowe, 2011), which alludes to the types of
scaffolding that a teacher provides to help students reach his/her intended outcomes.
Beyond emotional support, teacher caring relates to the degree to which a teacher
exhibits respect toward students, fosters self-worth and belonging (Noddings, 1986),
maintains a positive emotional climate that supports academic-risk taking (Mathews &
Lowe, 2011), shows commitment to student achievement (Valenzuela, 1999), views
students as individuals, understands students’ needs as s/he guides them through the
educational process (Valenzuela, 1999), and approaches discussions about students’
future challenges with political clarity and cultural sensitivity (Roberts, 2010).
Valenzuela (1999) distinguished between two types of teacher caring: authentic and
aesthetic. Both types of teachers care, but an authentically caring teacher is committed to
student achievement and values them individually, while an aesthetically caring teacher is
well-meaning but cares in a superficial sense. In other words, an aesthetically caring
teacher espouses commitment to student achievement, and may be very well believe in
his role to help students achieve, but does not exhibit actions that represent that
commitment. By finding connections among teacher beliefs about students’ capacity as
learners, teacher behavior in their interactions and relationships with students, and the
classroom climate that they shape for their students as it relates to rigor and caring. A

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teacher who lacks of caring does not consider the needs of his students and may even
behave in a hostile or antagonistic way towards students.
An inextricable link exists between rigor and caring because rigorous instruction
is an essential component of Valenzuela’s (1999) illustration of authentic caring.
Valenzuela (1999) posited that a commitment to students’ academic achievement is a
necessary quality in authentically caring teachers. This commitment requires that
teachers deliver rigorous instruction, which in turn requires content and pedagogical
knowledge. The following data analyses of Mr. Abraham, Ms. Leslie, and Mr. Emerson
will address the intersection between rigor and caring as it examines their beliefs and
behaviors.
Case Study #1: Mr. Abraham at Baldwin City High School
Introduction. Nestled in a residential neighborhood populated with single-family
homes, Baldwin City High School belonged to Baldwin City, which had a population of
approximately 38,800 people and was predominantly White and Latino (U.S. Census
Bureau, 2010). Baldwin City lay within the complex community of the city of Los
Angeles, which itself contained pockets of urban and suburban neighborhoods. The
median household income was 50% more than the median household income in Los
Angeles (ibid.), and Baldwin City contained both large cookie-cutter tract homes walled
by concrete and densely populated public housing apartments lined with cars and tall
fences.
Baldwin City High School was built in 1951, and it was located a mile away from
downtown Baldwin City, which offered an array of upscale restaurants and art galleries.
It sat on a sprawling campus full of well-maintained white-and-blue striped, one-story

95
buildings. Posters that announced club meetings and dances adorned outdoor bulletin
boards, and recycling bins were visible everywhere. At least three security guards
roamed and kept watch over campus entrances. Grassy areas were populated with small
trees and benches, and the buildings were surrounded by pristine athletic fields and
outdoor basketball courts. Baldwin City High had a student population of 2,300, of
which 39% of the students were Latino, 24% were Black, 21% were White, and 12%
were Asian and Pacific Islander (Ed-Data Partnership, 2010). Its 84 teachers consisted of
the following racial demographic: 67% White, 14% Asian and Pacific Islander, 12%
Latino, and 6% Black.
Mr. Abraham was a White male in his mid-40s. He grew up in Baldwin City and
graduated from Baldwin City High School. He had never intended to be a teacher and
took on a career in database administration and online marketing. He was unhappy with
his job and felt that he was not contributing to society when he responded to a spam
email that elicited interest from prospective teachers. The email came from Los Angeles
Teaching Fellows, an organization that trained potential and existing teachers to work in
urban schools. After many email exchanges, Mr. Abraham was asked to complete an
application. He later realized that this selective program had picked him from thousands
of candidates. His first two years of teaching were at a minority-majority urban high
school in South Los Angeles. His challenges included cultural differences and classroom
management, but he completed his two-year commitment to the organization: “I did two
years at Walker High because I had to. I had to teach at an urban school for two years as
a way of paying back the Los Angeles Teaching Fellows Program. I didn’t feel safe at
Walker anymore.” His dissatisfaction with Walker High led him to fulfill an open

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English teaching position at Baldwin City High School. The idea of contributing to his
alma mater appealed to him: “I like to be able to come back and give back to the same
community that helped develop me.” He had taught at Baldwin High for seven years,
though, for the last two years, he had been job-searching in Austin, Texas. His desire to
leave Baldwin City High stemmed in part from recent problems with colleagues and
administrators, and he now believed that the negative aspects of teaching outweighed the
positive. The job search in Austin had been difficult, and he anticipated that he would
remain at Baldwin High for two or three more years.
Mr. Abraham was an eleventh grade English teacher at Baldwin High. He taught
three sections of college preparatory American Literature and two sections of Advanced
Placement Language and Composition (AP). At Baldwin City High, all six periods met
every day for 55 minutes, except Wednesdays, when the faculty met for staff meetings
after school and classes were 40 minutes long. Mr. Abraham was hired by a well-liked,
popular principal whom he already knew. When she transferred to become a principal at
another high school a year ago, a young, former teacher took her place, so Mr. Abraham
had to adjust to the new school leadership. He had hoped that the new principal would
introduce more discipline into the students’ lives because, in his opinion, the school
leadership needed to enforce more rules: “I feel like the atmosphere and the culture on
campus is too lax. The students have a little bit too much power…They get their way too
much…The students are always pushing and always pushing.” He preferred stronger
school leadership that disciplined students and “empowered the faculty a little bit more so
[it] could take a bit more power back.” Mr. Abraham’s preference for an administration
that displayed and exercised authority revealed his view that the relationship between

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faculty and students was oppositional. This view also reflected his use of authority in his
own classroom, a topic that will be discussed later in this chapter.
Mr. Abraham often spent his lunch indoors, bringing food and microwaving it in
his classroom, while clubs met or students wandered in to chat with him. He sponsored
several clubs that met at lunch, such as the Zen Club, where students hung out and
listened to loud electronic dance music, and the Fellowship Club, where students
discussed their spiritual needs and prayed together. Mr. Abraham was Christian too, and
he spoke freely about his faith during these lunch meetings with the Fellowship Club. He
also sponsored a role-playing club. His sponsoring duties did not extend beyond school
hours and occurred only at lunch. As his profile on the Baldwin City High website
stated, he also enjoyed many hobbies, such as table-top role-playing games, painting
metal miniatures, attending Steampunk conventions and Renaissance fairs, and
volunteering at his church.
Mr. Abraham’s classroom was organized in seven rows of four to six student
desks that all faced the whiteboard at the front of the room. A whiteboard on the right
side of room contained the daily agenda, and a bulletin board adjacent left of the front
whiteboard posed a large poster titled “Mr. Abraham’s Dos and Don’ts” and a few school
announcements. Two small posters that displayed grammar rules hung above the front
white board. Mr. Abraham’s podium sat at the front right side of the room, and he kept
his grade book and quizzes inside. Otherwise, the walls were bare. The entire left side of
the room was lined with tall windows that reached the ceiling and offered a view of a
grassy lawn and classrooms beyond it. One tall bookshelf full of fictional books sat at
the back of the room, blocking an empty bulletin board. A large teacher’s nook was at

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the back of the room, where there was a teacher’s desk, a desktop computer, a printer, a
loveseat sofa and armchair, a small Ikea-like dinette table, and four large posters that
depicted fantasy worlds and characters. Mr. Abraham’s teacher aides graded student
work in the teacher’s nook, and Mr. Abraham went only to the nook when he needed to
retrieve something. A ceiling-mounted television hung above the teacher’s desk. There
was no student work on the walls, and the decorative posters hung only in his personal
area. In preparation for Back-to-School night, Mr. Abraham moved the tall bookcase and
stapled students’ poems on the bulletin board.
Period 4, the college preparatory American Literature class, consisted of 35
students, 20 boys and 15 girls. It was racially and culturally diverse with 11 White
(seven male, four female), 11 Black (seven male, four female), seven Latino (three male,
four female), and six Asian students (three male, three female). Because students chose
their seats from the first day of school, they somewhat racially segregated themselves. In
the left back corner of the seats sat five Black and three Latino males. There were also
two Asian male students, a Latina female, and two Black females who sat amongst them,
and one of the Latino males who sat in the last seat of one aisle was in a wheelchair and
accompanied by an aide. Most of the students who sat in the first two rows were White
with the exception of one Asian and one Latina female. Mostly White and two Asian
students sat on the right side of the room, and two Black females sat closest to the door.
The students were friendly with one another, many were sociable, and when Mr.
Abraham assigned a journal write at the beginning of the period, the regular participants
of the discussion were three Black males and one Black female: Carl, Kay, Al, and

99
Keisha. Three or four students participated regularly in reading-related discussions,
while the rest of the students remained silent or called out guessed answers.
Period 5, the AP Language and Composition class, also consisted of 35 students,
with 26 girls and nine boys. There were 17 White (five male, twelve female), five Latina
female, seven Black (one male, six female), four Middle Eastern (one male, three
female), and three Asian male students. A number of students might have been of mixed
racial heritage, as they were difficult to identify. The majority of students who sat in the
first two rows nearest the front whiteboard were female. Two quiet Latina females sat in
the last seats in the left rows, behind the highest performing student, a South Asian male.
With an exception of three or four students, most of the AP eleventh graders emerged
from the same honors tenth grade class. They were friendly and familiar with one
another. Three female cheerleaders sat on the right side of the room, while the front
corner of the left side was occupied by a talkative group of two White males and two
White females. At least ten students regularly participated in content-related discussions,
but in the only discussion about The Crucible that I observed, only two students
responded to Mr. Abraham’s questions, while the rest were silent.
The data below show that Mr. Abraham delivered instruction of low rigor and
exhibited aesthetic caring toward White students and a lack of caring toward Black
students. Regarding the rigor of his instruction, he offered only the recall of events in
literature-related discussions and assessments. He required low-level thinking from his
students, as displayed from his vocabulary assignment. The rigor of his reading quizzes,
which contained recall questions that require one-word answers, were eclipsed by his
emphasis on the extra credit questions, which required students to remember specific

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details about his personal life. He demonstrated aesthetic caring toward students who
appeared to be most similar to him in racial and cultural background, socio-economic
status, and personal interests and tastes (White, middle-class, honor-type or, as he
identified, “geeky” and “nerdy”). He showed a lack of caring toward Black students,
whose vernacular language he appropriated and mocked in order to humor the class,
though he did this at the expense of alienating minority students. The following
examples illustrate the ways in which Mr. Abraham’s beliefs about his students’ capacity
as learners impacted his decision to teach with low rigor. They also elaborate on the
ways in which his interactions with students, which exhibited aesthetic and lack of
caring, represented his relationships with students and his perceptions of those
relationships.
Rigor of Instruction. Mr. Abraham’s definition of rigorous instruction included
setting achievable expectations and presenting challenges:
Setting the bar just outside of a student’s comfort level…letting them know that
you’re not going to bring the level…down to what they want…For them to
achieve success in your classroom, they’re going to have to stretch and they’re
going to have to push themselves. And when they achieve that bar, you set it up
again a little bit higher and you keep going.

Giving an example of rigorous instruction, he suggested that the essay writing process
was a journey of affirmation and gentle nudging:
You acknowledge that they’ve done a good job with it. But at the same time, you
may comment at the end of it, saying, “Here’s how you could have made it better.
I would have liked to have seen you grapple with this concept in this way.” Or, “I
think you did a good job, but I think you could have gone further with it.”…So,
they feel affirmed but at the same time they feel challenged.

Mr. Abraham’s characterization of rigorous instruction touched on student motivation,
and he described it as pushing students to stretch their thinking. His depiction of a

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students’ stretching pointed more to effort than performance, and his vague definition did
not address the intentional scaffolding that he provided to push students’ thinking.
“Setting the bar outside of a students’ comfort level” did not point specifically to
intellectual challenge, and I did not ask him to clarify his use of this phrase. Instead of
giving an example that depicted rigorous expectations within a moment of instruction, his
example of rigorous instruction referred to feedback on an essay after instruction had
occurred. Contrary to his example, rigorous instruction lies in the ways in which teachers
set up the climate to introduce intellectual challenges, invite discussions charged with
questions that take students beyond the text, and require evidence and reasoning for ideas
presented by students. I also did not question his use of the words “bar” and “pushing,”
which in themselves did not reveal enough about his methods of instruction. Differing
from the descriptions of rigorous instruction provided above by Crawford (2008),
Mathews and Lowe (2011), and Matsumura et al., 2008, in which teachers present
opportunities to engage students in critical thinking, constructing knowledge, making
connections, and providing evidence for their assertions, Mr. Abraham considered
student motivation as a factor in rigorous instruction because he believed that presenting
a challenge without affirming students’ work led to their lack of motivation. This
connected his view of rigorous instruction to the students’ drive and interest to learn.
Mr. Abraham’s actions in Period 4, the college preparatory American literature
class, did not align with the characterizations of rigorous instruction above. The
following exchange about The Crucible demonstrated a tendency towards low rigor
because he did not regularly intellectually challenge his students:

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Mr. Abraham: Who breaks? Who does Reverend Hale talk to? And who does
Mary call out?
S
2
: Abby.
Mr. Abraham: Yes, she calls out Abby. Does Abby say, “Yes, it’s my fault?”
Who does Abigail blame?
S: Tituba.
Ss
3
laugh, mocking the name “Tituba” & pronouncing it different ways.
Carl (BM
4
): The black lady.
Mr. Abraham: Does he talk to Tituba by himself?
Ss: No
Mr. Abraham: Are they actually questioning Tituba?
Ss: No
Mr. Abraham: What are they doing?
Kay (BM): Interrogating her.
Mr. Abraham acts out Tituba’s interrogation with slapping noises and cowers,
feigning fear.
Mr. Abraham: If you’re getting hit with a switch, what will you do?
Ss: Confess.
Mr. Abraham: “I don’t want to get beat no mo’!”
He puts his arms up in a defensive position and cowers.
Ss laugh.
Mr. Abraham: Thomas Putnam wants to hang…How does Tituba react to
this? (loudly) ‘Oh, hell, yes, I’m a witch.” Is Tituba really a witch?
Then things spin out of control. The Reverend Hale asks, ‘Who
else was there?’ What does she say?
Ss call out.
Mr. Abraham: Putnam asks, ‘Was Goody Osborne there? Was _____
there?’ What are they trying to do?
Kay: Trying to get rid of them?
Mr. Abraham: Kind of. But before you make a person pay for a crime,
you have to find them guilty of a crime. So are Putnam and Hale
using Tituba?

This excerpt demonstrated low rigor because instead of asking students open-ended
questions that required critical thinking and giving student the opportunity to connect the
text with larger concepts and themes, Mr. Abraham asked low cognitive, recall questions

2
S: Student
3
Ss: Students

4
BM/F: Black Male/Female; WM/F: White Male/Female; LM/F: Latino Male/Female;
AM/F: Asian Male/Female

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that established only plot summary. Instead of constructing knowledge from the text, the
students copied Mr. Abraham’s outline on the whiteboard, and as he asked questions,
they called out answers without raising their hands. He would either wait to hear the
right answer or answer his own question, which he did several times in the exchange
above. Mr. Abraham solicited 13 questions in this brief exchange about Act I. Eight
questions required one-word, recall answers. The other five were yes-or-no questions.
Also, he asked several questions at once, giving students little time to think or process,
and presented leading questions that did not allow students to explore ideas or themes.
The level of rigor in this exchange was low because students did not learn through
dialogue; they simply shouted answers to Mr. Abraham’s plot-related questions.
This exchange also serves as an example of the intersection between rigor and
caring. Beyond demonstrating an aspect of low rigor, this interaction uncovered insight
into Mr. Abraham’s sense of humor and his lack of sensitivity to his students of color.
When the students mocked the name of Tituba and Mr. Abraham further entertained them
by assuming a Caribbean accent when he quoted and performed her fearful confession, he
made light of her beating and reinforced a cultural stereotype of which the students had
already made a farce. Carl, a Black male, was the only student who pointed out that
Tituba was Black, and his mention of her race was not addressed by Mr. Abraham, who
either did not hear Carl’s comment or ignored it. Mr. Abraham chose to use this moment
to entertain the students when he could have discussed the role of “the black lady” in The
Crucible, posed questions about the author’s intention or purpose for including Tituba in
the play, or brought up themes that juxtaposed seemingly civilized societies and religions
and savage ones. This not only pointed to a lack of rigor – Mr. Abraham did not connect

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the text to universal themes or concepts, nor did he allow students to look at Tituba’s race
with a critical eye – but a lack of caring and a show of insensitivity to students, which is
discussed in depth in the next section about teacher caring.
The following example also depicted a common occurrence that included low
rigor in Mr. Abraham’s class. Because Mr. Abraham permitted talking amongst students
and the blurting of questions during quizzing time, the students probed him for hints
about the extra credit question immediately after he passed out the quiz. On one occasion
in the college preparatory class, the extra credit question was “For the last two years, Mr.
Abraham has tried to move out of CA and into which state?” The following exchange
exemplifies Mr. Abraham’s encouragement of student focus on the non-content-related
extra question:
Mr. Abraham passes out quizzes from front row.
Al (BM) grumbles about extra credit question
Manuel (LM) asks question about extra credit question
Mr. Abraham: I’ll give you a hint. It’s one of the contiguous states, so it’s not
Alaska or Hawaii.
Jack (WM): Why do you want to move there?
Mr. Abraham: I’m just tired of California
FS
5
: Is there a beach?
Mr. Abraham: Yes, there are beaches
Ken (AM): Is the beach on a lake or on the ocean?
Kay (BM): Are you fond of cold weather?
Mr. Abraham: I love cold weather. I am fond of cold weather.
Ss are quiet.
Neil (BM) raises hand.
Mr. Abraham: Yes, Neil?
Neil: Is the state large?
Mr. Abraham: You guys always focus on the extra credit question. [Smiling]
There are 5 more questions.
[Observer’s comment] What does this show if kids are worried about the extra
credit question?
BMS: I don’t know #3. Ugh.

5
FS: Female student; MS: Male student

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Al: Do you know the name of the football team?
Kay: Do you like major metropolitan cities?
Mr. Abraham: No, not really. I like cities, but not large metropolitan ones. That’s
why I don’t like Los Angeles.
Carl (BM) speaks.
Mr. Abraham to Carl: Just relax. Close your eyes and it’ll come to you.
Carl: How many vowels are in it?
Mr. Abraham: I’m not gonna tell you but there are vowels in it.
Sandy (WF): How many?
Mr. Abraham: I’m not going to tell you.
Carl: How many consonants?
Mr. Abraham: I’m not going to tell you.
Ss talk.
Mr. Abraham: There’s a map on the wall over there (points to back wall). I’m not
going to let you get up & go to it, but…
Carl: Is it close or far from the equator?
Mr. Abraham: For some people it’s close, for some people it’s far. All right, pass
your quizzes up.
Ss: (surprised) What?!
[Observer’s comment] Students are not ready or having been taking the quiz
during all this talking.
Mr. Abraham: What? You need more time. Okay, I’ll give you another minute or
a half.
Al raises his hand.
Al: Does it get hot in the state?
Mr. Abraham: Yes, most people would say it does. What do you mean by hot?
Al: Like, over 80 degrees.
Mr. Abraham: Yes, but most every state gets to 80 degrees at some point in the
year.
Alice (WF): Is it humid?
MS: Does it snow there?
Mr. Abraham: I don’t think so…. Maybe.
Carl: Does spelling count?
Mr. Abraham: If you don’t spell it correctly, I’ll be concerned. All right, that’s
more than enough time. Pass your quizzes up please.
Mr. Abraham collects quizzes from the front of the room as students pass them
forward.
Carl and Mr. Abraham converse.
Carl: I guessed Virginia.
Mr. Abraham: It’s not Virginia.
Sal (BM): It’s not Virginia?
Carl: (smiling, looks back at Sal) No.
Sal: What’s the answer [to the extra credit question]? (When Mr. Abraham has all
the quizzes)
Mr. Abraham has not left the front of the room at all.

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Mr. Abraham: Since when did I not go over the quiz?
Sal: Skip one through five.

In this interaction, which lasted seven minutes between Mr. Abraham’s distribution and
collection of the handout, students asked 15 questions about the extra credit question.
This quiz-taking moment in class showed that Mr. Abraham elicited the students’
digression away from the content-related questions about The Crucible to the extra credit
question about his life. The quiz questions, which consisted of detailed recall questions
about the play’s plot, such as “What do Abigail and the girls pretend to see on a beam of
the church?”, did not give students opportunities to practice critical thinking or make
connections to larger themes and concepts. Furthermore, he did not give them the
opportunity to engage with the reading, and his choice of quiz questions showed that he
had no interest in gauging and addressing the students’ understanding of the text. The
content of the quiz and his actions during the quiz did not encourage students’ interest in
The Crucible. He presented the content in way that was irrelevant to them, and his
instruction, as displayed during this quiz, did not motivate students to read. His lack of
engagement in the content might explain the lack of student participation in class
discussions. Mr. Abraham appeared to be unaware of the students’ disinterest in the play
when he said jokingly, “You guys always focus on the extra credit question. There are
five more questions.” Instead of focusing their attention on the quiz questions about The
Crucible, he answered their inquiries, thereby ingraining in the students a sense that the
success of their quiz grade hinged on correctly answering the only extra credit question.
Also, during the seven minutes of quizzing, Mr. Abraham invited students to look at a
map at the back of the room, a suggestion that was unrelated to the quiz itself. Mr.

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Abraham’s behavior demonstrated that he did not value the content or the students’ input
enough to establish and build from the students’ understanding of The Crucible.
Mr. Abraham’s low-rigor curricular decision to approach The Crucible with a plot
outline emerged from his belief about college preparatory students. He felt that they had
a weak grasp of the story and needed class time to establish the events in the play. He
also viewed outlining as a time for students who did not read to become familiar with the
story:
I felt like it was necessary because, number one, I know for a fact that there are a
lot of students that just didn’t do the reading. And number two, there were a lot of
students that were doing the reading but weren’t a hundred percent
comprehending what they were reading.

He also announced these low expectations to the students, preceding the outlining of Act
II with “Let’s summarize Act II for the people who didn’t read.” Mr. Abraham not only
believed that some students did not complete reading homework but that those who read
did not comprehend the text. Because he engaged the students with low-level, recall
questions, he could not assess whether they read or whether they understood the text. The
format of class discussion, in which students called out answers, and his recall, yes-or-no
questions did not capture student understanding. As the discussion and quiz examples
above illustrated, Mr. Abraham did not hold students accountable for thinking, and his
beliefs that college preparatory students did not read or understand what they read
showed that he was not committed to their learning.
Mr. Abraham’s perception of the AP class in Period 5 and his beliefs about AP
students’ abilities were more positive than those about college preparatory students,
though his pedagogical methods did not change. Mr. Abraham expressed confidence

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that, beyond comprehending The Crucible, the AP students in Period 5 actively sought to
answer their own questions about the text: “I felt definitely with my AP students…they
went out and tried to answer those questions for what they didn’t understand on their
own.” He implied here that AP students were more motivated to understand the text than
the college preparatory students. A discussion below about The Crucible with the AP
students revealed the opposite. With his use of language and word choice, this example
showed that Mr. Abraham preferred fostering a casual rapport with the students over
intellectually challenging them, and he used humor to lead them away from content-
related dialogue:
Mr. Abraham: Where does [the story] get confusing for you?
Ss don’t respond.
Mr. Abraham: Turn to page 90.
He summarizes and quotes.
Mr. Abraham: Proctor is speaking here…Danforth.
He explains who Cheever is.
MS: Can men be witches?
Mr. Abraham: Yes. Except that nowadays they’re called warlocks. Back then
called witches.
He summarizes dialogue between Proctor and Judge Danforth.
4 students’ heads are down.
Two-thirds of the class has book open.
Mr. Abraham: Parris is always trying to cast aspersions.
He reads aloud.
Mr. Abraham: That’s just him being a dingleberry.
Ss laugh.
Female student: What’s that?
Naomi (BF): That’s just a butt nugget.
Mr. Abraham: Yes, butt nugget.
Naomi plays with Alexa’s (WF) hair in front of her as Mr. Emerson continues.
3 students in back read the play quietly.

Mr. Abraham’s actions in this excerpt demonstrated low rigor because, instead of letting
student construct knowledge, make connections, and engage in higher order thinking, he
summarized the story and referred only to the plot and not to any larger concepts or ideas

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that related to the text. Instead of giving students opportunities to make their own
assertions and search the text for evidence, he demonstrated that he cared only about
establishing the plot, while the AP students sat passively. Mr. Abraham began with an
open-ended question to gauge students’ understanding of the play, but when they did not
respond, he launched into a lecture of summarizing and quoting the text. Besides one
student’s non-content-related question about witches, the AP students were quiet, even
disengaged, as some put their heads down and some read quietly. Plus, his use of
“dingleberry” might have humored students, but it distracted them from a content-related
discussion. This excerpt further reaffirmed that Mr. Abraham did not value the content
enough to engage students in intellectually challenging ways. Again, Mr. Abraham did
not hold the AP students accountable for understanding the play, which was evident in
their lack of interest during the discussion. A disparity existed between his beliefs about
AP students’ abilities and the absence of opportunities for these students to show those
abilities in class. His instruction did not invite the AP students to practice critical
thinking, so I was unable to determine whether his beliefs about them were drawn from
actual assessments of their academic performance.
The low level of rigor in Mr. Abraham’s class was reflected not only in his
facilitation of class discussions but also in his assignments. Mr. Abraham assigned The
Crucible Vocabulary Project to both his college preparatory and AP classes. Directions
were the following:
• Locate each word below in “The Crucible,” and write down the complete
sentence in which it appears, along with the page number it appears on. (15
points)
• Using context clues within the sentence, write down what you think each
word means. (30 points)

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• Look up each word’s correct definition and record it in the space provided.
(15 points)

This assignment lacked rigor because it required little thinking. Students were assigned
to copy the text, guess a definition, and copy the dictionary. Students were not asked to
construct knowledge from discovering the words’ meanings, nor were they given an
opportunity to make connections between the words and the meaning of the text. They
were not asked justify their guessed definition by explaining the context clues in the
text’s sentence or apply the word in a new context or sentence. Upon giving instructions,
Mr. Abraham further distanced the assignment from the content of the text: “Go to
Google. Type in quotations ‘text of the Crucible.’ You can do searches on that page.”
Instead of finding the words within the text as they read, students were encouraged to use
the Internet for the sole purpose of completing this assignment, which was unrelated to
their understanding of the text. In other words, Mr. Abraham isolated the homework
activity from the experience of reading the play. This low-rigor assignment implied that
he viewed this assignment as a task that involved Google and word searches, not one that
would improve the students’ understanding of language or text.
While Mr. Abraham defined rigorous instruction as “setting the bar just outside of
a student’s comfort level,” his actions in class did not demonstrate that his definition
referred to intellectual rigor. He did not inquire about his students’ understanding of The
Crucible, nor did he elicit interest around the themes and assertions presented by the play.
His pedagogical choices included whole-class discussions where he posed recall, plot-
related questions that were volleyed with one-word answers, and when he heard the
correct answer called out, he would move on. He did not structure his lessons to include

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student input, and he did not engage them in critical thinking or in connecting themes in
The Crucible to sources of knowledge beyond the text. The students were barely held
accountable for reading and understanding the text by quiz questions that required the
recall of details from the text. Later in this section, I discuss Mr. Abraham’s beliefs
about students that emerged from his choices and actions in class as they related to rigor
of instruction.
Teacher Caring. The teacher-student relationship and classroom climate are
affected by the extent to which a teacher expresses caring towards his students (Gettinger
et al., 2011). These exhibitions of caring can shape students’ attitudes towards and
experiences in school, as well as their level of motivation and academic risk-taking
(Furrer & Skinner, 2003; Hamre & Pianta, 2001). Mr. Abraham characterized caring as a
delicate balance and believed that he was a caring teacher:
That can be a difficult line to walk sometimes. I think it’s me. I think it means
being available for your students when you can. But I don’t think you should
totally give your life for your students…Part of being a teacher is sacrificing. For
me, I think the biggest sacrifice is my time…part of being a good teacher is being
compassionate. But I also think that being fair is just as important…Teachers that
aren’t fair are the teachers that are not respected by students. And students
know…You have to be approachable…And your students have to trust you. They
have to know that you trust them and they trust you. And with some students,
giving that trust is really difficult. As a teacher, you’re going to get burned
sometimes by students who you give trust to and they don’t return that.

Like Noddings (1986), Mr. Abraham believed that there must be reciprocity in the
teacher-student relationship. He called for the necessity of trust; she talks about self-
worth and respect. Describing caring teachers as self-sacrificial, compassionate, fair,
approachable, and trustworthy, his characterizations focused on a teacher’s attributes,
whereas, Mathews and Lowe (2011), Roberts (2010), and Valenzuela (1999) focused on

112
teachers’ actions. Unlike Mr. Abraham’s illustration, the authors’ descriptions of caring
focus on teachers’ interactions with students, particularly a teachers’ deliberate approach
to creating a positive and respectful environment for students. Mr. Abraham believed
that time was the most precious commodity that he could offer to students as a symbol of
caring. For him, devoting time to students occurred at the expense of one’s personal life,
which created a difficult balance for teachers. Also, his view of a caring teacher centered
on the extent to which a teacher was willing to bend or accommodate to his students,
whether it be sacrificing time, understanding, trust, or compassion. He viewed caring as
occurring at the expense of the teacher, unlike the authors above, who highlight the
actions of caring teachers in the classroom.
Mr. Abraham’s lack of physical proximity to most students revealed a lack of
caring. He stood at the front of the room all class period because the aisles were too
narrow: “When I’m walking up and down the aisles, I feel very constrained.” He used
close proximity as a classroom management strategy for discouraging misbehavior: “I
know that my presence right next to a student or between students can be a deterrent for
whatever it is that they’re doing.” Instead of encouraging ease from his close proximity,
Mr. Abraham used closeness to provoke discomfort. One unusual but revealing instance
in the AP class happened when the class discussed a non-fiction article. Mr. Abraham
and a female student openly addressed his lack of proximity to most students:
Mr. Abraham: Why did he write this?
Barbara (BF): To point out the flaws (Mr. Abraham approaches her in the
aisle)…that the government…(Pauses. Cringes, smiles, looks up at Mr.
Abraham) You make me nervous.
Mr. Abraham: I make you nervous. Be glad that I stand at the front of the
audience because if I did this (walks up to her and paces near her quickly),
then you wouldn’t like that.

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Ss laugh.

Because Barbara was unaccustomed to Mr. Abraham’s close physical presence, she
stumbled over her response. Speaking to his rare shifting down the aisle, Mr. Abraham
drew humor out of Barbara’s nervousness. His presence was intimidating toward
students because they were accustomed to his habit of planting himself at the front of the
room. In fact, because he stood at the front throughout the class period and roamed only
from left to right, he interacted mostly with students in the first two rows. One example
highlighted a common occurrence in which his non-content-related conversations with
front-row AP students during a quiz cultivated positive relationships:
One student asks for 4 more minutes for the quiz.
Mr. Abraham: I can do three, but four is pushing it…(joking)…I’m not a dictator.
He stands at left side front and talks to Elaine (WF) and Gemma (WF) about
women and make-up.
Mr. Abraham: …I really feel for you females. That’s why I married my wife.
She’s not a make-up person.
Mr. Abraham walks to the center of the whiteboard.
Mr. Abraham to the class: Everybody knows it’s supposed to get cold through the
week, right?
[Observer’s comment] It’s still quiz time! Isn’t he interrupting their work?
Ss talk about weather.
Mr. Abraham says he prefers cold weather. Students talk.

In this exchange, Mr. Abraham showed that his tendency to anchor himself at the front of
the room resulted in bonding and forming positive relationships with the students who sat
in the first rows, who were predominantly White in both the AP and college preparatory
classes. Mr. Abraham’s distance from most students meant that he was unable to
cultivate self-worth and positive relationships among them, which Noddings (1986)
insisted is necessary behavior for a caring teacher. In this instance, instead of roaming
the aisles during the quiz to gauge students’ individual needs, he waited at the front of the

114
room for students to finish and proceeded to carry on a friendly non-content-related
conversation with Elaine and Gemma that was audible to most students who were still
taking the quiz. Approximately six minutes into the ten-minute quiz, Mr. Abraham
started a non-content-related conversation with the entire class about forecasted weather.
Beyond the issues of teacher caring, these actions demonstrated Mr. Abraham’s lack of
respect for both the students’ thinking time and for the task itself. This lack of caring
emerged from Mr. Abraham’s lack of respect for his students, and he took away the value
of their activity by initiating an irrelevant discussion. Mr. Abraham’s actions in this
exchange served as another example of the intertwining relationship between teacher
caring and rigor of instruction. The absence of caring emerged when he showed a lack of
commitment to their academic achievement.
Mr. Abraham’s aesthetic caring emerged not only from his distant physical
proximity to students but from content of the quiz questions themselves, which were
accompanied by one extra credit question that was non-content related and tested the
students on their memory of Mr. Abraham’s personal life. The teacher-student dynamic
surrounding these extra credit questions were elaborated upon in the rigor section above.
Mr. Abraham’s use of these questions revealed his view of caring and his approach to
building relationships with students. Mr. Abraham asserted that these extra credit
questions served two purposes:
The first purpose of the extra credit question is to give those students who maybe
haven’t prepared as well as they possibly could have just a chance to accumulate
some additional points. I don’t want any of my quizzes to wreck anybody’s
grades but, at the same time, I still want to see if they’re doing their work. So
that’s number one. Number two, there’s two different kinds of extra credit
questions. Most of them are about me personally. And then, every once in
awhile, I fill in one that’s…additionally related to what we’ve been reading…just

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to give the kids a chance to earn some additional points…The other ones about
me are to help develop rapport with me as a teacher…The center of my
philosophy of teaching is building these relationships with the students. If I put
myself out there and, I mean, just in silly, goofy little ways but the personal things
that I can put out there, then my hope is that my students will feel like they’re
getting bread of the butter. And number two, that they’ll feel comfortable sharing
personal things with me.

Extra credit questions appended to the quizzes about The Crucible included the
following:
• Name one of the clubs Mr. Abraham sponsors at CCHS.
• Mr. Abraham’s anniversary is Oct. 26
th
. How many years will he have been
married this coming anniversary?
• What is Mr. Abraham’s favorite color?
• What did Mr. Abraham do for a living before becoming a teacher?

Mr. Abraham’s reasoning for including these extra credit questions uncovered
aesthetically caring characteristics. On one hand, he wanted to keep students accountable
for completing the reading homework. On the other hand, he did not want the quizzes to
“wreck anybody’s grade.” These extra credit questions were his way of showing caring,
in which he could afford them an opportunity to pass the class. In a way, they were held
accountable, but the extra credit questions worked against his intention of accountability
because they gave students the chance to progress without completing the work. Mr.
Abraham’s goal was to pass his students, and this approach to accountability was
indicative of aesthetic caring. His intention was focused not on their learning or
understanding but on “setting the bar” low enough for them to move onto the next grade.
Furthermore, his thoughts about the content of the extra credit questions showed a
lack of caring and reciprocity. He believed that a natural byproduct of his divulging of
personal information was the students’ divulging of personal information. This logic
demonstrated a lack of understanding because he placed the responsibility of relationship

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building on the students, instead of seeing reciprocity in their understanding of each
other. His approach to building relationships did not invite students to give input or open
up to him. In fact, he did not create opportunities to learn about them. Although Mr.
Abraham asserted that the extra credit questions helped him develop a rapport with
students, he did not create an environment that encouraged the students’ voice. These
questions dismissed the importance for students to share their knowledge and life
experiences and took away the opportunity for Mr. Abraham to reaffirm their self-worth
and belonging.
Mr. Abraham’s caring was best captured in his relationships with particular
groups of students. He appreciated relationships in which certain students and he
experienced an immediate attachment:
The best way I can describe the rapport I have with any of my students that I have
rapport with is it’s just a personal connection. There’s something about their
personality that I get. And there’s something about my personality they get. It’s
almost like the connection is immediate. And so it’s almost like we just click…I
think those students feel like they’re kind of geeky or nerdy or...like a student on
the fringe. But those are almost always the kind of kids that I connect with the
most quickly because I was that kind of a kid in high school.

Mr. Abraham’s view of positive relationships demonstrated a lack of caring because he
showed a commitment to only particular groups of students. He used words such as
“rapport,” “click,” and “connection” to describe a spark that occurred without effort. He
nurtured relationships with students who reminded him of his high school self. He
elaborated on this type of relationship when he talked about Jack, a White male student in
the college preparatory class: “I think Jack and I connected right away because Jack is
almost exactly the same kind of kid that I was in high school. And I see where he’s
coming from.” Because Mr. Abraham identified himself as a “geeky” or “nerdy” person,

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he was more sensitive and empathetic to similar types of students. Using Jack as an
example, Mr. Abraham demonstrated that he naturally cared about a specific type of
student. He did not have to make an effort and appreciated the ease of falling into
positive relationships with these students, which shed light on his lack of effort to form
positive relationships with students who appeared to have little in common with him. He
did not espouse or demonstrate a commitment to all students despite their differences
from his cultural background, socio-economic background, or worldview. In fact, he
expressed futility in building relationships with students who did not seem to be similar
to him:
I spent a lot of time and energy trying to connect with them. I’ll go out of my way
to talk to them when they come into class, at the beginning of class. I’m moving
seats around pretty regularly…I will oftentimes try to move those guys to the
front so I can at least have some sort of proximity connection with them. And
then, I’m a human being so I’ll be honest. These are not students that I never
connect with. I try and whether they just don’t have a desire to connect with me or
they’re just so different or maybe even hostile towards having a connection with
me. I do my best to find at least something about them that I can compliment
them...whether they’re dressed nice or whether their hair looks good that day or
whether I’ve heard that they’ve done something that I can praise them on...

Mr. Abraham’s words revealed a lack of caring because he faulted perceived non-
connected students for their lack of desire to connect or their hostility toward his efforts;
in other words, he placed blame on these particular students for rebuking his efforts, not
on his lack of trying. In addition, he did not get to know them personally, nor did he
address his perceived conflict with them or foster their self-worth and mutual respect. He
lacked the persistence to connect deeply with them, resorting to connecting with “hostile”
students by complimenting their clothing. These superficial attempts at connecting with

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students exhibited aesthetic caring and were the extent of Mr. Abraham’s endeavors at
building positive relationships with students who were different from him.
Further illuminating his lack of caring, Mr. Abraham’s later segue into race
clarified his discomfort with those particular students with whom he did not connect. His
exclusionary approach to relationships with students took on racial overtones when he
characterized challenging teacher-student relationships:
…most of the students that I have difficulty connecting with and then I’ve
difficulty disciplining are my African American male students…my experience
with African American males has been that they don’t appreciate my quirkiness
so much. And also, they’re simply not into the same things that I am. And
whereas, I am not quick to judge the things that they are into, but they are quick to
judge things that I’m into. And I’m just human. That has a putting-off effect for
me.

Mr. Abraham voiced a particular lack of caring for Black students, who signified the
opposite of his racial and cultural identity and socio-economic status. Instead of making
an effort to understand each student and viewing difference as a learning opportunity, Mr.
Abraham showed a lack of respect for their identities and experiences of minority
students and exhibited cultural insensitivity. Again, he placed the onus of relationship
building on the students, faulting Black male students for not connecting with him.
Although he proclaimed himself to be tolerant, his words and actions conveyed that he
was not tolerant or receptive to his Black students’ identities and voices. Mr. Abraham
believed that race was not a factor in his perception of students because he taught himself
to ignore race when he was a new teacher as a Los Angeles Teaching Fellow at a
predominantly Black and Latino high school: “I trained myself, not almost to seem to be
colorblind, but to see the student rather than the color of the student.” This ability to see
the student and not the student’s race conflicted with his behavior in class, which

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revealed tension with Black male students. He recognized his relationship problem with
this group of students, and this conflict juxtaposed Mr. Abraham’s beliefs about himself
as a near-colorblind teacher and his realization that his relationship with Black male
students was in part impacted by racial or cultural difference. Mr. Abraham’s actions and
espoused beliefs revealed aesthetic caring toward White, middle-class students like
himself and a lack of caring toward Black male students. In her study of relationship
quality, Davis (2006) explored the concept of relational press, which she defined as “the
enactment of students’ and teachers’ beliefs, motives, and values regarding relationships
in the classroom” (p. 195). Mr. Abraham’s unconscious prejudice toward Black students
and his perceptions about who they were impacted their mutual relational dynamic in the
classroom. Although he espoused colorblindness, Dovidio, Kawakami, and Gaertner
(2002) and Trawalter, Richeson, and Shelton (2009) would have argued that his implicit
prejudice emerged from his nonverbal and verbal interactions with Black students. In
addition, as Babad, Bernieri, and Rosenthal (1991) found that students could easily detect
teacher differential treatment toward different groups of students, the Black students’
awareness of his prejudice impacted the relationships that develop in the classroom
between Mr. Abraham and the students and among the students themselves.
Mr. Abraham’s lack of caring was further reinforced by his use of language.
Although Mr. Abraham professed his challenge of interacting with Black male students,
he used Black Vernacular often, freely and mockingly. When students in the college
preparatory American Literature class contributed in a whole class discussion to the
outline of Act I of The Crucible, Mr. Abraham rephrased their words on the board for the
sake of eliciting humor: “Girls in the forest (Da Devil’s home, yo!)” and “Parris no say

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nothing.” In speech, he regularly dropped a phrase colloquial English, slang, or Black
Vernacular to entertain or draw his students’ attention: “Just chill. Stay here,” “It’s
wack,” “That was shady,” and “Yo, yo, yo, pass up your homework.” Because he
emphasized these phrases in his tone of voice and inflection, this effort to draw attention
to himself showed that these phrases were not a part of his everyday conversational
language. They were deliberate word choices intended to make students laugh. In a
common occurrence during class discussion, one example highlighted his use of Black
Vernacular to belittle a Black male student while humoring the rest of the students:
Mr. Abraham: How does [John] respond to [Elizabeth]?
Carl (BM): He doesn’t believe it.
Mr. Abraham: What’s a shorter word for this?
Kay (BM): Poppycock?
Mr. Abraham: That’s a good word, but no.
Students call out words.
Kevin (AM): Skeptic? (Mr. Abraham cannot hear because students are calling
out.)
MS: Flibbertigibbet.
MS: Carl, you’re a flibbertigibbet.
Carl (not smiling and looking tired): That’s not even a word, dog.
Mr. Abraham: “Flibbertigibbet” is a word, dog. “Incredulous” is the word.
[Observer’s comment] Mr. Abraham emphasizes the word “dog” as he mocks
Carl’s use of the word.

Mr. Abraham’s response demonstrated a lack of caring because he embarrassed Carl and
did not enforce rules of respect. Instead of admonishing the joke by Carl’s peer, Mr.
Abraham joined the humor at the expense of Carl’s dignity by correcting him and
mocking his use of Black Vernacular. Also, Mr. Abraham implicitly chided Carl’s use of
Black Vernacular in his emphasized enunciation of “dog” while using his comment as a
mechanism for entertainment and humor. Showing an absence of caring, Mr. Abraham’s
behavior did not foster a positive emotional environment grounded in rules about respect,

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nor did he encourage self-worth or exhibit cultural sensitivity to the needs of individual
students. In fact, this type of relationship between teacher and students was similar to
Rist’s (1970) observation of the kindergarten teacher, whose disrespectful behavior
toward the “slow” learners invited imitative behavior from the “fast” learners. Mr.
Abraham’s inaction when a male student teased Carl condoned and encouraged further
bullying. This clear lack of caring demonstrated that Mr. Abraham humiliated and
allowed other students to bully particular students, which created an emotionally
unfriendly environment that disregarded a need for mutual respect and belonging.
Mr. Abraham’s lack of caring was reinforced by his reasoning behind using
teenage language, or, more specifically, his perception of teenage language. He believed
that using colloquial language, slang, and Black Vernacular made him more likeable:
I think they appreciate [the use of colloquialism and slang]. Sometimes, I just do
it to be funny. I’m not an entertainer. I’m a teacher. But I’m pragmatic enough
to say that it’s easier to teach students who are entertained…I also use the slang
and colloquialisms, especially the kind of language that they use or that I hear
them using, to help them relate to what I’m teaching and also help them relate to
me.

Mr. Abraham believed that his efforts to emulate his students’ speech were acts of caring,
as if he were reaching out to them to show his understanding of them through his
understanding of their language. Instead of weaving academic vocabulary into his
speech, so that students gained exposure to new words used in the context of content-
related discussions, he used his perception of their everyday language in order to
entertain. This pedagogical decision reflected a lack of caring because it opposed a
caring teacher’s commitment to student achievement. Mr. Abraham interspersed his
language with these phrases to entertain and help students better relate to the content and

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to him. Though his intent might have been to create a positive environment by making
the content accessible, his choice of language showed that he held low expectations for
his students’ ability grasp English-related content, as if he felt it necessary for him to
speak their language in order for them to understand. This act demeaned their capacity as
English students.
The following example was the best example of Mr. Abraham lack of caring as
reflected by his choice of words. These moments of awkwardness occurred regularly
when students responded quizzically to Mr. Abraham’s use of slang or Black Vernacular.
This exchange happened when college preparatory students took a quiz about The
Crucible:
Sam (BM): Do you have white out?
Mr. Abraham: I do. (He walks across the front of the room)
Sally (AF in front of Steven) passes her Wite-Out to Steven.
Mr. Abraham: Whoa, thanks, Sabrina, for hookin’ a brutha up.
Mostly Black males: Whoa.
Al (BM): Elaborate.
Mr. Abraham: It means that [a person has given something that you need].
Students quiet down and take quiz.

Mr. Abraham showed a lack of caring when he adopted Black Vernacular with the
affected enunciation of “hookin’ a brutha up” because his intention to be entertaining
revealed cultural insensitivity that alienated Black students. Rooted in Black history, this
phrase contains numerous connotations, which might explain the Black male students’
immediate expression of discomfort and confusion. Al’s response of “Elaborate” might
have been a request for Mr. Abraham to explain his choice of words in this specific
circumstance. The confidence and ease with which he conveyed this phrase also showed
his unawareness of the effect of his language on the students of color. Mr. Abraham,

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oblivious to the gravity of his choice of language, explained the meaning of the phrase
itself to which the Black male students did not respond. But he missed the possibility of
the inappropriateness of his remark and eliminated the opportunity to dialogue about his
use of “hookin’ a brutha up,” which might have opened up an intellectually stimulating
conversation about the effect of language and word choice in particular settings and
social contexts. As a result, Mr. Abraham elicited humor by using Black Vernacular and
exhibited a lack of caring in his disrespect of the Black students.
A caring teacher values the experiences of students and integrates students’ skills
and knowledge into his curricular decisions (Bondy et al., 2007). He values them as
individuals, creates a learning environment with explicit rules of respect and pro-social
behavior, and fosters a sense of self-worth and belonging (Matsumura et al., 2008;
Noddings, 1986). Authentically caring teachers show commitment to student
achievement and view their students’ identities, voices, and communities as assets rather
than deficits (Valenzuela, 1999).
Mr. Abraham’s actions did not reflect the characteristics of a caring teacher
described above. He might have been well intended in his efforts to connect with
students and make learning relevant and accessible, but the logic and reasoning behind
his approaches did not result in creating positive relationships or a safe learning
environment. In his justification of his distant physical proximity, he believed that close
proximity to the students effectively discouraged misbehavior. As a consequence, he
spent entire class periods at the front of the room and cultivated close, positive
relationships with students who were predominantly White and sat in the front rows. He
included extra credit, non-content-related questions about his personal life on the reading

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quizzes because, while he wanted to keep students accountable for reading at home, he
also wanted them to pass the class. Also, he believed that the extra credit questions
elicited openness from the students, but placing himself as the topic of these questions
did not give students the opportunity to share anything about their own lives. He showed
aesthetic care for students who were similar to him in race and socio-economic status
(White and middle class) and showed a lack of caring toward Black students when he
exhibited intolerance. Lastly, he used Black Vernacular and slang to entertain and make
the content accessible, but this decision revealed low expectations for the students’ ability
to understand the content and represented insensitive humor at the expense of the Black
students in his class. Overall, Mr. Abraham was a teacher who lacked caring and was
unconscious of the effects that his decisions and actions had on his students.
Conclusion
Mr. Abraham seemed to hold deficit and generalized views about his students and
their capacity as learners. He believed that college preparatory students had poor reading
comprehension skills and could only be trusted to focus when they sat in rows facing
forward. On the other hand, he believed that AP students had high reading
comprehension skills and were motivated enough to seek answers to their questions about
a text. While he praised AP students for the passion and vigor they showed towards the
world and believed that they held a similar worldview as he did, he thought that college
preparatory students were narrow-minded and had worldviews that were largely shaped
by media.
Mr. Abraham’s background and personal experiences informed his views of
students, which is similar to Rist’s (1970) proposal that a teacher’s “normative reference

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group” – backgrounds and attributes set by the teacher as norms – serves as the basis for
the subjective evaluation of students, an assertion that was supported by Gollub and
Sloan (1978) and McCarthey (1997). Mr. Abraham compared perceptions of his own
youth to his views of college preparatory students, and although he believed that his own
worldview was expansive and tolerant, his speech and actions in class revealed a narrow-
mindedness and intolerance toward students’ viewpoints.
Therefore, Mr. Abraham was unconscious of his own ideology and of his desire to
impose his ideology on his students. On one hand, he believed that he was objective and
invited a student input. On the other hand, he also felt charged with the responsibility of
exposing students to the real world. Mr. Abraham’s goal to illuminate his students’
limited perspectives belied his belief that his classroom was an open environment where
students could share and examine their knowledge and beliefs. This disconnect emerged
from Mr. Abraham’s inability to relate his actions in the classroom to his beliefs about his
students.
Mr. Abraham’s behavior in class and interactions with students revealed his
beliefs about their abilities as learners. Because he believed that college preparatory
students had low reading comprehension skills, he conducted class discussions about The
Crucible by asking low-level, recall questions that required one-word answers. He did
not move any further into the text than establishing a surface-level understanding of the
plot, and he did not use discussion time to ascertain the students’ understanding of the
text. He believed that AP students had higher reading comprehension skills, but his
method of facilitating discussions in the AP class did not affirm this belief because he did
not provide them with the opportunity to share their understanding. When he introduced

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a contemporary issue that related with the text, he imposed his own opinions and beliefs
on the class discussion and did not explore students’ perspectives. His actions
demonstrated that he had little interest in establishing students’ understanding of the
content, and his imposition of opinions and beliefs showed that he had little interest in
their perspectives and experiences.
Teacher beliefs about students’ ability also affect their demonstrations of caring.
Mr. Abraham showed aesthetic caring toward students similar to him in race and socio-
economic status and a lack of caring toward minority students. He felt little need to put
effort into building relationships with White, middle-class students, and he felt that these
students recognized and respected his authority. This implied that he held the notion that
students should accept his authority because he was in a position of power, one aspect of
the construct of authority that Crawford (2008) described when she distinguished
between the authority of possessing knowledge and exercising control. His behavior
toward college preparatory, especially Black male students, supported Crawford’s (2008)
description of a display of authority that “captures the behavioristic view that students are
to accept the knowledge that a teacher professes as truth without question simply because
he or she is a teacher, and teachers ‘know’” (p. 1708). By informing students that he
dictated the class for their benefit, Mr. Abraham took away the opportunity to build an
environment of mutual respect, to show that he valued each individual, or to foster in his
students a sense of self-worth, all of which are actions of a caring teacher (Noddings,
1986). This lack of caring conflicted with Mr. Abraham’s espoused belief that building
positive relationships with students increased his effectiveness as a teacher.

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Overall, Mr. Abraham was a teacher unconscious of his own ideology. He taught
content by employing low-level, recall thinking that dulled students’ engagement with the
text. He did not challenge his students with questions that provoked critical thinking or
encourage them to make connections between the texts and other sources of knowledge
that might have better helped students make meaning of the content. He believed that he
was a caring teacher who understood his students and their academic needs, but he
cleaved to his generalizations about them as selfish, narrow-minded teenagers. He
offered no opportunities for students to share their knowledge and experiences. His
interactions with students demonstrated a lack of cultural awareness, especially in his
exchanges with Black male students. This case study highlights the idea that teachers
may tend to bond with students who are similar to them and have difficulty bonding with
students who are different from them. Mr. Abraham’s lack of reflective practice and his
inability to critically examine his own ideologies prevented him from being a rigorous
and authentically caring teacher.
Case Study #2: Ms. Leslie at Petry High
Introduction. Petry High School was a low-income high school adjacent to Los
Angeles Unified School District. It was closed in 1981 then reopened in 1998, joining
two larger neighboring high schools. When the district established open enrollment few
years ago, parents could choose to send their child to any school in the district. Because
the two larger high schools had poor reputations for gang violence and because Petry
High’s overall standardized test scores were the highest in the district, Petry High’s
population increased rapidly to 1,900 students this year. In the last five years, the English
Department had grown from 12 to 20 teachers. The school constructed numerous brown

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portable classrooms away from the main buildings and around the sports fields. The
administrative office occupied portable rooms, while the two main buildings contained
approximately 40 classrooms. Petry High had recently built an enormous, tan-painted
concrete performance auditorium where school and local community events were held. It
was the largest building on campus and visible from the adjacent freeway. Populated
mostly by portables, Petry High exuded a vibe of temporary existence, as if the hastily
constructed structures could disappear in an instant. Only the performing arts theatre
seemed permanent.
Petry High was located in a predominantly Latino community, and its student
population was 76% Latino, 12% Black, 6% Asian Pacific Islander and Filipino, and 4%
White (Ed-Data Partnership, 2011). Interestingly, 72% of teaching population did not
report its race, while 16% reported Latino and 11% reported White (ibid.). As a Title I
school, 81% of its students participated in the free-or-reduced price meal program (ibid.).
Fifty eight percent of Petry High’s students measured proficient or above in English
Language Arts in 2011 while 59% measured proficient or above in Math (ibid.).
Ms. Leslie began teaching when Petry High School’s principal offered her a
substitute position five years ago. She previously worked in youth ministry and coached
sports. The principal’s proffer came at a time when she served as a soccer coach for
Petry High students, and the added income appealed to her. She was born and raised in
the community surrounding Petry High and attended a neighboring high school. She had
spent all of her life in this community except three years in Chile, where she taught
English to elementary-aged children. She had been a long-term substitute teacher for five
years and, recently, with the support of the same school principal who hired her, began

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taking subject-specific exams to earn her teaching credential. Even though she was not a
credentialed teacher, she appeared to be a permanent fixture at Petry High, especially
with her involvement in extracurricular activities at school. She participated regularly in
school events by chaperoning dances and attending sporting events. She sponsored a
time-consuming running club and organized group runs after school several times a week
and on weekends. She also registered student runners and joined them in local races.
She kept her room open during lunch, and with a small refrigerator and microwave, she
spent most of her day in her classroom. Because she spoke fluent Spanish, she had no
problems communicating with parents, most of whom were Spanish-speaking.
Ms. Leslie, a ninth grade teacher at Petry High School, was White and in her late
20s. Because she had taught only the college preparatory level, I was not able to observe
her with two tracks of classes, so I could not compare her behavior with and instruction
for differently tracked students. The school’s bell schedule was on a rolling block, which
meant that Period 1, 2, and 3 met for 87 minutes on Mondays, 4, 5, and 1 met for 87
minutes on Tuesdays, and so on. Sixth period met every day for the last 50 minutes of
the school day, and Periods 1 through 5 met three days a week during different times of
the day. Period 1 convened Monday mornings at 8am, Tuesday afternoons at 1:30pm,
and Friday afternoons at 10:30am. Ms. Leslie preferred the rolling block format because
the varying class time eliminated perpetually lethargic morning classes and after-lunch
boisterous classes.
Ms. Leslie’s room was on the second floor of one of the main buildings. Student
desks were organized in a wide arc that faced the white board and overhead at the front of
the room. Seats were placed side by side in pairs and in groups of four, so students could

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easily turn to their neighbors when Ms. Leslie elicited a question and instructed them to
talk in groups. Seats were assigned, and because there were so few girls in Period 1,
many small-group configurations consisted of all boys. A podium and small desk with a
laptop and projector were located at the front of the room. The whiteboard was covered
with text and small posters: the Focus Learning Target, the daily agenda, the saying of
the week, a list of students who were assigned detention, and past notes written by Ms.
Leslie, such as conversation starters for partners. The adjacent wall had two empty
bulletin boards and teacher-made posters with tips about annotating text. Underneath the
windows on the opposite wall were six posters with each class’s expectations for
behavior and students’ signatures underneath. A grammar activity with illustrations
completed by students was posted on the windows. In the back of the room sat a
teacher’s desk, computer with printer, microwave, and mini-refrigerator.
Period 1 had 35 students – 24 boys and 11 girls. The students were all Latino
with the exception of one Black male and one Asian female student. Ms. Leslie warned
me about the misbehavior of students in this class. She attributed the misbehavior to the
large class size and the inordinate number of boys. There were approximately eight boys
who did not pay attention to Ms. Leslie’s lessons, three boys of whom were particularly
distractible. Some boys amused others with non-content-related banter and teased those
who participated in the lessons. The two groups of four students in the back of the room
were the most attentive and quiet, and these groups were more evenly balanced in gender
with two girls and two boys. Ms. Leslie placed disruptive boys at the front of the room,
where she often paced left and right to keep them on task.

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Period 5 had 20 students and was more racially diverse with 15 Latino, four Black
female, and one White male student. Because the class was small, Ms. Leslie was able to
give her attention to each student. The class was also more balanced in gender with ten
boys and ten girls. The students appeared to be kinder toward one another, more focused
on class tasks, and less boisterous than Period 1. Most students participated, especially
the Black female students, who sat in the front of the room, supported each other, and
formed their own unit during group activities. There was one special needs student who
required the use of a laptop every day. Ms. Leslie assigned seats, so all of the students
sat close to the front of the room. All of students wrote in a composition book that they
brought to and from class every day. According to one student, Ms. Leslie had not
graded the notebooks by the time of my classroom observations in mid-October.
The data reveal that Ms. Leslie lacked rigor in her instruction and demonstrated
aesthetic caring. She held some generalized notions about their ability as English
students and showed low expectations for them as intellectual thinkers. Her lack of clear
expectations and learning goals were reflected in activities and assignments that required
low-level thinking. She did not offer students the opportunity to construct knowledge or
to craft assertions that were supported by evidence, nor did she provide challenging tasks
that engaged students intellectually. Instead, she designed activities that were meant to
keep students busy, such as repeating answers, holding up fingers to signify feedback,
and copying lecture notes. She cared about her students’ well being, but demonstrated
little care in their academic growth and achievement. Her aesthetic caring was in part
shaped by her lack of training and lack of content and pedagogical knowledge. In other
words, she did not know not know how to authentically care about them because she did

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not know how to help them achieve academically. She was preoccupied by misbehavior
and gave behaviorist directives more frequently than she gave instruction. She cared
about her students as people, not as critical-thinking scholars, so despite her sensitivity to
students’ needs and her involvement in the school community, she did not know how to
exhibit a commitment to her students’ academic achievement. Linking rigor and caring,
the data below show that her view of student misbehavior reinforced her notions that her
students lacked the capacity to be taught grade-level standards.
Rigor of Instruction. To Ms. Leslie, rigorous instruction was “something that
would challenge the kids beyond the average or [make] them think beyond just what’s
given in front of them.” She considered the minimum two-page requirement the current
autobiographical narrative assignment as an example of a rigorous expectation. This
example revealed that Ms. Leslie’s academic expectations related to following of
procedural policies, not to students’ quality of work, and in fact did not align to her own
view of rigor as making students “think beyond just what’s given in front of them.” The
following instances in Ms. Leslie’s class demonstrated that her academic expectations for
her students were not designed to challenge them with rigorous instruction and that her
intentions dwelled amongst other priorities, which are discussed below.
The following example demonstrated how Ms. Leslie operationalized rigor. Her
approach to teaching the autobiographical narrative represented a pattern of practice that
revealed a lack of rigor and unclear expectations. In the following lesson, she introduced
techniques for writing descriptively, which she called “painting techniques.” Her
slideshow was called “Word Painting Tool Kit: How to show and not tell!” and each slide

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offered a different technique. The slides also gave students an opportunity to practice a
specific painting technique:
Slide 1: Painting with Participles
• Add verbs with ing endings to the beginning of the end of a sentence
• Take the following sentence: “The diamond-scaled snakes attacked their
prey.”
• Now add the following participles to the beginning of the sentence:
“Hissing, slithering, and coiling, the diamond-scaled snakes attached their
prey.”
• Add the participial phrase to your sentences: “Hissing their forked red
tongues and coiling their cold bodies, the diamond-scaled snakes attacked
their prey.”
Slide 2: Now you try
• Write down a sentence about your watermark event
• Add two or three participles
• Create a participle phrase
• Additional example: “on the wings of a dream, the Olympic long jumper
thrust the weight of his whole body forward.” (Cathleen Conry)
Slide 3: Painting with Absolutes
• Add a two-world combination containing a noun and a verb with an ing or
ed ending to a sentence.
• Take the following sentence: “The cat climbed the tree.”
• Now add the following absolutes to the beginning of the sentence: “Claws
digging, feet kicking, the cat climbed the tree.”
• Add absolute phrases to your sentences: “Feet trembling on the snow-
covered rocks, the mountain climber edged along the cliff.”
• Additional example: “I glanced at my clock, digits glowing floresecent
blue in the inky darkness of my own room” (Jenn Coppolo)

Ms. Leslie expected students to remember the names and definition of the painting
techniques then apply them to their own autobiographical narrative. Below is an excerpt
of classroom dialogue in Period 1 that accompanied this slideshow:
Ms. Leslie: Did [the substitute] go over [the slides]? Ladies and gentlemen, let’s
quickly review this ‘cause you’re going to do an activity where you’re
going to look for painting techniques in someone else’s essay. You’re
going to be a detective and look for them. Then you’re going to look over
your own and use them.
The overhead projector shows Slide #1: “Painting with Participles”
Ms. Leslie: What do we add –ing to?

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Ss call out: Verbs.
Ms. Leslie shows example on the board: “Claws digging, feet kicking”
LM walks in late (sixth late student this period).
Ms. Leslie: Next.
Ms. Leslie skips Slide #3 and #4.
Slide #5: “Painting with Appositives”
Ms. Leslie: What’s an example of an appositive?
Ss are quiet.
Ms. Leslie: The boy, comma, sitting right next to me, his name is David. Turn to
the person sitting next to you and give them an example of an appositive.
Ss talk for a little bit.
Each slide has the title “Painting with…” and definition with examples (five
bullet points)
Ms. Leslie: All right, and…. Who has not spoken to today? Lalo, can you tell us
what an appositive is?
Lalo (LM): (reads from the overhead) A noun that adds a second image to a
preceding noun.
Ms. Leslie: Don’t read from the board. What is it?
Ms. Leslie gives an example: Santa Claus… Christmas, my favorite holiday,
comes every year.
Lalo: Santa Claus, a chubby dude, slides down my chimney each Christmas.
Ms. Leslie: Good. Miguel, give me another example…
Ss are talking and not listening.
Ms. Leslie: And we’re going to be quiet in 5, 4, 3, 2…
Miguel (LM): “Garfield, the hairy, orange cat, fell.”
Ms. Leslie: Good, what did he use in order to describe Garfield?
Ss: “Hairy” and “orange”
Ms. Leslie reads Slide #7: “The large bull moose, red-eyed and angry, ...”
Ms. Leslie: So you guys, what are you doing here? You’re just moving the
adjectives.”

Ms. Leslie’s rapid review of the painting techniques presentation and her interaction with
the students demonstrated low rigor. In this interaction, Ms. Leslie did not make an effort
to gauge students’ understanding of the painting techniques. She neither waited to
discover if the substitute already covered this material nor did she make an attempt to
find out how well they learned the information. She asked, “Did [the substitute] go over
[the slides]?” and without allowing for any wait time, she immediately moved into a
“review” by asking the students to state close-ended responses to recall questions with

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the information located directly on the slides in front of them. Her method of reviewing
the presentation demonstrated that the students’ understanding of the slides was not
important to her, and she evoked a sense of urgency to complete this task so that they
could move onto the next one, which was apparent when she reviewed the slides quickly,
reintroducing the five painting techniques in eight minutes, a speed that prohibited
students from reading or processing the text. In addition, she did not give explicit
instructions when she asked Lalo to define “appositive.” He accurately recited the
definition, but she reinstructed him to define it in his own words, which she did not
previously make clear. Lalo was able to give an example of an appositive after Ms.
Leslie offered one, but she did not establish whether Lalo or any of the students
understood these painting techniques. Not only did she fail to provide the students with
time to think and process the information, she required students to perform low-level
thinking by identifying the techniques. The only connection that students made beyond
the slides’ text involved applying the techniques in creating their own sentences, but their
application did not indicate that they understood the techniques because they created
sentences after Ms. Leslie gave examples. The larger purpose for learning these painting
techniques – applying them to their autobiographical narrative – was assigned for
homework, so the bulk of their thinking was expected to occur at home. This interaction
lacked an invitation for students to engage in critical thinking, and Ms. Leslie did not
give them a chance to analyze or evaluate the word choice of the slideshow’s examples,
nor did she discuss the purpose of using precise language. She taught this presentation
apart from their autobiographical narrative then presumed that they understood the skills
well enough to apply them to their own writing without any class time for individual

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practice or evaluation of quality. Ms. Leslie’s curricular and pedagogical decisions in
this instance validated her lack of intention to challenge the students with rigorous
instruction.
Another lesson in Ms. Leslie’s teaching of the autobiographical narrative revealed
her lack of rigor and common tendency to instill a sense of urgency. When the students
came to class with their final drafts, Ms. Leslie guided them into another peer-editing
session with a writing rubric:
Ms. Leslie: We’re going to take ten minutes and you’re going to grade someone
else’s essay. You’re going to take a look at the rubric…Read the rubric. If
you think they have this here (points to a box in the rubric), give them a
six. If you think they have a five, give them a five…If you are done
grading, write directly on the paper and make suggestions. You have ten
minutes.
(6 minutes later)
Ms. Leslie: Stop for a moment. Let me clarify the rubric. If you look at the
purpose, point at purpose. Six is the highest, one is the lowest. Read over
the info because it tells you what you’re looking for…Do they have
improvement over the three drafts or did they print out the same draft
three times? So give them a grade on this.

Ms. Leslie was well intentioned in her scaffolding of the writing process. Each step,
from applying painting techniques to their writing to peer editing, was designed to
improve the students’ final product. But in this instance, Ms. Leslie gave students ten
minutes to process the rubric, read three drafts to determine that changes were made,
make suggestions for improvement, and assign grades to the final draft according to each
category on the rubric. This cognitively demanding activity required analysis and
evaluation of content, organization, mechanics, and style, but Ms. Leslie allowed only ten
minutes for them to practice these skills, taking away opportunity and time from students
to intellectually invest themselves in this potentially rigorous assignment. On one hand,

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she showed that she valued peer collaboration and evaluation by engaging them in this
activity, but she did not challenge students to evaluate these essays with evidence to
support their grading decisions. On the contrary, she used phrases such as “read over the
info” and “give them a grade,” which implied that she accepted their assignation of
grades without thoughtful deliberation or justifiable reasons. She might not have
understood that rigorous instruction would have entailed giving students enough time to
read the essay, process the content, understand the categories of the rubric and the
distinctions between the various rankings, evaluate the essay using evidence, and
communicate their evaluations to their peer. Thus, through Ms. Leslie’s instruction, this
activity meant to improve a peer’s writing became a series of hastily designed tasks that
thwarted students’ intellectual engagement.
On Ms. Leslie’s desk sat visible evidence of the low rigor of her pedagogical
approaches, which drew from a toolbox of strategies used to enliven a class. There were
two large index cards that listed teaching strategies on her desk. One card listed 27
suggestions for engaging student participation:
Techniques for student interactions:
1. Flashcards w/ names
2. Appointments (time clock)
3. Parking lot
4. Quick whip
5. Checking for clarification
6. Creative coding (underline anything you know, squiggly line new info, ?
needs clarification.
7. Fill in the blank: My partner & I discussed ______
8. Partner A, B
9. Call backs
10. Thumbs up recognition…

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Ms. Leslie kept these reminders accessible, and they showed that she was open to
employing new strategies to encourage student participation and that she sought different
ways to improve her practice. They also showed that she valued the participation of
every student and gave each student an opportunity to dialogue and collaborate with a
peer. But her behavior in class and interview responses indicated that she was more
concerned about experimenting with these strategies and had not thought about the
reasoning behind them. For example, Ms. Leslie immediately stopped an activity that did
not appear to engage students, and, maintaining that a change of pace was one successful
method of engaging students, she viewed her flexibility as an asset: “I’m a big fan of if
it’s crashing and burning, like, okay, what we do to at least get them up out of their seats
and go to talk to somebody else or just trying to something to break it up.” Her use of the
notecards’ suggestions and her interview response above showed that, instead of faulting
students for an ineffective lesson, she assumed responsibility for its outcome. But
although she was flexible in her practice of teaching strategies and aware of students’
responses to her teaching, her focus on keeping students physically engaged neglected
their need to be intellectual engaged, and her attempts at trying new strategies to break up
the perceived monotony of an 87-minute block period resulted in the fast-paced and
disjointed nature of her classes. With this rapid-fire teaching, she did not deliver rigorous
instruction that allowed time for students to construct knowledge through discourse,
respond to high-quality, open-ended questions, form assertions and gather supporting
evidence about content, and engage in higher-order thinking that results in connecting
abstract and concrete ideas. Her fixation on student misbehavior diverted her attention
away from thinking about the alignment of her pedagogical and curricular decisions to

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her larger academic expectations and the degree to which she presented challenging
content to her students.
Because she exhibited anxious behavior that suggested that students did not see
her as an authority and because she revealed her concern about her ability to maintain
authority in her interviews, her classroom behavior showed that she focused on more on
classroom management than on intellectually rigorous expectations, which is
preoccupation common in teachers (Bondy et al., 2007). She responded to this anxiety in
various ways: keeping the entire class on the same pace without regarding the students’
reception of the lesson; keeping the students busy by demanding physical responses to
her behavioral management techniques; focusing on the misbehavior of a few students
and losing sight of teaching content; and being wedded to a timer that maintained a class
period full of fast-paced activities. One exchange in Period 5 highlighted Ms. Leslie’s
preference for keeping the class on task and in sync rather than allowing students to
participate independently. After students read and commented on each other’s essay, Ms.
Leslie transitioned into a review of painting techniques:
Ms. Leslie (to the class): Create a sentence with adjectives and switch the order
around.
She looks to the back of the room.
Ms. Leslie: Rob, are you helping her out or doing your own?
Rob (LM): I’m doing it as I’m helping her out.
Ms. Leslie: Are you writing your own sentences?
Rob: She’s writing them.
Ms. Leslie: I’d like you to do your own. I like that you’re helping her, but I asked
you to do something.
[Observer’s comment] Rob helps his partner Alexandra and tells her what
brackets mean in the essay. Neither have been paying attention to the
lesson.

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Ms. Leslie’s actions here revealed that she believed that Rob’s compliance was more
important than his assistance to Alexandra on her essay. Redirecting him away from the
previous activity, Ms. Leslie took away an opportunity between Rob and Alexandra to
collaborate as he examined and evaluated her essay. She acknowledged his efforts to
help Alexandra but followed with disapprobation by pointing out his failure to follow her
instructions. Rob tried to avoid conflict with Ms. Leslie when he gave inconsistent
responses, but Ms. Leslie ended the exchange with “I asked you to do something,” which
showed that she expected compliance. Neglecting to see the learning opportunity
between Rob and Alexandra, Ms. Leslie exerted her authority by keeping the entire class
on the same pace. Actually, the students seemed to be demonstrating skills that fulfilled
her intended purpose of the activity. This might have implied that Ms. Leslie did not
understand that peer collaboration required a shifting and sharing of authority (Crawford,
2008). Ultimately, rigorous instruction was overshadowed by Ms. Leslie’s preoccupation
with managing students’ behavior.
Ms. Leslie’s continual use of behavioral management techniques resulted in a
neglect of rigorous instruction. Ms. Leslie spent most of the class period keeping
students on task, utilizing behaviorist approaches to classroom management to ensure that
the whole class was syncopated with her lesson. She often used call-and-response
techniques where students repeated her instructions or responded physically to her
directions with directives such as “If you can hear me, clap once. If you can hear me, clap
twice. If you can hear me, clap three times. If you can hear me, put your hands on your
head.” She counted down from five when she transitioned into another task and
sometimes clapped a pattern to which the students responded. The urgency with which

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she transitioned and directed students through activities was reminiscent of an athletic
coach, a position that she held before becoming a teacher. Most of her talking took the
form of behavioral directives at the whole class or at individually inattentive or
misbehaving students, and these exhortations interfered with instruction time. She had
little time to teach academic content or give attention to students who were focused, so,
in Period 1, rigorous instruction was lost to the behavioral management of four or five
misbehaving boys. Instead of giving students intellectually engaging content and
permitting them to construct knowledge by working autonomously, she gave them
simple, monotonous tasks that were guided with minute attention. Her behavioral
expectations outweighed her academic expectations, and her actions in class
demonstrated that developing students into critical thinkers was not her priority.
Ms. Leslie’s worry about misbehaving students in Period 1 impacted her behavior
in class and interactions with all students. Her constant anxiety about these boys led her
to view teaching as a way to occupy students’ time: “I just have to figure out ways to
keep [the boisterous, vocal boys] on task and not crazy.” She gauged the progress of the
class and her daily performance by the behavior of several students. Ms. Leslie also
believed that her students were not capable of concentration: “I find that if we do the
same thing for a long time, they get bored so I try to have at least some sort of shift in
between and because the block periods are so long.” She thought that giving the students
a lot of time to work on one activity was inviting distraction and misbehavior, so she
seemed to favor planning many activities over planning challenging activities. Ms.
Leslie’s belief that students were distractible youngsters who possessed a short attention
span and were not capable of concentrating on one activity over a long period of time

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prevented her from seeing them as capable thinkers who could form strong assertions that
were bolstered evidence or make connections between the abstract and concrete, the
literary and personal. These beliefs about her students were in part rooted in the absence
of rigor.
Ms. Leslie’s efforts to keep students busy and her lack of understanding rigorous
instruction were further enforced by her strict use of a timer, which ensured frequent
shifting from one activity to the next. Every task was timed, and Ms. Leslie believed that
creating a sense of urgency made students more productive and focused: “The timer is
supposed to be there to, one, keep me on track, and, two, to keep them saying, ‘Okay, you
only have this amount of time.’ But even then the kids get distracted and they don’t
always take advantage of that time…so it’s dealing with the kids who are completely off
task.” Using the timer to gauge her own pace of teaching, Ms. Leslie possessed self-
awareness about her practice, which meant that she regularly considered her own
performance. She admitted that some students were inured to the timer and disregarded it
completely. Nonetheless, the timer exuded a dominant presence in Ms. Leslie’s
classroom. Classes completed approximately five to six activities every period in an 87-
minute block period, which meant that 14 to 17 minutes were allotted for each activity,
excluding transitions between activities. The timer’s presence was also prominent
because it beeped periodically and because Ms. Leslie allocated such little time for each
task. She hurried the students through each activity as if she were still a soccer coach,
and students had little opportunity to debrief or reflect on the quality of their work.
Students could not think about any topic with great depth or learn from class discussions
because the timer constantly reminded them to move onto the next activity.

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Ms. Leslie’s exertion of procedural authority over the students masked her lack of
content-area expertise. Instead of sharing her knowledge of the content area in a way that
engaged and challenged students, she maintained authority over their tasks and behavior.
According to Crawford (2008), the process dimension of authority is operationalized
when teachers exercise control through making decisions, leading discussions, giving
instructions, and questioning and challenging students. Ms. Leslie spent much of class
time making decisions about student behavior and the pace of tasks, as well as giving
instructions, which she stressed by requiring students to repeat her instructions in unison.
Because Ms. Leslie was unable to substantiate her content knowledge through
instruction, she did not exhibit authority over the English content area. In fact, her
instruction and behavior revealed little content and pedagogical knowledge. For
example, her concentration on the mechanics and formatting of the autobiographical
narrative instead of content and language reflected her lack of pedagogical knowledge
about teaching writing. As a result, she was unable to explore the English content area by
practicing the same higher order thinking skills that students were expected to master.
The lack of rigorous instruction in Ms. Leslie’s classroom stemmed mostly from
the absence of content and pedagogical knowledge from her instruction. Despite these
weaknesses, she appeared to be thoughtful in her efforts to design lessons and activities
that addressed the standards. Her low expectations for her students stemmed from the
generalizations that she made about them and their background, and her thoughts about
them partly reflected a recognition that she could not sufficiently address their academic
needs. This disheartened outlook translated into the idea that she could not teach grade-

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level content because her students were intellectually and academically behind grade-
level:
I don’t know. The longer I teach, and even just listen to other teachers, I just
don’t know if [hitting the focus learning targets] is a realistic objective. I question
that…I can’t do the assignments for the kids. And I can call home and I can say
they have detention, but I still can’t even make them, and that’s a challenge.

As an inexperienced and impressionable teacher, Ms. Leslie may have absorbed deficit
thinking notions from her colleagues. Her exposure to their beliefs left Ms. Leslie
concluding that Petry students were not capable of performing grade-level standards. Ms.
Leslie relied on the completion of homework as a measure of student performance, an act
over which she had no control. Unable to deliberate on the quality of her instruction and
the degree to which she engaged the students in intellectually rigorous ways, she faulted
them for not submitting homework, which exonerated her role in their performance. Her
frustration was further reinforced by her lack of knowledge about their assets and skills,
which she revealed when she described their strengths: “Some of them actually do have
knowledge and are able to write well or at least decently.” Her use of such phrases as
“have knowledge” and “able to write…decently” questioned whether she had a concrete
grasp of what her students know and how well they write. Her vague choice of words
also revealed her lack of content knowledge. She could not challenge the students
because she neither understood their skills and knowledge nor possessed the content and
pedagogical knowledge to deliver effective instruction.
Despite her efforts to engage students in a variety of activities and the self-
awareness she showed about her own teaching practice, Ms. Leslie did not deliver
rigorous instruction. She seemed unable to fulfill Mathew and Lowe’s (2010) illustration

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of good instruction – communicating strategies easily and explicitly, connecting learning
to real-world contexts, giving students opportunities to examine their personal
experiences – all of which lead to students’ exercising control over their own learning.
Instead of viewing students as co-constructors of knowledge and using their prior
knowledge to build on their understanding of the content, she planned activities that
required low-level thinking, such a identifying and applying descriptive writing
techniques and recalling information. Some of her curricular decisions were ripe with
critical thinking opportunities, such as instructing the students to apply descriptive
writing techniques to their autobiographical narrative and analyzing and evaluating each
other’s essays. She showed that she valued peer collaboration and the participation of
every student. Her lessons leading up to assigning the final draft of the autobiographical
narrative showed that she understood the importance of scaffolding. In addition, she
exuded an eager attitude when she talked about improving her own practice. But she did
not give students enough time to process and learn from these activities, as the
application of writing techniques to their narrative was assigned for homework and the
analysis and evaluation of peer essays were allotted little time. Rigorous instruction
requires that teachers pose open-ended questions, require critical thinking, demand
students to provide evidence for their ideas and assertions, and structure lessons so that
students are able to make connections between the text and other sources of knowledge
(Mathews & Lowe, 2011; Matsumura et al., 2008). Concerned about classroom
management and pacing, Ms. Leslie did not know how to teach rigorously. Lastly, her
lack of curricular and pedagogical knowledge affected her behavior and decisions in
class.

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Caring. Focusing on the teacher-student relationship, Ms. Leslie emphasized a
teacher’s delicate balance between rigidity and leniency when she described a caring
teacher:
For me a caring teacher means that I set boundaries and adhere to them, that I am
compassionate and aware of the student, so if I see a kid that’s normally happy,
instead of just assuming something, I go and ask, “Hey, are you okay?”…there’s
one student in particular in first period that he is constantly talking. He’s
constantly off-task and I’m constantly talking to him, and I have to remind myself
that I can be stern with him but then I need to make sure that I’m soft…It can’t
always be stern, so I try to mix it up and just be caring and aware.

To Ms. Leslie, a caring teacher is cognizant of students’ emotional needs and regularly
gauges the moods of students whose behavior appears out of the ordinary but also draws
boundaries and keeps students accountable for their actions. Valenzuela’s (1999)
emphasis on quality instruction in authentic caring does not factor into Ms. Leslie’s view
of caring. Also, her definition focused on relationships with individual students, not on
building a positive emotional climate or community in the classroom. In Ms. Leslie’s
view, the degree to which a teacher showed caring impacted only individual relationships
with students, not her teaching, interactions with the class, or curricular and pedagogical
decisions.
At first glance, Ms. Leslie’s interactions with students appeared to show authentic
caring. She cared deeply about her students, and her interactions with them showed that
she wanted them to achieve. But over time observation and interview data revealed that
her actions were more representative of aesthetic caring. According to Valenzuela
(1999), authentic caring is inextricably linked to quality of instruction and commitment to
student achievement. Authentic caring surpasses simply caring for students as people but
also requires that teachers establish mutual respect and hold high academic expectations.

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The following instance showed that Ms. Leslie cared about her students’ well being and
advocated for them. It also showed that her focus on their everyday behavior in class
overshadowed her care for them as learners. In a phone call to a parent, this exchange
revealed that although Ms. Leslie cared and knew about Yvonne as a person, she
possessed little knowledge about Yvonne’s performance and little content knowledge to
be able to communicate Yvonne’s skills to the parent:

I first want to tell you that Yvonne is doing well in my class. She raises her hand
and participates. Unfortunately, I told the kids that I would be calling parents if
they didn’t have their essay. On Tuesday, they have the final draft due…She has
been working on it in class... She and I have talked and she’s going to stay after
school and type it. But she still needs her third draft by Tuesday...I don’t know if
she can finish it, but she’s working on it in front of me right now…She’ll have to
make improvements on it. Maybe you can make suggestions on how to make it
better…I’m not terrible concerned about her. It’s just that if the kids didn’t have
it today, I wanted to make a point to call home.

Ms. Leslie advocated for Yvonne as she informed the father that Yvonne failed to bring
her essay to class. She showed caring as she assuaged any possible conflict between
Yvonne and her father by softening her criticism and offering praise for Yvonne’s
performance. On the other hand, Ms. Leslie’s praise lacked specificity, and she made no
comment about the quality of Yvonne’s work. The absence of specific comments about
Yvonne’s performance indicated that Ms. Leslie cared about students as people, not as
scholars. Her caring for students was directed only at their personal wellbeing and
behavior. Ideally, she wanted her students to earn a passing grade, “knowing that they
turned in all their work and they at least were able to show that they could grasp all the
standards that we’ve been hitting.” Ms. Leslie gauged students’ performance by their
completion homework and their ability to “grasp” the standards, as reflected in their
benchmark scores. As Valenzuela (1999) argued, the degree to which teachers teach

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rigorously is linked to the degree to which they authentically care about students.
Authentic caring cannot be removed from rigorous teaching and learning because
teachers who authentically care also hold high academic expectations for their students.
Ms. Leslie was unable to practice authentic caring because she did not know how to care
about her students as academic intellectuals.
This distinction between authentic and aesthetic caring – the degree to which
teachers are committed to student achievement – and her lack of content and pedagogical
knowledge made Ms. Leslie an aesthetically caring teacher. As discussed in the section
above, Ms. Leslie’s belief about her students’ capacity as English learners was best
captured in her statement, “I don’t know. The longer I teach, and even just listen to other
teachers, I just don’t know if [hitting the focus learning targets in preparation of
benchmark exams] is a realistic objective. I question that.” Ms. Leslie showed
generosity and kindness towards her students, but she simultaneously believed that they
were not capable of performing up to grade-level expectations and that, despite her
efforts, the benchmark exams were too difficult for them. Ms. Leslie’s low expectations
of her students coupled with her lack of content and pedagogical knowledge made her
unable to intellectually challenge them in the English content area. She also shared some
generalizations about her students and their background that explained their poor
performance:
I wonder if they would struggle in any scenario. I find, sometimes, the
demographic make-up here, it’s very common to just say, “Oh, I don’t get it. I
don’t want to do it.” Or, in general, even if they don’t get it, just, “I don’t want to
do it. I don’t care. Why do I need this?” And it’s hard to compete with that
attitude. It’s also hard to compete with if they have to take care of brothers and
sisters at home or, you know, I don’t know what is completely going on at home.

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As she speculated about the students’ environment outside of school, she shared her
frustration about the larger issues that affected student learning and performance. I did
not ask her to clarify her use of “demographic make-up,” so I could not determine if she
was referring to race, culture, or socio-economic background or to all of those factors.
This statement showed that she knew little about the degree to which these outside issues
affected her students’ attitudes and motivation toward learning. Due to her lack of
content and pedagogical knowledge and unawareness of her role in bridging students’
home and school lives by accessing their prior knowledge and skill sets, she was unable
to help students navigate through the institutional experience of schooling or exhibit
cultural sensitivity as she prepared them for tackling future challenges (Roberts, 2010;
Valenzuela, 1999). Therefore, she cared aesthetically not because her compassion for her
students was superficial but because she did not know how to care for them in a way that
empowered them intellectually and strengthened their ties among school, home, and
community. Because these limitations prevented her from understanding her students’
needs, she viewed her role in opposition to or competing with the students’ lives outside
of her classroom. In posing the relationship among student, teacher, and community as
conflicting, she saw the teacher as losing the battle to purge students of their complacent
attitude toward school. Although Ms. Leslie grew up in the surrounding neighborhood,
she did not have a strong grasp of her students’ lives outside of school and did not know
how to negotiate the disconnect between school and home, which led her to believe that
she fought a prevailing attitude of failure among the students. An authentically caring
teacher sees the students’ perspectives, gives them opportunities to think about and
reflect on their personal experiences and relate them to learning, and builds respect for

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students as individuals who have lives and identities outside of school. But Ms. Leslie
was not trained or experienced in making these connections, so, from her own
experiences and the attitudes and beliefs of fellow teachers, she found her own way of
rationalizing her struggle in the classroom.
Planned with good intentions, the following incident also showed Ms. Leslie’s
aesthetic caring towards her students. This example revealed her desire to connect with
and affect the students in a personal way but also captured her lack of understanding in
turning these issues into learning experiences for students. She spoke on a non-content-
related topic that distressed her and, as indicated by her setting of the timer, did not give
time for student input:
Ms. Leslie sets timer for speech on suicide.
Ms. Leslie: Within the last three weeks, I’ve known two people who have
committed suicide…I don’t know exactly what I want to say, but I want to
convey how horrible it is and that things get better. Now matter how low
it gets, things get better. I don’t know how many of you know someone
who has committed suicide, but it leaves devastation for the people who
are left behind…If you know anyone who is having a rough time, please
reach out to them, talk to them…If you need help, there are crisis hotlines.
They don’t judge. They’re volunteering. They’re there for people to vent
and talk. If you need anything I’m here. I’m here to talk. Even if it’s ten
years from now, you lost your boy or girlfriend, you’re…When I was
living in Chile, I was there for two years. My grandma passed away. I
broke up with my boyfriend. I went into a minor depression, but never did
I take any of those steps. We all have those lows. Life is not easy. You
know that life can be tough. For some of you, life is easy. Your job is
school. Some of you work…You guys get to come to school. My point
is, know that you’re not alone.
Timer goes off.
Ms. Leslie turns off and keeps talking.
Miguel (LM) says something quietly.
Ms. Leslie:…Miguel, don’t….step outside…you know that this is the most
inappropriate time.
Miguel goes outside.
Ms. Leslie: If you’re at that point, think of me. I’d be sad if you took your life.
Even if I didn’t talk to you in 5, 6, 17 years. Remember my face. Again, I

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haven’t taken time to talk about this, I don’t want to lecture you…Thank
you for your attention. We’ll take a few minutes and finish “The Most
Dangerous Game.”

Ms. Leslie’s efforts to reach her students in a personal way surpassed aesthetic caring in
the superficial sense, but her method of conveyance showed that she did not know how to
address this topic with the students in a way that gave them an opportunity to make a
connection. Despite the sincerity in her delivery, she did not construct this occasion to
allow student input. She planned it as a way to communicate her feelings by delivering a
lecture, not as a way to investigate students’ feelings about the topic or to let students
connect it to their own lives. In addition, she shared an example of a personal struggle
but did not open up the dialogue for students to do the same. Similar to Ms. Leslie’s lack
of understanding of her students’ skills and knowledge, this instance showed that she
lacked interest in knowing who her students were. She did not understand that giving
them a chance to connect and make sense of this topic would be effective and meaningful
to them. Although this speech was well intended, she ended it about herself: “…think of
me. I’d be sad if you took your life…Remember my face.” Her speech vaguely
mentioned consequences of suicide that affect other people, yet her choice to close with
herself did not acknowledge students’ lives outside of her classroom.
Beyond her interactions with students and her behavior in class, aesthetic caring
also emerged when Ms. Leslie discussed her role in the classroom. On one hand, she saw
herself as more than a teacher of English but as a teacher of life: “I want to be able to
teach them about English, but, honestly, I’d rather teach them more about life than
English. That’s more important to me than achieving all the standards.” Having grown
up in the surrounding neighborhood and traveled to different countries, she wanted to

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share her world experiences with her students so that they could obtain a glimpse of what
lay beyond their neighborhood. On the other hand, she separated her view of teaching
students about life from the teaching of English content. Her eagerness to show students
pictures of a recent trip to Spain constituted a lesson about life beyond Los Angeles that
was unrelated to the subject area. Her idea of preparing students for future challenges did
not lie in the teaching of English but in exposure to the world vicariously through her
personal experiences and travels. Her statement also presumed that her students did not
understand life, which showed that she did not understand what her students knew, who
they were, and what they understood about the world.
Ms. Leslie showed caring for her students by the way she talked to their parents,
offered food for them when they arrived to class hungry, and committed her personal
time to leading the extracurricular activities. Her aesthetic care for students surfaced
from her preoccupation with behavioral management and the obstacle that she did not
have the content and pedagogical knowledge to teach effectively. She was genuinely
concerned about their future lives, but she did not view or teach the English content area
as means of empowering and preparing them for future challenges. She advocated for
her students but knew little about their lives and community. In fact, she saw these
outside contexts as impediments to student achievement because she believed that they
fostered a sense of complacency toward school. She cared about them as people but not
as scholars, and her inability to view them as intellectuals prevented her from
understanding their need for intellectual challenge, rigorous instruction, and high
expectations. Noddings’s (1986) concept of teacher caring underscores the need for
mutual respect and individual self-worth, and she asserted that it is a teacher’s ethical

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duty to model and practice care. Because Ms. Leslie was unable to view the students as
possessing value and experience useful to academic learning, she could not foster a
classroom climate in which students’ experiences and voices were welcomed and
afforded mutual respect.
Conclusion. Ms. Leslie’s generalized conclusions about students’ capacity as
learners and her inability to teach effectively due to her circumstances as a long-term
substitute affected her behavior in class, interactions with students, instruction, and
curricular and pedagogical decisions. In interviews, she attempted to make sense of her
struggle in the classroom, and she pinpointed both her need to improve and their
“demographic make-up” as factors that shaped student motivation and performance. In
some ways, she attributed her students’ failure to factors that were out of her control,
which, according to Bensimon (2005), allowed her to remove personal responsibility
from her students’ academic outcomes. She showed caring for students by maintaining a
reliable presence in school functions and taking an active role in clubs, but she did not
seem to have much hope in helping students achieve academically. Echoing the attitudes
of some teachers at Seguin High School (Valenzuela, 1999), her view that students did
not care about school prevented her from connecting with her students. Furthermore, Ms.
Leslie appeared to be aware of her inexperience and addressed it by seeking help from
colleagues. Thus, her beliefs about students’ capacity as learners stemmed in part from
her notions about their attitudes and lives outside of school and her cognizance about her
own professional limitations.
Because Ms. Leslie believed that her students had low motivation and that she
lacked agency to effect change in her classroom, instead of challenging them with

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rigorous instruction, she set low academic expectations, satisfied if she could keep them
busy and if they completed their work. Rather than examining the quality of their work
by giving constant feedback and instruction and rather than teaching content that engaged
them in personal and intellectual ways, she maintained a task-oriented mentality without
deliberating on the purpose and expectations of her instruction. This tendency might
have been reflective of her prior experience as a soccer coach. She did not create a
classroom climate where students were encouraged to engage in constructing knowledge
through discourse, participate in high quality discussions that required higher order
thinking, and offer evidence to support their ideas. The class period was occupied by
fast-paced tasks that required low-level thinking, which required students to identify and
recall knowledge, and the students were automatons that were expected to respond
instantly to her behaviorist methods of classroom management.
Ms. Leslie’s fixation on the formatting and appearance of student work revealed
her lack of English content-area expertise. During the autobiographical narrative writing
process, Ms. Leslie emphasized formatting over content, and her academic expectations
of her students included hoping that they would earn a passing grade and “[grasp]” some
of the standards covered through the year. In addition, she expressed confidence in her
flexibility in employing numerous teaching strategies, but she did not give sound
reasoning for her pedagogical choices. She held nebulous notions about successful
students: they were decent writers and turned in their work. She did not describe the
attributes of excellent student work or effective teaching in ways that showed that she had
knowledge of the skills that students were expected to master. The vague descriptions of
her expectations reflected an absence of reflection about her curricular and pedagogical

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decisions as well as her lack of preparedness in teaching the English content area.
Satisfied if they finished their work, she did not challenge her students or reflect on her
instruction or on the quality of her assignments.
Ms. Leslie was in a difficult position. She felt fortunate to have this job at Petry
High School, but as a substitute without training, she recognized that she was not
adequately prepared to perform her job effectively. She did not possess the content
knowledge and pedagogical knowledge to teach with rigor. She was placed in a
classroom five years ago as a substitute without support, and as she struggled to plan and
implement lessons, prepare for benchmark exams, negotiate her role and authority in the
classroom, and build relationships with students, she had been left much on her own for
most of her teaching experience. She did not or did not know how to reflect on her
instruction, her actions in class, and her relationship with students because she was not
afforded the opportunity, time, or support to engage in such introspection. Her lack of
confidence motivated her to seek the help of other teachers for guidance, resources, and
advice, but she did not know how to evaluate their proffered knowledge. Given her
constraints and her lack of support, she was unlikely to be able to provide her students
with rigorous instruction. In addition, without support that encouraged her to learn about
her students and the assets and knowledge that they brought to class, she was only able to
care aesthetically. She did not know how to link her care for them as individuals to her
care for them as learners. Without the intentional support, content and pedagogical
knowledge, and reflective practices required to teach with rigor and caring, Ms. Leslie
was not prepared to meet the needs of her students.

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Case Study #3: Mr. Emerson at Petry High
Introduction. Like Ms. Leslie, Mr. Emerson was also an English teacher at Petry
High School, a low-income, predominantly Latino high school adjacent to Los Angeles
Unified School District. The student population at Petry High was 76% Latino, 12%
Black, 6% Asian, Pacific Islander, and Filipino, and 4% White (Ed-Data Partnership,
2011). The majority of the teaching population (72%) did not report its race, while 16%
reported Latino and 11% reported White (ibid). Petry High was a Title I school, and 81%
of its students participated in the free-or-reduced price meal program (ibid.). Fifty eight
percent of Petry High’s students measured proficient or above in English Language Arts
while 59% measured proficient or above in Math (ibid.).
Mr. Emerson grew up in the suburban peninsula area of the Bay Area in northern
California. He attended a small, private Christian high school and graduated from
University of California, Los Angeles, with a bachelor’s degree in cyberkinetics, which
included subjects such as computer science and cognitive science. In one class, he shared
that his father put away money for college for a number of years and that he had received
a scholarship because he was part American Indian. He had been teaching at Petry High
for eight years, and his tenure preceded the school’s rapid expansion from the increase in
student enrollment when the local school district introduced an open enrollment policy in
2003. Because of Petry High’s rolling block schedule, in which three out of the students’
six periods met each day for 87 minutes, he saw each class three times a week during
different times of the day. On Mondays, Periods 1, 2, and 3 met, while on Tuesdays,
Periods 4, 5, and 1 met, and so on. Previously, Mr. Emerson had continuously taught a
remedial ninth grade English that focused on improving reading skills. Last year, he

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taught 9th grade English and one section of Advanced Placement (AP) English for 12th
graders. This was his first year of teaching all 12th grade English classes, both upper and
lower tracks. His current teaching schedule included two AP English classes, two in a
Biomedical magnet program, and one college preparatory class.
Period 4, the college preparatory 12th grade English, had a focus on British
literature and consisted of 34 students – 20 males and 14 females. It was predominantly
Latino (14 male, 10 female) with six Black males and one Black female student.
Attendance was inconsistent in this class; on the first day of observation there were 10
students absent, and on other days at least 3 different students would be absent. These
college preparatory students were friendly and sociable. Some were quiet and passive,
while approximately eight participated without being called on. Mr. Emerson regularly
used a computer program that he called the “randomizer,” which randomly drew
students’ names and appeared on the overhead, so they were accustomed to being called
upon. They were rarely reluctant when asked to participate. Mr. Emerson had recently
introduced guidelines for writing the personal statement for the college application. They
usually followed the Elements of Literature textbook’s curriculum for British Literature.
Previously, they had read literature from the Dark Ages, such as excerpts of Beowulf and
The Canterbury Tales. Mr. Emerson called their future in higher education “scattershot.”
He did not know how many college preparatory students were well positioned and
prepared to enter college, and he did not have a sense of the students’ goals unless they
approached him personally with concerns about their future plans.
Period 5 was a 12
th
grade AP English class and consisted of 27 students – 18
females and 9 males. The students were predominantly Latino and female, with one

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Asian male, and six Black females. They were also friendly and sociable, and the
dominant female presence brought a different tone to the classroom than the dominant
male presence in the college preparatory class. Mr. Emerson was familiar with the
students’ creative writing skills because they recently submitted their college-application
personal statements, which he had yet to return with feedback. They were currently
reading Laura Esquivel’s Like Water For Chocolate and using a newly published AP
Literature textbook called Literature and Composition: Reading, Writing, and Thinking.
From his experience with 12
th
grade AP English last year, Mr. Emerson predicted that
every AP student in this class would attend a four-year university next year.
Mr. Emerson’s classroom was located in a portable on the edge of campus,
adjacent to the sporting fields. A tall, barbed wire fence and a concrete wall topped with
barbed wire lined the school’s boundary and bordered this cluster of 14 brown portable
classrooms, while auto-body shops and homes sat on the other side. The classroom was
both bare and untidy. There was a large whiteboard at the front of the room, onto which
Mr. Emerson projected his laptop from a podium at the front. The podium contained a
few items, such as his keys and Race Matters by Cornel West. The teacher’s area was
cluttered with papers and books on the ground, and an outdated school-issued desktop
computer occupied most of the space on his desk, which he rarely used. There were 36
student desks that faced the front of the room in eight rows of four to six desks. A tall
bookcase at the front of the room held textbooks and graduate-level education texts, such
as Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol, two texts by Diane Ravitch, and books on race
and inequality. The whiteboard was filled with diagrams that showed different formats
for structuring essays, and the agenda was located at the top right hand side of

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whiteboard. The classroom walls were bare, absent of student work and posters. When
one student noted the empty walls, Mr. Emerson mentioned that, over the summer, the
custodians mistakenly thought that Mr. Emerson would not return to the same classroom
in the following fall, so they removed his belongings and tore his displays from the walls.
By the time I began observing in November, he still had not posted anything on his walls.
As demonstrated below, Mr. Emerson showed moments of both rigor and lack of
rigor in his instruction and a mix of aesthetic and authentic caring. He held an array of
beliefs that transcended simplistic and generalized notions about students’ abilities as
learners, and the complexity of his beliefs was reflected in his behavior in class. In the
AP class, his instruction was content driven and challenging because he presented his
students with open-ended questions that furthered their critical thinking skills and helped
them make connections between abstract concepts and the text. On the same note, he
sometimes dictated the connections for them when he did not scaffold their understanding
in a way that helped them arrive at his intended outcomes autonomously. With his
college preparatory students, he provided them with opportunities to connect modern and
classic literary works and to make assertions backed by evidence, but he did not practice
literary analysis with them, and he made explicit connections between the texts and
abstract concepts and themes instead of allowing students to make those connections on
their own.
As a teacher who showed aesthetic and authentic caring, Mr. Emerson showed
commitment to student achievement when he emphasized attributes necessary to succeed
in college and made explicit attempts to raise his students’ self-efficacy through forming
positive and respective relationships with them. Yet he struggled with negotiating the

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outside factors that influenced student motivation and learning and felt nebulous about
his role in the classroom. Classroom observations of Mr. Emerson did not clearly reveal a
straight line between his beliefs and actions because he held conflicting ideas about his
role as teacher and their capabilities as learners.
Rigor of Instruction. Mr. Emerson defined rigorous instruction as a “complex
cognitive activity, one that required observation and an organization of thoughts and then
communication of thoughts.” He stressed that the product of rigorous instruction was not
the regurgitation of information and distinguished between difficulty and rigor by
explaining that rigor did not simply mean difficulty but also had value and required
greater cognitive difficulty. He elaborated that rigorous instruction required many steps
of cognitive activity and excluded the memorization of information. Mr. Emerson’s
characterizations of rigorous instruction were similar to those described by Mathews and
Lowe (2011) and Matsumura et al. (2008) because they emphasized intellectual challenge
and engagement. He also recognized that rigorous instruction was not the presentation of
difficult material but involved steps that increased in complexity. He also included
higher order thinking in his assertion that rigorous instruction involved the organization
and communication of ideas. Mr. Emerson offered a robust and specific view of rigorous
instruction, though his curricular and pedagogical decisions and actions in class wavered
between abiding by and contradicting this view.
The following example demonstrated Mr. Emerson’s ability to deliver rigorous
instruction. It also showed that he took away opportunities for college preparatory
students to practice critical thinking through literary analysis. This exchange represented
common practice in Mr. Emerson’s classroom, where he gave students time to engage

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with the text on their own before leading a class discussion about their thoughts. Mr.
Emerson prepared the students for Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to
His Love” by introducing the idea of romantic persuasion. After the class discussed one
modern love song suggested by a student, it listened to the poem on a recording:
“The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”
By Christopher Marlowe

Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods or steepy mountain yields.

And we will sit upon the rocks,
Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks
By shallow rivers to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.

And I will make thee beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant posies,
A cap of flower, and a kirtle
Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle;

A gown made of the finest wool
Which from our pretty lambs we pull;
Fair lined slippers for the cold
With buckles of the purest gold;

A belt of straw and ivy buds,
With coral clasps and amber studs;
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me and be my love.

The shepherds’ swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each May morning:
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me and be my love.

After listening to the poem, the following interaction occurred:
Mr. Emerson: I want you to summarize the poem in three sentences. I want you to
provide some details. Summarize it with a partner. Come up with the same

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answer but write it down on separate sheets of paper. Read it over one
more time and ask yourselves, “What is this saying?” Don’t write it in
two. If you write it in two, it’s probably too short. If you feel comfortable
working on your own, that’s okay. But I find that with poetry, when
you’re working with someone, you can talk it through. Working with
someone else is like quality control. It’ll keep you from writing something
that doesn’t make any sense.
He stands at podium.
Students talk.
Mr. Emerson writes on overhead: Write a summary of the poem in three
sentences.
Mr. Emerson roams.
Zane (BM): Myrtle is a metal, right?
Mr. Emerson: Myrtle is a plant. You guys have 30 more seconds. I see you guys
asking questions, so you guys have another minute.
Mr. Emerson roams classroom.
After seven minutes of group work…
Mr. Emerson: So your job was to summarize the poem in 3 sentences. “The
Passionate Shepherd to his Love.” Let’s find out what you guys said.
Lana.
Lana (LF) explains.
Mr. Emerson: Anyone have a question or want Lana to read it again?
MS: Read it again
Lana reads it again.
Mr. Emerson: Thank you very, very much. (To the class) Any problems with that?
Mary (LF): Can I volunteer [my own summary]?
Mr. Emerson: No, not right now. Chris? You got beef with it?
Chris (LF): There’s no place where he says can offer a quality life.
MSs: (taunting Chris’s disagreement) Ooh, like Tupac & Biggie.
Lana reads lines from the poem that show that the shepherd offers a quality of
life.
Mr. Emerson: Thank you for your backup, Lana.
He calls on Mary, who gives her summary.
Mr. Emerson: Excellent. Her point is that he uses nature to convey to the girl to be
with him. It doesn’t sound like she’s reciprocating his feelings. Janet?
Janet (LF) gives her summary.
T: Good job. Janet. Let’s go Jaime.
Jaime (LM): He would give her anything she needs. Not buy her, but give her a
bunch of stuff.
Mr. Emerson: So he promises stuff to her. What does he promise her? “We will
sit upon the rocks” that sounds nice. But what are they doing? “Watching
the shepherd feed the flocks.” Better than TV (sarcastic tone). “Watch the
river & listen to the birds…”… What else does he promise? Your bed will
smell good because there are roses on it. And you want a hat? I’ll make
you one out of flowers (sarcasm). I can get you a belt of straw. Most

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people use leather, but straw is great. Just like Mary says, he tries to tempt
her using nature.
[OC] Mr. Emerson paraphrases poem and students realize how funny or silly it is.
Students laugh.

This exchange contained the presence and absence of rigorous instruction. As evidence
of rigor, Mr. Emerson instructed the students to construct meaning through discussion
and then communicate that meaning through a three-sentence summary. He reasoned
that students who worked with peers held each other accountable for the meaning, which
followed Crawford’s (2008) explanation of the constructivist model of learning where
students participate in their own learning process and co-construct knowledge in
collaboration with peers. He encouraged collaboration and explained that it guaranteed
better quality ideas. When Lana participated, Mr. Emerson evaded Mary’s proffer of
sharing in order to encourage the class to examine Lana’s summary. In this moment, he
created the condition for students to question and engage with one another around their
interpretation of the text, another display of constructivist teaching. Chris’s question
toward Lana showed that the students had internalized Mr. Emerson’s habit of requesting
supporting evidence. This was another sign of rigorous instruction because Mr. Emerson
had established an environment where students knew to be prepared to provide evidence
for their assertions and had adopted this habit well enough for Mr. Emerson to remove
himself from the discussion.
This interaction also demonstrated low rigor because in the dialogue after Lana’s
contribution, Mr. Emerson removed the opportunity for students to engage in critical
thinking about the poem. Mr. Emerson thanked Lana for providing evidence for her
summary but failed to further delve into Lana and Chris’s exchange by asking Lana to

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explain how her evidence showed that the shepherd promised a “quality life” to his love.
His affirmation of her support revealed that she has met his expectation of providing
evidence and that he was ready to move onto another student. He allowed other students
to participate but did not offer chances for students to examine each other’s summaries,
so they were not asked to defend their idea with evidence as Lana had been. Then he
quickly paraphrased the poem, taking away from students the opportunity to analyze the
speaker’s persuasive techniques more closely. Instead of facilitating dialogue among
students, he commanded authority over the meaning of the poem and even elicited humor
through his sarcastic interpretation of each line. In addition, because Mr. Emerson gave
the students seven minutes to read and summarize the poem, the students may not have
had received enough time to make meaning of the poem, which contained embellished
language and antiquated vocabulary. These actions demonstrated low rigor because,
besides the exchange between Lana and Chris, he neither engaged the students in critical
thinking nor required them to defend the meaning that they made from forming their
summary. Also, he interpreted the poem for them, thus preventing them from better
understanding and analyzing it independently.
There were occasions when Mr. Emerson taught rigorously but did not provide
students with the scaffolding necessary for them to attain his expected outcome. In the
following instance, Mr. Emerson explained one particular students’ struggle with
connecting a contemporary work to a Renaissance poem:
Chris will sometimes speak up and is often… the quickness with which he
articulates things, things the other students are still like, “I don't really know what
you’re talking about,” is pretty amazing. So I took “Otis” by Jay-Z and Kanye,
and [the students] said, “Okay, well, they took something that was old, an Otis
Redding song, and refreshed it by…overlaying their own lyrics and by mixing up

165
his… you know, by mixing up his actual song to create a beat.” And [Chris is]
like, “Okay, I get that but I don't know how to talk about that in a sonnet.” But at
least he had made the cognitive step to: “I get that.” Once he'd spent maybe 20
minutes trying to look at it, he may have some ideas, but things of that nature or
the poems with response of looking at how we have songs that have responses
now or… Anyway, still trying to find modern ways to connect them to whatever
the subject matter is. I thought some of those went well.

In this excerpt, Mr. Emerson’s constructivist approach emerged when he presented a
sonnet and a rap song and intended for students to make meaning from the juxtaposition.
He thought that the presentation of the materials led students to transfer their skills and
make a connection. Mathews and Lowe (2011) describe rigorous instruction as
presenting challenge tasks with attainable outcomes, and in this instance, Mr. Emerson
did not prepare students for the challenging task of making connections between two
literary works, so the outcome was unattainable for them. Even Chris, a quick-witted
student in the college preparatory class, expressed confusion and was unable to
understand Mr. Emerson’s purpose in connecting the two works. This implied that the
rest of the students might have had more difficulty in deciphering Mr. Emerson’s
purpose. Rigorous instruction is not the act of giving students difficult work but teaching
them skills to achieve challenging tasks. Mr. Emerson found engaging and relevant
materials to engage students in higher order thinking but did not set them up to attain his
goal.
Mr. Emerson’s expressed academic expectations for his college preparatory
students were similar to my characterizations of rigorous instruction in Chapter Two: to
“gather textual evidence,” “organize their writing into logical parts,” and “continue
attempting to understand difficult texts, using whatever is out there at their disposal to
understand difficult texts.” Instead of being fixated on the array of discrete goals that

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were provided by the twelfth grade California State Standards for English Language Arts,
Mr. Emerson chose a few that he found were most important to carry through the school
year. The last expectation – to “continue attempting to understand difficult texts…” –
signified his efforts to build the students’ self-efficacy and resilience. He believed that
students learned best through the apprenticeship model in which “[students] observe, they
do with help, they do on their own…I think that’s how people learn best and that’s
actually a question I ask my students…’How do you even know what is good at
something?’” His examples of the lessons that utilized the coaching model included
teaching students the habits of strong readers and reading literary analysis with students
before letting them practicing it independently.
For the AP students, Mr. Emerson’s academic expectations revolved around
preparing for the AP test: to “master AP literature language,” “demonstrate creative
writing that illustrates their understanding of the effect of literary devices,” and
“recognize when an author subverts expectations.” These learning goals reflected Mr.
Emerson’s intentions to teach rigorously. They all involved engaging students in critical
thinking, constructing knowledge, connecting concepts and ideas to text, and explaining
assertions using evidence. He gave specific expectations that involved the acquisition of
skills – mastering academic language, demonstrating creative writing, and recognizing
oddities in texts. His goals were embedded in the mastery of the English content area and
surpassed the fulfillment of California State Standards for the English Language Arts.
Mr. Emerson showed more frequency of rigorous instruction in the 12
th
grade AP
class. The following exchange depicted a usual exchange between teacher and students

167
about patterns in Like Water for Chocolate, and it went beyond low-level thinking and
simple recall of its plot:
Mr. Emerson: I want to go back to patterns. You’ll be answering some of these
soon.
Elaine (BF) asks why the chapters are in months.
Mr. Emerson types on overhead: What is the significance of the months? How do
they correspond to the story?
Carlos (LM) says meals don’t match months.
Mr. Emerson types: Starts in January, ends in December, dishes don’t match
months, what does that signify?
Dina (LF) and Carlos say that Christmas rolls are supposed to be eaten in January
but they’re eaten in December in the novel.
Mr. Emerson: Who remembers why that is? Why they’re eating Christmas rolls in
December?
FSs: It’s [Tita’s] birthday.
Mr. Emerson: We start with Tita’s birthday, and she’s eating her favorite food
even though it’s not the right month. But we start with the right month
because Tita is the protagonist.
Mr. Emerson types on overhead:
The meaning of seasons & do they correspond?
Winter=death sad
Spring is new life
New beginning, etc.
[Observer’s comment] Oftentimes, Mr. Emerson does not speak. He just types
what he will to say, and the students read from the overhead.
Mr. Emerson: And what we do get in the spring? We get… (trails off)
Marlene (LF): A new baby.
Mr. Emerson: It’s very apparent and will be more apparent that the timeline of the
text is not in one year. When we get to the end of the story years and
years and years go by. So, the question of “Why those months?” is a very
good question because it doesn’t correspond time-wise.

The interaction between Mr. Emerson and his students demonstrated a high level of rigor
because he posed open-ended questions that required critical or abstract thinking about
the text. In addition, he did not present these patterns as absolutes but pitched them as
questions that encouraged students to search for oddities and delve further into the text
for evidence. As he urged them to look for oddities, Dina and Carlos were able to
connect their prior knowledge about Mexican culture. The students collectively

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connected the text to larger themes and concepts and produced examples from the text
from memory. Mr. Emerson did not require students to practice close reading and textual
analysis in this particular discussion, but he started from their understanding about the
novel.
Moments of low rigor emerged when Mr. Emerson dominated and drove class
discussion with his own questions about the text. He did most of the talking in this
exchange, and instead of inviting students to generate their own questions about patterns
and oddities in the novel, he directly articulated them. So although he posed these new
ideas and questions for discussion, he maintained content authority, which Crawford
(2008) elaborated on in her study about the ways in which classroom participation is
affected by a teacher’s constructivist ideology. This class discussion would have been a
valuable opportunity for students to assemble their own questions and gather possible
responses to them by returning to the text for evidence. Even though encouraging
students to assume authority over their engagement with a text would require more class
time, at least the students would be able to better challenge and solidify their
understanding of it. Also, this discussion consisted of students’ verbal contributions and
Mr. Emerson’s typing of lists and questions on the overhead, so he did not present a
structured format for collecting and analyzing ideas, which would have helped scaffold
student learning. This interaction showed an occasion when Mr. Emerson gave every
student the opportunity to engage in higher-order thinking, text exploration, access prior
knowledge, and provide supporting evidence, all characteristics of rigorous instruction. It
also showed that Mr. Emerson did not offer structure to the students’ processing and
analyzing of these patterns, oddities, and questions and that he did not require students to

169
refer to evidence in the text when they made assertions. Therefore, although Mr.
Emerson’s behavior during this discussion about patterns demonstrated rigorous
instruction, he missed opportunities for scaffolding their collected knowledge in ways
that would have helped them understand and organize large concepts and themes over the
course of reading the novel.
There were some occasions in the AP English class when Mr. Emerson moved
away from rigorous instruction by exploring his own discoveries about the novels and
neglecting the students’ understanding. One such instance occurred in a discussion about
the significance of a minor character in Like Water for Chocolate:
Mr. Emerson: Why does the doctor have to be a white guy? That doesn’t have to
happen. I’m sure there were Mexican doctors in town. These are
questions you should be asking. What does that create that wasn’t there
before?
He pauses. Students do not respond.
Mr. Emerson: What has now become a theme? A possible theme that wasn’t there
before?
Michael (LM): Stereotypes?
Mr. Emerson: No, not necessarily stereotypes.
Chris (LM): White superiority?
Mr. Emerson: Not necessarily.
Mr. Emerson types on the overhead: Why does the doctor have to be white? What
does the story say about cultural imperialism and differences?

Although Mr. Emerson presented his AP students with high-level questions that linked
larger concepts and themes to text, he did not provide opportunities for them to improve
their own understanding apart from his assistance. In this interaction, he was unable to
help his students connect race to cultural imperialism, and instead of creating conditions
for them to discover this connection through discourse, he explicitly shared his larger
point. When students did not offer his expected answer, he gave it to them, rather than
allowing them to make sense of it on their own. He modeled the skills of a critical

170
thinking and informed students, “These are the questions that you should be asking.” But
instead of teaching them how to ask these types of questions, he presented them with
many examples throughout the class discussion. In Writing is Dialogue: Teaching
Students to Thinking (And Write) like Writers, author and English teacher Jeff House
(2006) suggested that teachers scaffold by helping students generate general themes from
the text, gather ample evidence related to those themes, then create assertions from an
analysis of the patterns found within the evidence. House’s method would have been
more helpful to students’ understanding of Like Water for Chocolate because the students
might be better able to construct ideas and assertions from examining concrete textual
evidence than to draw abstract conclusions from seemingly chance observations as Mr.
Emerson had done here. Plus, they would have come up with their own assertions
instead of passively soaking up Mr. Emerson’s ideas. This interaction represented a
moment of low rigor because Mr. Emerson dominated the thinking that took place during
the discussion instead of providing students with an opportunity to independently connect
the text to larger themes.
Overall, Mr. Emerson showed characteristics of a teacher who delivered
instruction that was both low and high in rigor. He gave students the opportunity to
construct knowledge around a text and make connections not only to their prior
knowledge but also to other texts. He engaged them in critical thinking around elements
of texts and author’s intentions, encouraged students to connect abstract themes and
concepts to texts, and trained students to provide evidence to support their assertions.
However, he also showed some instances of presenting intellectually challenging ideas
without preparing students to attain his learning goals, whether it be connecting a rap

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song to a sonnet or discovering the theme of cultural imperialism from a minor
character’s presence in a novel. His practice reflected Crawford’s (2008) illustration of
constructivist methods, but he maintained content authority by serving as the expert of
the text, unlike the teacher whom Crawford (2008) observed, who shifted content
authority from her students to herself, depending on the nature and purpose of the
activity. Mr. Emerson’s academic expectations for both the college preparatory and AP
students were concrete and intellectually challenging, but when he took away
opportunities for students think and come to conclusions on their own, his actions in class
represented a low-rigor environment. Therefore, his conflicting ideas about what
students were and were not capable of were reflected in multiple instances of high and
low rigor.
Teacher Caring. Mr. Emerson exhibited moments of aesthetic and authentic
caring. He possessed strong ideas about addressing students’ needs, but felt ambivalent
about his role in their learning. He also understood the significant role that teacher-
student relationships played in student motivation. Mr. Emerson recognized that students
who made an academic effort were partly motivated by positive relationships with their
teacher:
Some students will relationally stop liking you and because they relationally don’t
like you, they will not do the work in your class. They’re motivated by
relationships, so I try to maintain a positive relationship and I would generally
describe my relationship with students as positive generally.

Mr. Emerson was aware of the impact that teacher-student relationships had on student
effort and performance. He believed that students who did not like their teacher were less
willing to make an academic effort. Maintaining positive relationships showed students

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that he cared about them. Mr. Emerson’s display of caring elicited students’ intellectual
and emotional investment in the class.
Mr. Emerson made a conscious effort to build positive relationships with his male
students. He believed that they had a greater need for an intellectual connection to
school:
I also feel like in general right now boys are the less academically engaged, if you
had to generalize. I will actually feel like most of my efforts in [getting to know
my students] are more guy-oriented…You can make students feel comfortable by
the way that you interact with them as well. If you’re willing to laugh at things,
not take things seriously if they want to joke around and that becomes a place of a
certain amount of comfort.

Mr. Emerson believed that making students comfortable in his class was one step towards
building positive relationships and motivating them and that teachers who were willing to
be relaxed around students created a comfortable environment. From interviews with and
journals by students and teachers, Davis (2006) found that humor strengthened teacher-
student relationship building when students reported that teachers used humor to deal
with minor misbehavior and to engage students’ interest in the material. Similarly, Mr.
Emerson felt that a teacher’s lightheartedness helped students to relax. Mr. Emerson’s
often opened class with a sense of humor and a respectful demeanor. His beliefs about
teacher-student relationships were demonstrated in the following interaction with the
college preparatory students:
Mr. Emerson: All right, folks, you should have your Reader’s Notebooks, please.
AJ, I like that you have that hat off. I like that.
AJ (LM): Basketball-shirt Wednesday. You’re not wearing one.
Mr. Emerson (smiling and shrugging): You don’t tell me these things. You gotta
tell me these things.
AJ: Button-up shirt on Thursday.
Mr. Emerson laughs and jokes around with other students. He fist bumps Victor
(LM) & hugs Claudio (LM) at the podium after they have entered.

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Bell rings.
Claudio puts his stuff down on his desk and immediately begins to pass out
Reader’s Notebooks.
Mr. Emerson: Thank you, Claudio for helping with that. Eliot (BM), you sit over
here. Thank you, Zane (BM), I appreciate that.
Eliot was sitting next to his friend Cameron (BM).
Zane passes out notebooks with Claudio.
Mr. Emerson: Please take out page 61-62 of your notebooks. Please have your
notebook open to page ____. Thank you, Victor for helping. Thank you,
Carmen (LF) for helping.

Mr. Emerson’s easy demeanor and friendly pre-class banter with male students reflected
authentic caring. This exchange demonstrated respect between Mr. Emerson and his
students and showed that Mr. Emerson had set a particular tone in his class in which
students felt a sense of belonging and appreciation. He engaged in respectful physical
contact with Victor and Claudio, acts that implied a high level of comfort among male
students in his class, who felt emotionally safe displaying physical affection and
friendliness. He also publicly recognized Claudio and Zane’s efforts to help him start
class. Mr. Emerson’s positive relationships with male students did not intimate negative
consequences for his relationships with female students. Observations in his
predominantly female AP class found that he also had positive relationships with them.
Mr. Emerson exhibited traits of a caring teacher who viewed his students as individuals,
fostered a positive emotional environment, and engendered mutual respect.
Exhibiting characteristics of a caring teacher who understood his students’ lives
outside of school, Mr. Emerson sometimes used his knowledge of a few college
preparatory students to elaborate on tips about writing personal statements for college
applications:
Mr. Emerson: I find it interesting that both John (LM) and AJ (LM) participate in
business. I would guess that you, John, find shoes at a certain price and

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sell them at a certain price…You could write your personal statement on
your entrepreneurial idea…John could write about how hard he worked
doing that and apply that entrepreneurial spirit to this college. Not that he
would bring business there, but he could bring these skills and ideas to
college.

This example demonstrated that Mr. Emerson understood some students individually and
guided them through the writing of the personal statement by helping them navigate
through the education process with their complex lives outside school in mind. He
implicitly praised John and AJ’s business acumen and proposed that they tie their
entrepreneurial skills and attributes to the qualities that colleges sought in potential
students. Thus, showing a commitment to their achievement, Mr. Emerson made a
connection between their outside lives and their academic lives.
Mr. Emerson’s commitment to student achievement emerged again when he
explicitly discussed the academic strengths that would help them through college. When
Period 4 students read quietly about England’s historical background during the
Renaissance in the textbook’s introduction of a new unit, Mr. Emerson typed on the
overhead in capital letters, “THIS IS SIMILAR TO COLLEGE LEVEL READING, SO
WHILE I KNOW THAT IT MAY NOT BE SUPER EXCITING, IT IS A GOOD IDEA
TO GET USED TO IT AND PERSEVERE.” After 20 minutes, instead of reviewing the
content of the reading, Mr. Emerson took a metacognitive approach by suggesting that
they talk about the genre of the introduction:
I was impressed with the effort I saw. I saw that 90% of you were trying to
persevere through it. A year from now, when you get to college, a lot of what you
read will sound like your history textbooks. (He pulls a book from the bookshelf)
This is a book on urban planning. It’s straightforward, informative, boring…and
if you were to read a science textbook, no storyline, no plot. I’m impressed by
your effort, though, because you’ll be seeing this in college. You gotta push
through.

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He demonstrated caring in this speech because he explicitly discusses future challenges
that they would face as college students and pointed out qualities that they need to master
in order to achieve academically. Although he expressed privately that the college
preparatory students’ preparedness for college was “scattershot,” he made public his
assumption that they would enter higher education. Mr. Emerson addressed the need for
persistence in reading non-fiction texts and praised their efforts, but he also warned them
that much of their college reading would resemble this dry, informative introduction to
Renaissance history. Because Mr. Emerson was concerned about the college preparatory
students’ negative attitudes towards intellectual challenges, he made an effort to make
learning explicit, so that they were aware that a strong skill set was not intrinsically
present in a student but attained through effort and persistence. This effort reflected his
goals to build resilience and self-efficacy in these students.
In the post-observation interview, he shared his interpretation of student
motivation and his strategy for addressing low motivation:
I think there are also a lot of students who get it in their head they're stupid. And
I think that a lot of those students that are maybe lower-skilled are lower-skilled
because they told themselves they were stupid for so long that they didn't
participate in academic activities. That's why you maybe even heard this said a
couple of times. I said, “If you read it and you don't get it the first time, that
makes you…” and they know the answer is “normal.” And so that's something
that I try to, I guess, kind of push in to their heads, so that they don't think, “I'm
abnormal when I read something and I don't get it.”

By making their learning processes explicit, Mr. Emerson combatted what he perceived
as the students’ deeply rooted low self-image and negative mentality. He believed that a
mental barrier inhibited students from persisting through intellectual challenges and that
long ago students who were low skilled internalized the notion that they were incapable

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of learning. Interestingly, he mentioned that their internalization occurred when “they
told themselves,” neglecting the idea that they might have been told by others that they
were intellectually incapable. According to Mr. Emerson, after many years of not putting
in effort for fear of failure, low-skilled students found themselves lacking the skills to
approach challenging tasks, so their actions, which took the form of a lack of engagement
and academic persistence, were self-fulfilling and reinforcing. He also used the
apprenticeship model to help students understand their learning processes and overcome
their fear of failure:
So I try to give them models, models that they can look at at that moment and
then give them between 50 to, you know, a little bit over an hour to do the actual
writing. But I find unfortunately though, and it depends on the class or whatever
and sometimes per student, but there's a cognitive wall you have to get over. It's
the fear wall of “I don't know what I'm doing, this is uncomfortable for me.” And
for some that's... that's bigger than others and I think for fourth period...Oh, I think
that happened…for them, that cognitive wall for some of them lasted a long time,
and they didn’t get much written as a result.

Mr. Emerson believed that college preparatory students’ discomfort toward academic
writing loomed so threateningly over them that they produced very little of their personal
statement in class. His conscious attempts to help students tackle their frustration and
feelings of low self-efficacy demonstrated authentic caring. Recognizing that this
“cognitive wall” existed most palpably in their efforts to write, he gave them models to
examine before endeavoring to write on their own. But Mr. Emerson described “writer’s
block” as more enduring than the temporary inability to write but a mental obstacle that
some students carried through many years of schooling. By openly addressing their
frustrations and giving them skills to overcome them, he created a positive emotional and

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intellectual environment for students, explicitly addressed their future challenges, and
fostered self-confidence and persistence in order to help them achieve.
Mr. Emerson’s view of external factors that negatively impacted student
achievement uncovered the link between caring and rigor. He faulted his school’s
curriculum for impeding on students’ success in English class: “[Regarding
Shakespearean plays and The Odyssey], I don’t feel like [schools] really approach our
language-disadvantaged students just in terms of things that we read in a way that really
sets them up for success.” In this statement, Mr. Emerson exhibited some deficit thinking
by referring to second language learners as “language-disadvantaged,” as if their home
language hindered their academic achievement. He also recognized that Petry High
students had disadvantages because they felt a disconnect between home and school. He
might have felt that he was in the difficult position of coercing students to read culturally
inaccessible texts. His comment also showed that he understood the importance of
culturally relevant materials to student motivation and learning. Beyond addressing this
disparity, Mr. Emerson did not explore his role in helping students make those
connections. Mr. Emerson believed that mandating outdated and Eurocentric texts
hindered the achievement of second language learners. He also believed that his
students’ poor academic performance was also in part caused by their lack of exposure to
academic English outside of the classroom: “[Regarding the Spanish-speaking students],
English is being patterned onto [Spanish], they’re not going to know if a sentence sounds
right…In the same way, my African American students who may not speak academic
English at home or…with their peers.” In a study of five students’ home and school
lives, McCarthey (1997) found that students whose home and school lives did not

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connected were more quiet in classroom activities and less likely to share stories from
home than students who home lives were reflected in school. Mr. Emerson recognized
this disconnect between Petry students’ home lives – in his comment, reflected through
their home language – and English content and curriculum at school. Mr. Emerson
presented this issue as a problem for students, and his actions in class and curricular
decisions did not show intentional attempts to bridge school and home. Mr. Emerson
level of caring did not reach authentic caring because he did not view himself as an
instrument that could improve students’ mastery over the content area, and he did not
make these challenging outcomes attainable for students through scaffolding. His
academic expectations were intellectually rigorous, but because he did not recognize his
agency in bridging students’ experiences between school and home, his actions did not
consistently represent rigorous instruction, which is one facet of authentic caring.
Mr. Emerson thought deeply about larger contextual issues that impacted student
learning and shared his views of teaching and learning in ways that showed deliberation.
But he did not seem to possess a clear sense about his role in student learning. The
following interview excerpt about students’ reading habits demonstrated the limitation of
Mr. Emerson’s caring:
One of my biggest questions as an English instructor is “How much more or less
the students learn in a year if all their time spent or 80% of their time spent in
class was just reading, just reading English, and 10% was writing and 10% was
the teacher talking?” I have major questions about how much they would actually
improve in terms of their English proficiency…

Reflecting on his constructivist teaching philosophy and belief in the apprenticeship
model, Mr. Emerson expressed a belief that presenting students with engaging texts
would gain them skills in English proficiency that they otherwise lacked in their English

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classes now. His belief that exposure to reading would give them skills ignored the need
for instruction to help students attain and improve those skills. Students would become
better readers by reading more, but they would not learn literary analysis from solely
reading literature. The teacher’s role is fundamental in their attainment of reading and
writing skills. Mr. Emerson revealed some confusion in his role and implied that his role
would be more effective if he had less of a presence in the classroom and if students had
more access to content. Although, as a caring teacher, Mr. Emerson showed a
commitment to student achievement through his actions in class, he also showed that he
did not recognize his own agency in helping students succeed.
Mr. Emerson was almost an authentically caring teacher who knew about some
students’ lives and found ways of incorporating their interests into his instruction but also
showed conflicting notions about students’ needs and capacity to learn. He recognized
the impact of positive teacher-student relationships on student effort, and his respectful
interactions and friendly banter with students reflected his methods of motivating
students, especially male students, who he believed were less academically engaged than
female students. His commitment to student achievement was revealed in his frank
discussions about his students’ future challenges in higher education. He encouraged
attributes, such as persistence, that would help students beyond high school, and he tried
to give students tools – mental and English content related – to overcome the lack of self-
confidence that they might have acquired from past school experiences. While he elicited
students’ interest in learning by supplementing the content with modern works, he
believed that mandated curricula impeded on their potential to achieve academically. He
described a clear disconnect between students’ home and school lives, which impacted

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student motivation and learning. But he did not explore or discuss his role in connecting
these seemingly disparate worlds. Grounded in constructivist learning theory, Mr.
Emerson believed that more exposure to reading would help student gain skills that they
actually needed through instruction. Therefore, he did not see his own role in impacting
student learning and did not exhibit enough caring to deliberate on ways in which he
could scaffold their learning so that they could reach challenging outcomes. Overall,
while he maintained positive relationships with his students and clarified their learning
processes in a way that made them better learners, he expressed a sense of despair and
futility about his role in helping students achieve amidst the external factors over which
he had no control.
Conclusion. Mr. Emerson exhibited both high and low rigor as well as aesthetic
and authentic caring. He showed moments of instruction with low and high rigor when
he explicitly taught students to understand their own learning process. In the college
preparatory class, he focused on two goals that required critical thinking: teaching
students to form robust assertions that could be supported by textual evidence and
helping them make connections and create relevance between classic and current literary
works. He gave the college preparatory students opportunities to construct knowledge
independently and in groups, but, as one example above demonstrated, there were
occasions when he did not give them the opportunity to think when he analyzed and
interpreted text for them. Unlike the AP students, he did not instruct college preparatory
students to analyze language, such as the kind found in Renaissance poems. He
encouraged them to question the text, but rather than instruct them to answer their own
questions, he served as the authority of knowledge when they approached a text with

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questions. Furthermore, even though he stated his beliefs in the apprenticeship model
and the necessity for students to practice content-area skills during class, he gave college
preparatory students little time in class to work. This was demonstrated by his lesson
about sonnets, in which he planned time to give students to write their own but ended up
spending most of the class period lecturing about the structure and types of sonnets. It
was also demonstrated when he delivered a lesson about personal statements when he
lectured about the dos and don’ts through the class period and eventually gave students
only 20 minutes to begin writing their own. Kagan (1992) noted the difficulty of
capturing teacher beliefs in the observation of their behavior in class, and this case study
about Mr. Emerson supports her claim, especially because his differing beliefs about
students’ capacity as learners displayed differing behavior in his instruction.
Mr. Emerson recognized the significant role of the teacher-student relationship in
student motivation, and while he showed some self-awareness about his interactions with
students, he demonstrated both aesthetic and authentic caring. As Furrer and Skinner
(2003) discovered in their study about student motivation and coping, students who feel
secure in their relationship with a teacher learn without fear and with high self-efficacy.
Because Mr. Emerson maintained supportive and positive relationships with his students,
he carried respectful content-related and non-content-related discussions with them and
was not preoccupied by enforcing his authority in the classroom. The mutual trust
between Mr. Emerson and his students created an emotionally safe learning environment.
Mr. Emerson enjoyed continually discovering students’ writing abilities,
intellectual aptitude, and personal goals, but he also acknowledged limitations in his
knowledge about students. Mr. Emerson admitted that he did not have a grasp of his

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college preparatory students’ capabilities. Of Lana, he said, “Who knows what her
ceiling is?” when he described her solid performance in his and another AP and shared
his worries about her preparedness for college application deadlines. He did not
generalize about students’ abilities and even acknowledged that he had a better pulse of
college preparatory students’ understanding of content because he used the randomizer
more often in their class, whereas discussions in the AP class were usually dominated by
a handful of students while the rest of the students stayed silent. Mr. Emerson’s ability to
distinguish between his tendencies in these two classes demonstrated that he was aware
of his approaches to gauging student understanding and of the impact that his behavior
had on student effort and performance.
Although Mr. Emerson showed detailed knowledge about some students, he
admitted that he had yet to tap some students’ potential. He did not refer to them as
belonging to a homogeneous group, yet he believed that they lacked exposure to
academic English and did not read enough. He thought that their second-language
learning characteristic and low socio-economic status were disadvantages that affected
their motivation and learning. In addition, he saw himself in the difficult position of
enforcing the school’s imposition of curricula that were disconnected in context, time,
language, and culture. He did not possess a clear understanding of his role in helping
students to bridge home and school life. Because Mr. Emerson held conflicting notions
about his students and about the factors that impacted their motivation and, his actions
and behavior in the classroom reflected these conflicted beliefs.
Mr. Emerson was well intentioned in his commitment to student achievement but
not prepared to use reflection as a way to think about the impact of his instruction. Like

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the two teachers described in the previous case studies, he did not have additional support
or resources that help him to reflect, so his intentions or expectations did not always align
with his instruction. One difficulty of enacting ideology into action is related to a
teacher’s lack of preparedness to reflect on his actions, behavior, and decisions in the
classroom. Because Mr. Emerson did not critically view his own practice, he lacked a
reflective habit. For example, in the rigor section included an excerpt in which Mr.
Emerson’s shared thoughts about Chris’s attempt to discover Mr. Emerson’s purpose in
juxtaposing a modern rap song and a sonnet. Mr. Emerson believed that if Chris, the
sharpest student in the college preparatory class, had more time to think, he would have
been able to find Mr. Emerson’s intended purpose and make a connection. Mr. Emerson
did not understand that Chris needed more scaffolding in order for him to understand the
purpose of Mr. Emerson’s lesson. Mr. Emerson believed that creating the conditions for
students to construct knowledge, such as presenting a contemporary rap song alongside a
Renaissance sonnet, would lead to critical thinking, but he did not adequately consider
his role in his pedagogical decisions that facilitated learning.
Mr. Emerson was an example of content-area expert whose pedagogical
knowledge did not match his knowledge of content. His enthusiastic and insightful
thoughts about Like Water for Chocolate fascinated his AP students, and his approaches
to relating contemporary songs to 16
th
century British sonnets brought relevance to his
college preparatory students’ understanding of poetry. But rigorous instruction requires
the presence of challenging tasks with attainable outcomes (Mathews & Lowe, 2011),
and though Mr. Emerson characterized rigorous instruction as requiring many steps of
cognitive activity, he lost sight of the need for scaffolding in order to ensure that his

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intended outcomes were reachable. Thus, his case presents the struggle of aligning
content knowledge with pedagogical knowledge. It also points out the difficulty that
teachers encounter when they try to enact their beliefs about teaching and learning.
Without support that helped develop his understanding between his decisions and
outcomes in the classroom, he would not be able to understand his own practice and
improve it.
Mr. Emerson’s case study presents the following predicament: How do teacher
enact what they believe? Even with a well-intentioned commitment to student
achievement and positive relationships with students, enacting ideology through behavior
and speech is a difficult task. When questioned about his purpose in placing AP students
in groups, Mr. Emerson explained that he could not possibly converse with every
individual student and that grouping students around a challenging task would increase
the likelihood that they would construct complex and meaningful ideas. He did not
explain how the collaboration facilitated learning. Being able to justify and explain these
pedagogical decisions would help Mr. Abraham become more deliberate in the way he
structured peer collaboration.
Mr. Emerson’s case study also highlights teachers’ challenge in consistently
exhibiting authentic caring. Mr. Emerson understood some of his students and the
challenges that they faced as they mitigated their school and home lives. He knew that
they had particular academic and emotional needs, so he built positive relationships that
encouraged student input. But, as he made a plethora of decisions from moment to
moment that dealt with pedagogical choices, relationships, interactions, responses to
students, etc. – some spontaneous and some planned – it seemed apparent that calling for

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teachers to show authentic caring every moment of the school day could be an
insurmountable expectation.
The conceptual framework proposed by this dissertation asserts that teachers’
unconscious and conscious beliefs about students’ capacity in their content area manifest
in their interactions and relationships with students, their behavior, and their curricular
and pedagogical decisions. These beliefs shape classroom climate, particularly the level
of rigorous instruction and exhibitions of caring toward students. Mr. Emerson’s case
study presents a teacher who showed some authentic caring toward students, especially
with his deliberate efforts to help them achieve academically. His instruction was well
intended with opportunities to challenge students with rigorous thinking, but this rigor
was occasionally subverted by his frustrations with larger, looming obstacles that
impeded on his students’ potential and his tendency to assume content authority. With
practiced reflection, Mr. Emerson could better align his instruction to his expectations,
but this would only occur if he took a closer look at his instruction and his role in
bridging students’ home and school lives.
A Cross-Case Analysis
This section explores patterns and themes regarding beliefs, behavior, rigor, and
caring across the teachers profiled in these case studies. This synthesis not only
compares the teachers’ beliefs to their behaviors but also sheds light on the complexity of
capturing rigor and caring. The following patterns and themes emerge from the case
studies and findings of Mr. Abraham, Ms. Leslie, and Mr. Emerson:
• The association between rigor and time
• The continuum of caring

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• Content and pedagogical knowledge as requisites for authentic caring
• Teachers’ identification of home and school relevance
• The lack of press on reflective practice
These teachers were multifaceted individuals with varying degrees of experience and
knowledge, and each of them held a set of ideologies that helped them make sense of
their role and relationships with students. The following section represents my attempt at
making sense of all the moving parts that emerged from capturing teacher beliefs,
teacher-student interaction, and classroom climate.
The association between rigor and time. In my analysis of observation data,
time was an obvious yet overlooked component of rigor in teacher instruction. Many
authors about rigorous instruction emphasize the quality of teacher-student dialogue, the
quality of questions from the teacher, and opportunities for students to practice higher
order thinking and make connections between content and prior knowledge (Mathew &
Lowe, 2010; Matsumura et al., 2008). They do not address the role that teachers’ use of
time plays in the extent to which students are able to process information, make sense of
the content, form questions about texts, discuss with peers, create assertions, search for
supporting evidence, and clarify their understanding. Gettinger et al.’s (2011) review of
learning environment research pointed to academic engaged time as a factor that effects
academic outcomes. They described academic learning time as
...the amount of time a student spends attending to relevant academic tasks while
performing those tasks at a high rate of success. [It is] a quality of classroom
environments that is directly impacted by the teacher’s behaviors in terms of
planning, management, and instruction. (Gettinger et al., 2011, p. 266)

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Teachers manipulate the way that they use time in the classroom, so teacher behavior
influences the amount of time that students are engaged in learning. Therefore, the ways
that Mr. Abraham, Ms. Leslie, and Mr. Emerson used time contributed to the extent to
which there was evidence of rigor in their classrooms. When time was used by the
teacher for the teacher or as a mechanism of control, rigor was not possible. When the
teacher used the time for the students, rigor was evident.
Each teacher approached the allotment of time in different ways that reflected
certain beliefs about learning. Mr. Abraham did not value the content of the course and
viewed learning as a regurgitation of details from the text. Because he believed that his
students were only capable of understanding the surface level of literature, he did not use
class time to challenge or academically engage them. Mr. Abraham devoted a lot of time
to introducing topics that were loosely related to content, such as one about the American
Dream and another about the Occupy Wall Street movement, and he shaped these
conversations into debates, in which he used these moments to convey his social and
political beliefs. Because Mr. Abraham neither set clear goals of expectations for these
tangential discussions nor provided students with opportunities to connect these topics to
the literary content, these activities seemed without purpose and unrelated to the English
Language Arts standards. He used quiz time as a way to exercise his authority, on one
occasion pointing out to the class that he was a benevolent dictator when he offered an
additional minute at a student’s request. These requests happen regularly, and, in the
college preparatory class, he usually agreed reluctantly, like a petulant tyrant who
demanded sycophantic acknowledgement of his generosity. In addition to wielding time
as a form of authoritative power, Mr. Abraham wasted class time involving students in

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non-content-related banter and sometimes off-color humor instead of furthering their
understanding of content. This behavior reflected his low expectations of the students
and his self-important personality.
Ms. Leslie often planned many activities in one class period, so students were
given little time to think or process the content. Like a coach hurrying athletes through a
set of drills, she abided by the beeping of the timer, often reminding students that they
had a lot to do or that they had to move onto the next activity. Ms. Leslie believed that
her students did not have the attention span to focus on one task for a long period of time
and that giving them too much time led to disruption and misbehavior. On one occasion,
she took away time as a punitive measure when she rushed through a PowerPoint
presentation in response to the distracted and off-task students who were taking notes.
She insisted that they copy down important points in each slide but did not realize the
cognitive demand it would take for students to read each wordy slide and distinguish
between significant and insignificant information. In the post-observation interview, Ms.
Leslie realized that giving students little time to work meant withholding an opportunity
for them to process and make meaning of the content. Her constant herding of students
through numerous activities to keep them physically engaged represented her belief that
they were incapable of focusing and that they would distract each other if they were not
kept busy. Thus, her use of time did not result in rigorous instruction that allowed
students to engage in critical thinking.
Mr. Emerson mostly occupied college preparatory class time with teacher talk,
though he regularly designated some time for students to engage in small-group
discussions and independent reading or writing. His AP class consisted of more peer

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collaboration, which resulted in opportunities for students to construct knowledge and
form assertions based on supporting evidence, and whole-class discussion, which, though
unintentional by Mr. Emerson, often resulted in his usurping of talking time. He did not
rush students through their collaboration, and he gauged their progress as he roamed
through the classroom and eavesdropped. Mr. Emerson gave ample time for his students
to engage with texts in different ways and communicated high expectations, though
occasionally he dominated discussion time with his own assertions and ideas about the
content.
Delivering rigorous instruction requires giving students adequate time to think
about and process content. It also means creating conditions for students to make sense
of the content in different ways. Mr. Abraham often spent class time digressing from the
content or giving students little to no time to construct knowledge or practice higher order
thinking skills. Ms. Leslie and he seemed to view learning as a set of tasks to complete in
a fixed period of time, so they regularly transitioned students into new activities by
telling them that it was time to move on. Both teachers used time as a punitive measure;
Mr. Abraham’s allotment of time for the quizzes and his decision to extend it represented
an exercise of authority, while Ms. Leslie established a sense of urgency that reflected her
disapproval of and preoccupation with misbehaving students. Mr. Emerson used class
time differently in his college preparatory and AP classes. Although on some occasions
in the college preparatory class, he intended to allow time for students to construct
knowledge but would end up dominating class time with his talking. He offered more
time for students to construct knowledge in the AP class, which resulted in more
academic engagement. These teachers approached the concept of academic learning time

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– and thus the level of rigor in their instruction – in ways that reflected their beliefs about
learning and their academic expectations. If they believed that their students were unable
to think critically, grasp abstract concepts related to literature, or craft assertions that
were supported by evidence, then they did not allot time for students to be academically
engaged.
The continuum of caring. As I examined the teachers’ interactions and
relationships with students, I saw levels of caring emerge on a continuum. A lack of
caring was positioned on one end, while aesthetic caring appeared in the middle, and
authentic caring appeared on the opposite end. Mr. Abraham lacked caring because he
showed no interest in the students’ experiences and knowledge. Actually, he regularly
and publicly expressed to the students his perception that teenagers were close-minded
and selfish. His customary and deliberate misappropriation of colloquial language, slang,
and Black Vernacular reflected biased perceptions about teenage speech and a lack of
caring and cultural sensitivity toward his minority students. His choice of language also
reflected his belief that students accessed content more successfully if it were translated
into their “language.” This notion essentially captured his low expectations of them. His
exhibitions of aesthetic caring toward White students similar to him in cultural and socio-
economic background surfaced in relation to his “geeky” and “quirky” persona.
Therefore, his lack of caring emerged from his beliefs about and interactions with Black
students, and his thinly veiled aesthetic caring toward White students appeared in a
superficial way because he did not connect with them as individuals but through
perceived similarities presumed from their racial, cultural, and socio-economic
backgrounds.

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Ms. Leslie fell toward the middle of the continuum, though, in Figure 1, to the
right, because her lack of teacher preparedness affected her ability to care in a way that
empowered and challenged students. She had the potential to be an authentically caring
teacher if she had known how to care for them as intellectuals. Her lack of training
meant that she did not understand what effective teaching looked like, so she encountered
difficulty in supporting their academic achievement. Displayed in phone calls to parents
and a lecture about suicide, her concern for students demonstrated that she was more
concerned about their personal needs and less concerned about their academic needs.
Although this might be interpreted as authentic caring because authentically caring
teachers view their student holistically, Ms. Leslie could not deliver rigorous instruction
that would be manifested in Valenzuela’s (1999) characterization of authentic caring.
While Mr. Abraham sponsored clubs that expected little from him and viewed caring
mainly as a sacrifice of a teacher’s time, Ms. Leslie immersed herself in school clubs that
required her personal time and leadership skills outside of school hours. Ultimately,
excluding her from the category of authentic caring is Valenzuela’s (1999) distinction
that authentically caring teachers show a commitment to student achievement. Ms. Leslie
was unable to show this commitment because she did not have the pedagogical or content
knowledge to deliver rigorous instruction that supported student learning. This
intersection between rigor and caring is discussed in the next section.
Mr. Emerson’s behavior fell closer to authentic caring because he was aware of
the impact of teacher-student relationships on student motivation and sought to build
positive and respectful relationships with students. He also recognized their struggles of
making sense of texts and their difficulties with writing, so he regularly led metacognitive

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activities that helped them uncover and understand their learning processes. Although he
showed a commitment to student achievement, Mr. Emerson’s behavior did not align
with all of the characteristics of authentic caring. He did not use his knowledge about
students’ skills and experiences to build their capacity in the English content area and
saw their second language learning and non-academic language background as
disadvantages. In my definition of authentic caring, I integrate Bondy et al.’s (2007)
emphasis on the practice of culturally relevant pedagogy, where teachers use culturally
relevant materials, express value and respect for students’ experiences and opinions, and
connect the content to students’ lives in ways that are not superfluous but essential to
their learning processes. Even though Mr. Emerson displayed respect for his students’
experiences and opinions and allowed for student input, he did not use the skills that they
acquired in non-academic settings to support their learning in class, which would not only
represent culturally relevant pedagogy but would also support Moje et al.’s (2004)
depiction of the third space.
Figure 1 below shows the continuum of caring that emerged as I observed Mr.
Abraham, Ms. Leslie, and Mr. Emerson:

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Ms. Leslie fell between aesthetic and authentic caring and closer to the latter because she
was not prepared to demonstrate authentic care. There were no supportive structures in
place at Petry High School to help Ms. Leslie gain the content and pedagogical
knowledge that she would have received in a traditional pre-service teacher education
program. Despite her placement near aesthetic caring, Ms. Leslie could not be held
accountable for not knowing how to intellectually engage her students in content or how
to care for them as learners. After all, Petry High’s principal placed her in a classroom
with a full load of classes year after year with no systematic or intentional support to help
her improve her practice. Regardless of her non-traditional pathway into teaching, she
cared deeply about her students and did her best to teach them grade-level standards by
accessing the resources available to her. Because Mr. Emerson felt ambivalent about his
role in scaffolding student learning, he was not placed on the far right end of the
continuum. He did not understand or acknowledge his role in bridging the students’
home and school lives in the teaching of the English content area. Mr. Abraham fell on
the far left of the continuum of caring. Although he emphasized the importance of
building positive relationships with students, his behavior and interactions with students
conflicted with these espoused beliefs. In fact, minority students might have interpreted
his actions and speech as racially and culturally insensitive. Mr. Abraham was not placed
on the far left side of the spectrum because he did not exhibit the hostility or antagonism
that is present in a lack of caring.
Instead of labeling teachers in finite categories, this continuum allowed me to see
teacher caring across a spectrum. Because they fell into more than one category, this
continuum served as a suitable framework for thinking about teacher caring. But

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categorizing teachers on this continuum presented a problem. At first, caring seemed to
me like a matter of choice: teachers chose to commit to understanding their students and
helping them achieve; they chose to acknowledge and embrace their students’ identities
and experiences; and they chose to use students’ assets to support academic achievement.
But, as Ms. Leslie most aptly showed, many factors, such as teacher preparedness,
teaching experience, institutional support, and content and pedagogical knowledge
impact teachers’ ability to care authentically. Sometimes, disadvantageous circumstances
are foisted upon a teacher, so teacher caring cannot be viewed as simply a teacher’s
choice to care or not.
Content and pedagogical knowledge as requisites for authentic caring.
Valenzuela (1999) distinguished between authentic and aesthetic caring by highlighting
that authentically caring teachers show a commitment to student achievement. In her
ethnographic study of Seguin High School teachers and students, she described
authentically caring teachers who viewed their students holistically, but she did not
explore the operationalization of this commitment in depth. Through the analysis of
these case studies about Mr. Abraham, Ms. Leslie, and Mr. Emerson, I began to focus on
this aspect of authentic caring, especially in teachers’ demonstrations of commitment to
student achievement. In distinguishing between authentically and aesthetically caring
teachers, Valenzuela (1999) essentially pointed out that authentically caring teachers also
deliver rigorous instruction and set high expectations for their students. Rigorous
instruction does not require teacher caring, as Matsumura et al. (2008) noted, but
authentic caring requires rigorous instruction. This implies that authentically caring
teachers must also possess content and pedagogical knowledge in their content area in

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order to challenge students and help them master skills that prepare them for educational
experiences beyond the classroom.
As demonstrated in the last section about the continuum of caring, this conclusion
was drawn most poignantly from examining Ms. Leslie’s situation. Ms. Leslie had a
strong desire to improve her practice, and during classroom observations she often looked
in my direction when she needed assistance with instruction. When she agreed to
participate in this study, I sensed, more so in her than in the other teachers, that she
sought guidance. In addition, although I solicited my findings to all three teachers after
classroom observations were completed, she was the only one who requested feedback.
Mr. Abraham and Mr. Emerson were more confident about their practice and did not
appear interested in my findings, though I had offered – verbally and through email – to
share my thoughts before and after the two weeks of classroom observations. They
behaved as if they had reached the epitome of their teaching practice, and, perhaps as a
result of this outlook, both were seeking careers outside of teaching. Ms. Leslie actively
turned to her colleagues for advice and ideas and valued help from her principal, but she
did not have any intentional or organized form of support from the school or her
department. As much as she cared about her students and committed her personal time to
their extracurricular activities, she was constrained by her lack of knowledge. Thus, she
was ill equipped to challenge her students.
Authentically caring teachers not only view their students holistically, as people
with unique experiences and complex lives, but also use knowledge about students to
build their capacity in a particular content area. They give students opportunities to
connect content to real-world situations and use these connections to build students’

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knowledge and skills. Authentically caring teachers who practice culturally relevant
pedagogy do more than make content and learning relevant or validate students’
experiences. Their efforts to bring relevance to the classroom are fundamentally aimed at
developing students’ academic skills, so this commitment to achievement requires
teachers’ content and pedagogical knowledge of their subject area.

Figure 2. Intersection of Rigor and Caring

Figure 2 expands on the caring continuum illustrated in the previous section (See Figure
1) and shows the intersection between rigor and caring. Rigorous instruction relies on
teachers’ content and pedagogical knowledge, which serve as a y-axis in Figure 2.
Teachers’ names appear twice in this figure because content and pedagogical are
separated into two categories.

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Mr. Abraham exhibited aesthetic and lack of caring, and his reliance on the
transmission method of teaching showed that he possessed low pedagogical knowledge.
His instruction and curricular choices did not reveal his level of content knowledge
because his instruction and academic expectations demonstrated that he did not expect
students to think beyond the literal meaning of the text. On some occasions, he
introduced current events or abstract ideas, but he rarely pointed out these connections or
gave students the opportunity to connect them. His questions, assignments, and quizzes
could have been easily answered or completed by an Internet search, and he did not
connect the content to larger themes or other sources of literature in intentional ways that
encouraged knowledge construction and analysis. Even though he possessed more
content knowledge than Ms. Leslie, she scaffolded lessons more purposefully but
exhibited little content and pedagogical knowledge. In fact, her pedagogical knowledge
consisted of a toolbox of teaching strategies practiced for the sake of changing the pace
of the class or occupying students’ attention. Her lessons appeared to be a patchwork of
ideas, which had discrete goals but lacked cohesion and clear expectations. Interview
and observation data showed that Mr. Abraham and Ms. Leslie did not (or did not have
the skills to) deliberate about pedagogical decisions – why and how particular strategies
and activities were designed to scaffold student learning. Ms. Leslie showed more
authentic caring for the students than Mr. Abraham, though she was concerned more
about their struggles as people, not as scholars. Mr. Emerson demonstrated more content
knowledge and authentic caring than Mr. Abraham and Ms. Leslie. He possessed more
pedagogical knowledge because he was able to give explicit reasoning behind his
curricular decisions, but his pedagogical knowledge did not compensate for his uncertain

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feelings about his purpose in the classroom. His belief in the apprenticeship model of
teaching led him to view his role in the classroom as diminished or almost absent. Placed
closest to authentic caring, Mr. Emerson had positive and mutually respectful
relationships with students, and he was the only teacher who shared specific knowledge
about particular students in the interviews. The ideal teacher would appear in the top
right-hand corner of the figure as someone who possessed authentic caring and – as
requisite components of authentic caring – content and pedagogical knowledge.
Teachers’ identification of home and school relevance. In the interviews,
teachers pointed out the connection between home and school as a factor of student
performance, though they each held varying amounts of knowledge about the students’
lives outside of school. A few had some knowledge about the students’ home lives, and
none of them designed lessons that utilized students’ skills and knowledge acquired
outside of the classroom setting.
Mr. Abraham showed little knowledge about the students’ lives and projected his
perceptions about their lives in his everyday speech and behavior. In class discussions,
he made connections between real-world contexts and literature without giving students
the opportunity to make those connections or to find relevance in the content. Unaware
of the presence of his ideology in his practice, Mr. Abraham also made assertions about
students’ lives based on his social, political, and cultural beliefs without inviting student
input. He believed that his use of colloquial language, slang, and Black Vernacular made
the content accessible and relevant to students and did not understand that the absence of
academic language in his instruction intimated low expectations. Overall, he drew

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conclusions about students’ home-school relevance that did not emerge from his
knowledge of them.
Because Ms. Leslie knew little about her students, she held generalized views
about students’ lives and lamented external factors emerging from their demographic
background that impacted student performance. She did not make assumptions and
expressed overall unknowing about her students’ lives. Also, she did not view these
outside factors as sources of knowledge nor did she understand how to incorporate these
sources of knowledge and skill sets into her curricular decisions. With a vague
understanding about her students outside of school, she approached the concept of home
and school connection as far as recognizing that home and community factors influenced
student motivation and performance.
Mr. Emerson addressed home and school relevance when he spoke about the
students’ second language learning background. He labeled these students, as well as
non-standard English native speakers, “language-disadvantaged,” which implied that he
saw their language backgrounds as an impediment to their academic achievement. Like
Ms. Leslie, Mr. Emerson recognized his lack of knowledge about students’ lives outside
of school, and he gathered knowledge about particular students on occasions when they
approached him. He identified a disconnect between students’ home and school
experiences and believed that giving students access to relevant and engaging literature
would bridge the disconnect, motivate them, and develop their skills. His solution of
exposing students to texts and encouraging students to form authentic relationships with
literature neglected the need for scaffolding and instruction in their academic
achievement. Furthermore, Mr. Emerson did not view students’ knowledge and skills

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acquired outside of school as assets upon which academic skills around the English
content area could be built.
None of these teachers knew much about their students’ lives outside of school, so
none of them utilized the connection or relevance that students might discover between
home and school in their curricular and pedagogical decisions. In class, Mr. Emerson
openly addressed his knowledge about specific students and about common struggles that
they encountered as readers and writers, but he did not approach their non-academic skill
sets and prior knowledge as assets that could develop their skills in the English content
area. Despite the three teachers’ inability to validate and bridge students’ home and
school connections, each of them recognized that the relationship between home and
school impacted student performance.
The lack of press on reflective practice. These teachers seemed to be isolated in
their class environments, and each of them were, in many ways, left on their own. Even
though structural support took the form of school-wide faculty meetings, professional
development programs, and department meetings, these arenas might not have offered
much assistance regarding the improvement of teacher practice and instruction. Ms.
Leslie was the only teacher who actively sought help from fellow English colleagues, but
this support arose in the form of teaching ideas and strategies; they did not serve as
environments for analysis, reflection, and collaboration. Other than these avenues, these
teachers were not offered intentional, systematic support that could improve their
practice.
Because these teachers were not pressed by school leaders or colleagues to reflect
on their decisions and actions in class, they did not exhibit reflective practices when they

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discussed their thinking behind curricular and pedagogical decisions. Mr. Abraham was
not aware that his tendency to center class instruction and discussion on his personal
opinions and beliefs led to a disregarding of student voice and input. Ms. Leslie yearned
for feedback and guidance and did not have the training or support to think about her
practice critically. Cleaving most to the constructivist approach to teaching, Mr.
Emerson regularly placed students in groups, but he did so because he thought that
chances were higher that they would participate in productive discussions. He hoped that
the construction of knowledge would emerge from their collaboration. But his
constructivist thinking assumed that learning would occur from group interaction, not
from the deliberate structuring of group work in ways that facilitated collaboration and
learning. Also, constructivist theory led him to believe that students’ exposure to text
lead to meaning-making, not that they needed explicit teaching of skills to analyze,
synthesize, or evaluate texts. Therefore, each of these teachers were not pressed by
external forces, such as department chairs, administrators, peers, or content-area experts
to learn the skills necessary to analyze their curricular and pedagogical choices and
conduct reflective practice.

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Chapter 5: “I have begun to plant thee, and will labour to make thee
full of growing”: Implications for Teacher Education

Unaware of his fate, King Duncan warmly extols Macbeth and Banquo and promises to nurture
their success. The following conclusion offers recommendations for pre-service and in-service
teacher education programs that will improve teacher practice by focusing on instruction.
These programs need to “labour to make [teachers] full of growing” (1.4.28-29)
and rethink teacher education pedagogical practices in order to
cultivate effective instructional practices in the classroom.

This dissertation uncovers the relationship between beliefs and behavior and the
effect of this relationship on classroom climate. The data described three high school
English teachers in their various efforts to teach English Language Arts and build
relationships with their students. Their beliefs about students’ capacity as learners and
their ideologies about teaching, learning, and their role in the classroom shaped the ways
in which they maintained relationships with students, set classroom climates, and
exhibited rigorous instruction.
Mr. Abraham believed that his college preparatory students were struggling
readers capable only of understanding the the literal, surface-level meaning of texts and
that his AP students were motivated thinkers capable of literary analysis and creative
writing. He neither sought to establish his students’ understanding of the content nor
allow authentic student input in classroom discussions. Thus, he delivered low-rigor
instruction and exhibited a superficial level of aesthetic caring toward students similar to
himself in racial and socio-economic background, while he showed a lack of caring
toward minority students.
Mr. Abraham’s story revealed the significant role that ideology plays in teacher
behavior, teacher-student relationships, and, thus, classroom climate. His lack of
commitment to student achievement and his low expectations led to the delivery of low-

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rigor instruction that consisted of recalling details from literature. Furthermore, his
willingness to divert students’ attention away from learning and his tendency to focus
student’s attention on extra credit questions about his personal life demonstrated that he
did not value teaching content nor skills. Because he thought that the students were
selfish and narrow-minded consumers of media, he felt it his duty to impose his view
about the world onto them. Therefore, he taught with the purpose to enlighten the
students about the world, not to ascertain their understanding of content by learning about
their assets and knowledge about the world. The contradictions between his espoused
beliefs and enacted beliefs and his inability to reflect on his behavior among and
interactions with students revealed that he was unaware of the role of ideology in his
everyday actions.
Ms. Leslie was constrained by her lack of content and pedagogical knowledge,
which prevented her from accurately gauging her students’ abilities and led her to
presume that they were not capable of performing at grade level. Her preoccupation with
misbehavior diverted her attention away from delivering content that engaged and
challenged students, and her lack of support and training further hindered her from
teaching with rigor. She cared about students as people, not a scholars, and her lack of
knowledge made it difficult for her to connect with them in ways that revolved around
content. She cared for students as people as much as she could, but her inability to push
them intellectually prevented her from caring authentically. Ms. Leslie taught with low
rigor and exhibited aesthetic/authentic caring about students’ well being but neglected to
meet their intellectual and academic needs.

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Ms. Leslie’s story revealed the integral role that content knowledge and self-
efficacy play in teacher instruction. Her constant attention on students’ misbehavior
stemmed in part from her lack of preparation. The misbehavior of a few reinforced her
beliefs that students performed below grade level and shifted her focus away from
creating lessons that required critical thinking, but she did not know how to design
curricula that included critical thinking because she did not have the training to prepare
her for it. Thus, she resorted to assigning busy work to occupy students’ attention while
doing her best to help them prepare for benchmark exams.
Mr. Emerson admitted that he did not know the true potential of his students and
questioned his ability to capture their capacity as learners. His belief in the importance of
healthy relationships was reflected in his positive and respectful interactions with
students. He followed a constructivist approach to teaching and believed that students’
encounter with content led to knowledge construction, while his wavering view of his
role in a constructivist classroom shaped the level of rigor and caring in his curricular and
pedagogical choices. Mr. Emerson showed moments of both high and low rigor in his
instruction and authentic and aesthetic caring towards students.
Mr. Emerson’s high content knowledge and teacher-preparation experience meant
that he was better able to articulate his ideologies about teaching and beliefs about
students than Mr. Abraham and Ms. Leslie. His training background was also reflected
in his description of his academic expectations and in the way he made sense of learning.
He generalized about his students’ abilities to the extent of identifying the structural
disadvantages that they faced from linguistic, cultural, and socio-economic barriers. He
believed that student learning was primarily impeded by institutional mandates on

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curricular decisions and barriers that exist between students’ home and school lives. He
demonstrated moments of high rigor when he gave students opportunities to construct
knowledge through discourse and collaboration, but also moments of low rigor when he
presented abstract concepts without scaffolding the students’ understanding of the texts.
With his constructivist outlook, he did not utilize his role in scaffolding their learning,
which detracted from the students’ ability to achieve his intended outcome. His lack of
scaffolding also represented the uncertainty he felt about his role in the classroom. He
believed that he could be more effective if he held a diminished role in the classroom and
left students to learn from their authentic engagement with texts. Mr. Emerson’s story
reflected the crucial role of scaffolding in rigorous instruction and the necessity for
teachers to understand their role in the classroom. All three case studies also showed that
teachers need to be able to clarify and justify their intentions and expectations as well as
align them with their instruction, so that they understand what students need to learn and
can make curricular and pedagogical decisions that incorporate students’ understanding
of content.
This Dissertation’s Contribution
The data collected in this dissertation affirmed Bartolomé and Trueba (2000) and
Valenzuela’s (1999) assertion that teacher beliefs impact teacher behavior and that their
ideologies shape their actions and relationships with students. The data also indicated
that teacher beliefs about students’ capacity as learners influence their academic
expectations and their treatment of different groups of students (Blote, 1995). In
addition, as Mr. Abraham, Ms. Leslie, and Mr. Emerson demonstrated, teachers behave
in ways that communicate their expectations to their students (Brattesani, Weinstein, &

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Marshall, 1984). Mr. Emerson’s case study highlighted the notion that observation data
can capture a teacher’s set of conflicting and equivocal beliefs. Kagan (1992) was
accurate in her warning that capturing teacher beliefs through observing teacher behavior
is a challenge, though her review of studies in this area suggested that teacher beliefs are
reflected in a teacher’s instructions.
Classroom climate is partly shaped by the degree to which teachers deliver
rigorous instruction and the amount and type of caring they exhibit toward the students.
Teachers’ abilities to teach rigorously depend on content and pedagogical knowledge, so
teacher preparation plays a significant role in instruction and classroom climate. All of
these components emerge from teachers’ ideologies about teaching and learning and their
beliefs about students’ capacity as learners. Thus, rigorous instruction and caring are
related to the teachers’ espoused and enacted beliefs. Because Mr. Abraham believed
that college preparatory students were incapable of understanding The Crucible and
because he placed his opinions about political and social issues before the ideas and
opinions of his students, he created a classroom climate in which he was the ultimate
authority of both content and non-content related knowledge. He made no room for
student input because he dominated so much class time. Ms. Leslie’s lack of training and
resignation toward assisting student achievement resulted in lessons that were absent of
rigor and critical thinking. Her instruction could not match her level of caring, so she
maintained a classroom environment in which she constantly made efforts to corral
students who were distracted and inattentive.
Consistent with Valenzuela’s (1999) depiction of authentic caring, an inseparable
link exists between rigor and caring. Authentically caring teachers possess empathy, seek

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to understand students holistically, help students navigate through an intricate educational
process, and commit to student achievement by challenging students intellectually. They
do not commiserate with deficit-thinking teachers who complain about uncaring students
but concentrate on serving students’ needs and building classroom communities based on
respect and belonging. Mr. Emerson’s case study showed a sometimes authentically
caring, sometimes rigorous teacher who understood his students’ strengths and
disadvantages but did not care authentically enough to leverage their sources of
knowledge outside school to scaffold his instruction. His case study also presented a
challenge for teachers to maintain authentic caring as they make sense of their role in the
classroom, the community in which they work, and their relationships with students. The
educational and life experiences of Mr. Abraham, Ms. Leslie, and Mr. Emerson shaped
the way they viewed their work and their students. Further, in some cases, the cultural
and socio-economic gap between the teachers and their students also impacted the
teachers’ beliefs about students’ abilities and teachers’ perceptions about their role in the
classroom. These demographic differences appeared in interview and observation data,
though this dissertation does not isolate these factors to substantiate claims about teacher
beliefs and behaviors.
Implications for Teacher Education and Alternative Preparation Programs
This dissertation is not an indictment of teachers for the problems of public
schools. Most of the teachers profiled in this study were well-meaning individuals who
sought to improve the lives of their students. They worked in complex organizational
environments, each containing unique contextual backgrounds and particular historical
relationships with the surrounding community. Every year, they were placed in a

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classroom with hundreds of students who brought an array of life and school experiences,
as well as, in some cases, a tumultuous history with schooling. These teachers were
products of their teacher education programs, alternative preparation programs,
professional development programs, and school environments. They entered into their
roles in various ways and appeared to be more or less left on their own by their
administrators.
If schools do not continually nurture their teachers, they cannot expect their
teachers to view themselves as agents of change and assets to the school community.
Robust training in teacher education and alternative preparation programs and unceasing
support from schools are necessary if teachers are to continually thrive and seek to
improve their practice. Bartolomé and Trueba (2000) proposed that teacher education
programs rethink and clarify their mission:
What is needed in many teacher preparation programs is commitment, on the part
of administrators and educators, to weave key concepts such as political and
ideological clarity, courage, solidarity, and ethics across the existing curriculum
in order to better prepare prospective teachers to become effective teachers of all
students but, in particular, of low-status immigrant and U.S.-born minority
students. (pp. 289)

These authors called for clarity and courage in teacher education programs,
characteristics that will strengthen teachers’ perceptions of their role in the classroom and
place students at the center of their purpose. The following recommendations for teacher
education programs, alternative preparation programs, and schools emerge from this
dissertation’s findings:
• Alignment and clarification of intentions and actions
• Creating a third space

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• Socio-constructivism as an effective pedagogical approach
• Training teachers to scaffold learning
• Culturally responsive teaching
• Encouraging reflective practices
These implications for pre-service and in-service teacher education programs are drawn
from the findings established in these case studies, and they identify gaps in instruction
that can be addressed before teachers enter the classroom and during their tenure as
teachers.
Alignment and clarification of intentions and actions. Teachers need
opportunities and support to align their expectations to their actions in ways that reflect
content-based standards. They become better teachers when they are able to articulate
their goals, specifically what they want their students to learn, how they will teach it, and
how students will produce results that reflect that learning. In his interviews, Mr.
Abraham’s expressed year-end goals that were not evident in his day-to-day teaching,
and he was not familiar with the English Language Arts standards well enough and did
not care about students enough to explain how his curricular decisions fulfilled standards-
based expectations. In fact, the methods and goals of his instruction demonstrated that
the standards were tacked onto his lessons as an afterthought. Ms. Leslie’s preparation
for benchmark exams presupposed the teaching of standards, but her lack of training and
support produced instruction that required low-level cognitive thinking and addressed
only the most basic standards. Ms. Leslie also showed that she was unable to connect her
curricular decisions to the English Language Arts standards. While both Mr. Abraham
and Ms. Leslie expressed a vague understanding of the standards when describing their

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practice, Mr. Emerson possessed high content knowledge and used precise language to
describe his curricular and pedagogical decisions. Mr. Emerson’s understanding of the
standards made him more capable of teaching them in conscious and deliberate ways.
By clarifying their intentions and goals, teachers can better understand how
standards play into their academic expectations and everyday practice. When teachers
have an opportunity to unpack the standards and deconstruct them in ways that allow
them to link students’ learning experiences to their curricular and pedagogical decisions,
they are better able to teach in ways that engage students in higher-order thinking and
critical analysis. By giving sound reasoning for particular pedagogical and curricular
decisions, teachers show a clear purpose and goal in their practice. Teacher education
clinical courses and professional development programs can arm teachers with the ability
to support their decisions with research-based learning theories. This training allows
teachers to link their beliefs and intentions with their practice and expectations. Cochran-
Smith (2001) aptly presented the same questions about teacher-education outcomes that
teachers ask of their students: “What should teachers and teacher candidates know and be
able to do?” and “How will we know when (and if) teachers and teacher candidates know
and can do what they ought to know about be able to do?” (p. 6).
Creating a third space. Schools can also serve to help teachers create a
classroom that bridges home and school lives. Mr. Abraham, Ms. Leslie, and Mr.
Emerson did not have knowledge about students’ experiences and knowledge outside of
school, so they were unable to access and utilize these assets in their instruction. Mr.
Abraham overtly expressed stereotypes about students in his everyday behavior, so he did
not understand his students at all. Ms. Leslie perceived complacency in her students’

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attitude toward schooling as an impediment to their achievement. Mr. Emerson viewed
his students’ linguistic differences as disadvantages, so he did not see his role in
mitigating their school and home lives. For teachers to care authentically about their
students, they would have had to learn and embrace the students’ lives and experiences
outside of school and find ways of accessing and validating the knowledge and skills that
students brought to class.
Moje et al. (2004) showed how students’ funds of knowledge shape what they
know about the world and how teachers can access that knowledge in the teaching of
content. They discovered that students constantly make sense of what they learn in
school by “[making] connections that serve as bridges from everyday to academic
knowledge as scaffolds for students’ readings in classroom texts” (Moje et al., 2004, p.
53). The goal of constructing the third space in the classroom is to allow for many
different forms of knowledge and perspectives in students’ learning of content (ibid.).
Teachers can strengthen student achievement by leveraging students’ skills acquired
outside of school and transferring them to academic, content-related activities. Creating
this third space combats notions of deficit thinking, and instead of viewing school and
home as separate, distinctly different worlds, teachers can build and support student
achievement by bridging them.
Socio-constructivism as an effective pedagogical approach. In Mr. Abraham’s
class, a discussion about literature consisted of his presentation of low-cognitive level
questions that required one-word answers and the recall of plot-related details. His
students did not make meaning of the texts because he did not present open-ended
questions that required higher-order thinking or connections to other sources of

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knowledge. Mr. Abraham expressed his excitement when a student experienced “a light
bulb moment.” On one occasion in class, he overtly referred to this moment in the class
immediately before announcing an answer. This instance captured his view of teaching –
the transmission of knowledge from teacher to student – which was reinforced by his
methods of facilitating class discussions.
In refuting the practice of traditional teaching where teachers present and explain
content, take questions, and clear up confusions, Chazan and Ball (1995) explored the
role of teachers in discussion-driven teaching. They promoted a social constructivist
view of learning, where the teacher places an emphasis on discourse and encourages
students to form conjectures, explore them, find evidence, disprove and prove claims, and
try to persuade others of their ideas (Chazan & Ball, 1995). Engaged in critical thinking,
students construct knowledge when they negotiate disagreements and explore different
views. In the study, the authors investigated the teacher’s role in managing disagreement,
using it as a catalyst for learning (ibid.). They called for a shift in educational research of
teacher practice: “As researcher-teachers, we claim that what is needed is less evaluation
and more careful analysis: less embracing or rejecting of particular lessons and more
effort aimed at developing understandings of and reasoning about practice” (Chazan &
Ball, 1995, p. 24). A study of pedagogical practices will yield valuable information about
teachers’ role in students’ understanding and processing of content.
Training teachers to scaffold learning. Mr. Abraham and Ms. Leslie’s methods
of instruction mainly consisted of the transmission of discrete knowledge. Mr. Emerson
took a more constructivist approach, which encouraged student input and engaged their
interest, but he presented new material or concepts without guidance or support to help

213
students reach his intended goals. Tharp and Gallimore (1991) emphasized that teaching
is an “instructional conversation.” They redefined teaching as “assisted performance,”
which takes many stages: modeling, feeding back, contingency managing, directing,
questioning, explaining, and task structuring (Tharp & Gallimore, 1988, 1991). These
stages provide different ways of assisting learning through a student’s Zone of Proximal
Development (Vygotsky, 1956, as cited in Tharp & Gallimore, 1991). Teacher education
programs and professional development programs are responsible for preparing teachers
to scaffold in student learning and consider the stages that students experience when they
acquire, construct, process, question, analyze, or retain knowledge. Mr. Emerson
understood that rigorous instruction consisted of multiple steps in a cognitive activity, but
his instruction did not include these necessary steps. Structuring lessons that help
students achieve academic expectations is integral to rigorous instruction. Scaffolding
lessons assures student learning.
Culturally responsive teaching. As Mr. Abraham demonstrated in his
interactions with Black male students, cultural insensitivity can harm a student’s
experience in a classroom. Ford and Kea (2009) wrote about the conditions that
culturally competent teachers created for students to thrive. Teachers who possess
sociocultural consciousness engage in critical self-analysis of their own identity and the
ways in which it shapes their attitudes, beliefs, and actions (Ford & Kea, 2009). They
also proactively learn about students, confront their own negative attitudes that they
might have toward students, hold a constructivist view of learning that involves
scaffolding and problem-solving, and consciously act as agents of change (ibid.).
Culturally responsive classrooms incorporate cultures, focus on students’ sense of

214
belonging in the classroom, invite open-ended problem-solving, present engaging,
relevant, multidimensional views of topics, respect students, and honor their differences
(ibid.). Jones (2007) suggested a form of culturally responsive teaching paired with
standards-based instruction, and she described it as a teaching style that validates and
incorporates students’ cultural background and current societal issues into standards-
based instruction. Like Ford and Kea (2009), Cartledge and Kourea (2008) depicted
culturally responsive teachers as people who are aware of their own racial and ethnic
backgrounds and understand how their beliefs and biases impact their instruction and
behavior. They also asserted that these teachers nurture personal development, practice
introspection, and deliver effective and rigorous instruction (Cartledge & Kourea, 2008).
These authors’ suggestions for building culturally responsive classrooms address
students’ needs for both rigorous instruction and authentic caring.
Encouraging reflective practices. Teacher education programs may need to
implement more reflective pedagogy, so that pre-service teachers can analyze their
beliefs and ideologies about larger political, social, and philosophical dimensions within
the field of education, as well as their positionality, or their position as it is socially
located in the context of certain background factors, like race, class, and gender. Rodgers
(2002) offered a four-phase reflective cycle that helps teachers focus on their responses to
student learning and better examine their experiences and decisions:
The framework outlines a process of extended inquiry that slows down the
teachers’ thinking processes and asks them to observe carefully and describe in
detail – as an artist might – selected situations within the classroom. After
describing the scene, teachers ascribe meaning to what they see before moving on
to decide on the best course of action. (p. 231)

215
Rodgers’s (2002) reflective cycle consists of four stages. First, the teacher practices the
ability to have presence in the classroom. She is mindful and aware of where students are
in their learning, so that she can better perceive what is happening in the classroom.
Second, the teacher gives a detailed account of a moment in the classroom without
interpretation. Rodgers (2002) encouraged structured feedback from students to
understand what they learn from their point of view. Next, the teacher analyzes her
experience, which means breaking down and making meaning of the moment.
Sometimes this process uncovers biases and assumptions that the teacher might hold
about students and the learning process. Lastly, the teacher makes a deliberate decision
to change a strategy and test it. Rodgers (2002) advised that teachers experience this
reflective cycle in groups, so that they could guide each other through the process,
mutually analyze their experiences, and offer suggestions.
The purpose of reflection is to enact change in one’s own practice. Yost, Sentner,
and Forlenza-Bailey (2000) explored the concept of critical reflection and its impact on
teachers:
A reflective/analytic teacher is one who makes teaching decisions on the basis of
a conscious awareness and careful consideration of the assumptions on which the
decisions are based, and the technical, educational, and ethnical consequences of
those decisions. The end result of critical reflection of the individual is cognitive
change. (p. 41)

Yost et al. (2000) offered four areas in which teacher education programs could employ
critical reflection: constructivist methods that intersect theory and practice; dialogue and
opportunities for collaboration; action research projects; and writing experiences.
Teacher education programs can offer teachers opportunities for critical thinking in order
to explore a variety of perspectives on an issue and practice metacognitive thinking to

216
relate theory to practice (Yost et al., 2000). Once critical reflection is integrated into
novice teachers’ thinking processes, it becomes a part of their everyday practice.
In addition to the efforts of teacher education programs, schools must also support
opportunities for teachers to reflect. Teachers usually have a free period during the day,
but this time is usually spent completing clerical duties or grading. If school leaders want
to motivate teachers to improve their practice, they need to structure their organizations
to incorporate time, resources, and support to help teachers maintain reflective practices.
Conclusion
Teachers are expected to take on enormous tasks: challenge, motivate, and engage
students through content and pedagogical methods; nurture positive relationships built on
mutual respect and belonging; foster respect among students and encourage prosocial
behavior around content-related activities; clarify objectives and expectations that align
with content-area standards; intentionally structure group work so that students
collaborate with clear goals and roles in mind; utilize students’ prior knowledge and
funds of knowledge to make content relevant and accessible; prepare daily lesson plans
that provide scaffolding and address the needs of individual students; stimulate students’
self-regulation of learning; assess students’ understanding using multiple methods of
evaluation; and prepare students for benchmark exams and standardized tests. In
addition, teachers perform day-to-day administrative work by updating parents and
special education resource teachers, attending to temperamental copying machines,
maintaining a clean and welcoming classroom environment, and updating grade books
and websites. With so many large and small pieces to manage every day, it seems

217
impossible to expect teachers to be continually rigorous and caring with every individual
student.
One inherent component in the teaching profession is struggle. We struggle with
ourselves and our doubts about our effectiveness. We struggle with students and the lack
of communication or miscommunication that occurs between us. And we struggle with
the balance between school mandates and students’ needs and interests. Amidst all these
issues, teachers are expected to improve their practice.
Teachers cannot be expected to reflect and change their practice, test and assess
new pedagogical methods, or incorporate funds of knowledge and culturally responsive
practices if they are isolated in their classrooms day to day. They need to receive
feedback, guidance, and opportunities to discuss, analyze, and collaborate with
colleagues and content-area experts. The three teachers profiled in this dissertation were
left on their own without opportunities to reflect on their beliefs and behaviors in class,
making their ability to teach rigorously and with authentic caring challenging or even
insurmountable. Schools, professional development programs, and teacher education
programs are accountable for scaffolding teacher learning and thus should be held
responsible for making organizational and institutional changes, so that teachers may
receive intentional and consistent support. Also, closer ties between university teacher
education programs and schools would give teachers access to content-area specialists
who could help them better understand their content area and how it should be taught.
Instead of leaving teachers in the “trenches,” these educational institutions must take on
the task of investing in support for their teachers, so that they can become reflective,

218
critically minded, committed, and rigorous content-area experts. They must better ensure
that their teachers provide conditions for learning that encourage every grain to grow.
The act of teaching is often compared to planting. This recurring metaphor
highlights cause and effect in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and refers to the connection
between idea (the witches’ prophesy) and action (Macbeth’s sins). It also refers to
success and the credit to whom success is attributed. Macbeth obsequiously pays tribute
to King Duncan for his achievements while secretly plotting Duncan’s murder.
Assuming credit for his present and future accomplishments, he takes fate, which is
ironically dictated by the witches, into his own hands and eventually pays tragic
consequences. As teachers, how much do we take credit for our students’ successes and
failures or for “which grain will grow and which will not?” It would be foolish and
faulty to compare ourselves to King Duncan. We nurture, coax, challenge, and support
students’ growth, but we are not omnipotent cultivators who water and fertilize miniscule
and insignificant seeds. Our relationships with students and our circumstances in the
classroom are much more complex that the simple metaphor of planting. This
dissertation provides evidence that we teachers do not view all seeds equally. We
cultivate these seeds differently according to our beliefs about their ability to grow, then
we create conditions for learning that foster or discourage growth. This dissertation
suggests that changes, such as the ones described in this chapter, would be valuable for
the well being of students, teachers, and the societies to which they contribute.

219
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229
Appendix A: Demographic Background of Participants

Mr. Abraham Ms. Leslie Mr. Emerson
School Baldwin City High
School
Petry High School Petry High School
Gender Male Female Male
Age 45 Late-20s Mid-30s
Race White White White
Previous
occupation
Database administrator Soccer coach None
Preparation
experience
Los Angeles Teaching
Fellows
Long-term substitute Traditional credential
program
Years of
experience
9 4 7
Subject
taught
English Language Arts English Language
Arts
English Language
Arts
Grade taught 11
th
9
th
12
th

Teaching
assignment
College preparatory
and AP Language &
Literacy
College preparatory College preparatory
and AP English

230
Appendix B: Introductory Interview Protocol
The purpose of this interview is for me to get a sense of who you are and what kinds of
beliefs shape your ideas about teaching and students. You can be as specific or general as
you’d like (students in general, particular types of students, or individual students).

Knowledge about students:
1. *How do you get to know your students? (in & outside of the classroom)
2. *How do you use what you know about them when planning and teaching?
3. *Could you give an example?
4. *What do you know about your students’ background?
Beliefs about students’ capacity to learn:
1. *Can you share an example of a time, recently, when you used knowledge about
your students to make a decision about what to teach and how to teach it?
2. *How do you plan a unit?
3. *What are your students’ strengths as English students?
4. *What do they struggle with?
5. *What do you do to support them when they’re struggling?
6. *Can you give an example of how you help students understand challenging
texts?
7. Do you feel that you have a good sense of how deeply your students understand
the content of a lesson?
8. *How do you assess how well they’ve learned the content of a lesson?
9. How often do students collaborate? (in pairs or in groups)
10. (If they work in groups) What usually are the goals of collaboration?
11. *How do your students learn best?
12. *How do you make decisions about the range of ability levels in your class?
13. What is the best way to respond to the needs of all students?
14. *Given the reality of what teachers face in the classroom (range of ability levels,
teaching standards, emphasis on high-stakes testing, expectations of teaching 21
st

century skills), what do you do as a teacher?
15. How do you handle the possible mismatch between what you want to teach and
what you have to teach?
Rigor of Instruction:
1. *What does rigorous instruction mean to you?
2. *Could you give an example of rigorous instruction? (A lesson, unit, or activity)
3. *What are your expectations of good student work regarding literacy or literary
analysis?
4. *What are your expectations of good student work regarding writing?
5. *How do you convey these expectations of rigor regarding good student work?
Caring:
1. *How would you describe your relationship with your students?
2. *What kinds of classroom policies do you have in place to ensure that all students
have the opportunity to learn?
3. *What does it mean to be a caring teacher?

231
4. *What kinds of rules do you have in place to promote healthy relationships
among students and between students and yourself?
5. *What values do you promote or emphasize in your classroom?
6. *How do you convey your expectations about classroom behavior to your
students?
Teacher background:
1. *Tell me something about your background.
2. When and where were you educated?
3. When and where did you begin teaching?
4. How long have you been teaching?
5. How long have you been teaching at this school?
6. How did you come to teach at this school?
7. How did you come into the teaching profession?
8. *How would you describe your philosophy of teaching?
9. *What do you believe “works” in the classroom?
10. What kind of support do you receive from the administration?
11. (What kind of support do you receive) From fellow teachers?

* Starred questions are high-priority

232
Appendix C: Pre-Observation Interview Protocol

Day #1-5
1. What are your learning goals for today?

2. Are there any handouts or materials that might help me better understand what is
happening in class?

233
Appendix D: Classroom Map Protocol

Pay attention to arrangement of student and teacher desks, location of learning centers,
library, resources, and computers. Note evidence of student work. Mark student by
gender and race. Pay attention to location of teacher at beginning of class and movement
throughout period.

FRONT
BACK
Total # of students _______
Appendix E: Classroom Observation Protocol

School _________________
Teacher __________________
Grade level _____ Class
____________________
Date _________________
Time _____- _____
Materials & supplies
______________________________
Domain of ELA: (i.e., reading)
Reading, Writing, Literature, Listening/Speaking,
Grammar/Spelling
Nature of domain: (i.e., type of text)
_______________________________
Focus of instruction: (i.e. decoding,
comprehension, etc.)
________________________________
Nature of activity: (i.e. independent reading, aloud,
etc.)
________________________________
CLASSROOM
CLIMATE

Caring:
• Proximity to
students
• Physical contact w
ss, ss’ belonging,
& work
• Movement around
room
• Pos./neg.
reinforcement
• Level of respect
• How does t refer to
ss when speaking
to them?

Rigor of instruction:
• 1-on-1 interaction
• Explicit
expectations
• Elicits students
ideas
• Clarity of
instruction
• Academic language
• Connects students’
ideas
• Quality of class
discourse
• Probe student
thinking
• Feedback
• Amount of
instruction time
• Representation of
content

_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________

235
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________

236
Appendix F: Reflective Notes Protocol

School _________________
Teacher __________________
Grade level _____
Date _____

What did you notice about the teacher’s instruction?
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________

What did you notice about students’ responses to teacher instruction?
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________

What did you notice about interactions between teacher and student(s)? (Physical
movement of teacher, frequency of interaction with particular students, etc.)
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________

237
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________

Where did I see caring
happen?
Where did I see rigor of
instruction happen?
Where did I see pedagogical
practice happen?

In what ways? In what ways? In what ways?

What questions did it raise
for me?
What questions did it raise
for me?
What questions did it raise
for me?

238
Appendix G: Post-Observation Interview Protocol for Mr. Abraham

School: 1
Teacher: Mr. Abraham
Grade: level 11
th
(regular & AP)
Date 10/18/11
Time _____- _____

1. As you think about the past few weeks, does anything stand out for you?
a. Were there things that you thought went well?
b. Things that didn’t go well?
2. Were these weeks different than other weeks? If yes, how?
3. Was there anything that was unexpected or surprised you about your students or
yourself?

CONTENT
4. Did you learn anything new about your students in relation to their ability to
understand and analyze the characters in The Crucible?
a. If so, what did you learn?
b. If not, what are your thoughts about their ability to understand the The
Crucible?
5. Did you do anything in particular to adapt your instruction to your students in
ways that you had not anticipated?
a. If so, what?
b. If not, what might have helped you address students’ needs as your
lesson(s) progressed over the past two weeks?
6. You really value making real-world connections to the text. Are students able to
connect Occupy Wall St. to The Crucible?
7. What underlying themes or concepts did you want them to connect? Did they?
8. (Period 5) Originally, you had planned on teaching the public speaking standards
and talking to the students about their behavior as they presented. Did something
change during their presentations that led you to focus on the content of their
speeches instead?
9. How do you relate the standards to what you do in the classroom?
10. Or what connections did you have between the standards and what you wanted
the kids to learn when teaching the Crucible?
a. How did it play out?
11. (Maybe) Could you give an example of connecting a standard to a particular
lesson?
12. Ultimately, what do you want your students to learn from reading the Crucible?
13. How do these themes & concepts fit into the skills you want them to learn by the
end of the year?

239

STUDENT CONTRIBUTIONS & TEACHER-STUDENT INTERACTION
14. I noticed that in Period 4 you chose to have whole-class discussions about the acts
in The Crucible. Can you tell me a little bit about why you teach it using whole-
class discussion?
15. What did you learn about your Period 4 students after the discussion about the
American Dream or Occupy Wall St.?
16. What did you learn about your Period 5 students when you talked to them about
your challenge of organizing peers and making a change on campus?
17. Do you notice a difference between kids who contribute & kids who don’t?
18. How do you think your students respond to your use of colloquialisms & slang?
19. Do you have a better rapport with some students than other students? Can you
explain that type of rapport?
20. Each classroom has its own culture. Do you have different rapport across classes?
What are the differences?
21. I noticed in Period 4 that that black students contribute more to discussions (Al,
Kay, Kendra, occasionally Carl). Why do you think that is?
22. I noticed that you have a routine and structure to the way you organize the class
period.

STRUCTURE
23. How does each activity – journal, quiz, discussion about acts, in-class essay, take-
home essay, current event articles – serve to advance their learning?
24. What is the purpose of the extra credit questions?
25. What is the purpose of writing outlines for the acts?
26. I noticed that you spend most of class time in the front of the room. Why is that?
27. (Period 4) How do you think class will change now that the students are in
different seats?
28. (Period 4) What did you consider when changing the students’ seats?
29. Why didn’t you change the seats of Period 5 (AP 11
th
)?

STUDENT WORK
(I pull out two from each period)
Period 4: (homework – 2 days to complete) Puritan society pressured individuals to
adhere to strict standards of conduct and belief. Using the protestors article as a resource,
to what extent do you think society expects you to conform today? Explain.
Period 5: (in-class) Mencken wrote, The average man does not want to be free. He
simple wants to be safe.” In a well-written essay, examine the extent to which
Mencken’s observation applies to contemporary society, supporting your position with
appropriate evidence.
30. Can you say a little bit about each work?
31. How do they meet or not meet your expectations?
32. (Take one from each period) What is ________’s strengths in this essay?
33. What is ________ still struggling in?
34. Is there anything that I haven’t asked that might help me understand your
perspective on the past few weeks?

240
Appendix H: Post-Observation Interview Protocol for Ms. Leslie

School: 2
Teacher: Ms. Leslie
Grade: 9
th
English (reg)
Date 11/1/11
Time _____- _____

1. As you think about the past few weeks, does anything stand out for you?
a. Were there things that you thought went well?
b. Things that didn’t go well?
2. Were these weeks different than other weeks? If yes, how?
3. Was there anything that was unexpected or surprised you about your students or
yourself?

ACADEMIC EXPECTATIONS
4. What are your academic expectations of your students? Ideally, what would you
like your kids to accomplish academically by the end of the year?
5. How do your choices regarding curriculum & planning reflect your academic
expectations?
6. Looking at the rubrics for the autobiographical essay & travel brochure, how are
they a reflection of your academic expectations?
7. When you assigned timeline, plot diagram, and illustration of the island for “The
Most Dangerous Game,” why did you decide on these particular choices?
8. What did you look for when you graded the plot diagram, timeline, or Shiptrap
Island illustration?
9. How do these assignments reflect what you wanted the kids to learn from reading
the story?
10. Walk me through your thinking for where they are now academically & where
you want them to be by the end of the year.
11. What do you think about their academic performance in relation to the standards?
12. Regarding their autobiographical essays, how did the students meet your
expectations in relation to the 9
th
grade standards?
13. Where do you see academic potential in your students?
14. How do you use that potential to guide the way you plan your lessons &
curricula?
15. I noticed that you plan many activities in one period. Could you explain your
rationale behind the frequent shifting from activity to activity?
16. Since everything is fast paced, where do you get evidence of their learning? What
are you looking for?
17. What are your expectations for how deeply the students learn something in the
time you’ve given them? (In other words, with the many activities that you plan
during one period, how deeply do you expect them to get into the work/content?)

241

BEHAVIORAL EXPECTATIONS
18. What are your behavioral expectations? Ideally, how would you want your
students to behave?
19. What do you to elicit the behaviors you want to see in the classroom?
20. Why did you decide to call home for students who didn’t have their second draft?

STUDENT WORK
(I pull out one of two from each period)
Period 1 & 5: autobiographical essay
21. Can you say a little bit about each work?
22. How do they meet or not meet your expectations?
23. (Take one from each period) What is ______’s strengths in this essay?
24. What is _______ still struggling in?
25. Is there anything that I haven’t asked that might help me understand your
perspective on the past few weeks?

242
Appendix I: Post-Observation Interview Protocol for Mr. Emerson

School 2
Teacher Mr. Emerson
Grade level 12 (regular & AP)
Date 11/18/11
Time _____- _____

1. As you think about the past few weeks, does anything stand out for you?
a. Were there things that you thought went well?
b. Things that didn’t go well?
2. Were these weeks different than other weeks? If yes, how?
3. Was there anything that was unexpected or surprised you about your students or
yourself?
4. You mentioned that this is your second year teaching AP English. What kinds of
courses did you teach before you taught AP?
5. How would you characterize your Period 4 students?
6. How would you characterize your Period 5 students?
7. Are these typical of your experiences with regular & AP students?
8. How do these factors influence what you think they will learn by the end of the
year?
9. What approaches do you take in teaching them so that they’ll get there?
10. In the introductory interview, you mentioned that English class is more skill based
than content based. Do you find that this applies to both Periods 4 & 5? Do you
find that you do more of one in one class than in another?
a. Why do you think this ends up happening?
11. What are the similarities & differences between AP & regular students
behaviorally & academically?
12. What are the academic strengths & weaknesses of your regular English students?
13. How do you use these strengths & weaknesses to determine what you’ll focus on
from a content & skills perspective?
14. What skills & strategies do you want your Period 4 students to finish the year
having attained?
a. What about Period 5?
15. You use the term “clarifying question” a lot in class. How do students understand
the purpose of clarifying questions? What do they think they’re using the
clarifying questions to accomplish?
16. I noticed that you didn’t follow up with Period 4’s beginnings of a personal
statement. Why are they doing it the way that they are (begin one, start new unit)?
17. How well positioned are your students to get into college? (Because I noticed that
you just started on the PS in the regular class.)
18. I overheard you tell a student in [Homeroom] that you wanted to become a
principal. Can you share how this goal came about?
Student Work (None)
19. Is there anything that I haven’t asked that might help me understand your
perspective on the past few weeks?

243
Appendix J: Rigor and Caring Linked to
Observed Behavior and Interview Questions

Classroom Climate
Caring Rigor
Observation
(what to look out for)
One-on-one interaction with
students
One-on-one interaction with
students
Teacher’s location in the
classroom
Teacher’s explicit expectations
Teacher’s proximity to
students
Clarity of instructions
Physical contact between
teacher and student
Quality of teacher’s questions
Teacher’s movement around
the room
Opportunities for students to
construct knowledge
Teacher’s method of
addressing students
Opportunities for students to
connect content to abstract
concepts, prior knowledge, and
personal experiences
Level of respect enforced by
teacher
Opportunities for students to
collaborate with peers
Positive/negative
reinforcement
Students’ product
Interview
(post-observation)
What do you know about your
students’ background?

I noticed that you_______.
Why did you choose to do
this?

What do you know about their
community?

I noticed that some students
______ while other students
______. Why did you choose
to do this?
What kinds of issues impede
their learning? Their
performance?

What do you expect your
students learn from this
unit/lesson/activity?
Who struggles?
What do you do to help them?
How do you convey your
expectations to the students?
How do these pieces of student work meet or not meet your
expectations? (Lay out two pieces)

Abstract (if available)

Abstract Current educational research contains a dearth of studies that examine the relationship between teacher beliefs and teacher practice. This present dissertation addresses this lack by bridging teacher beliefs, teacher behavior, and the classroom climates that teachers build through their interactions and relationships with students. Teacher ideology – teachers’ rationalization of educational circumstances and student outcomes – and beliefs about students shape teacher behavior and interactions with students. These interactions establish the classroom climate, which in turn affects opportunities for learning. The interviews and observations presented here of three high school English teachers yield qualitative data that uncover the impact of teacher beliefs about students’ capacity as learners in the English Language Arts as they relate to two particular components of classroom climate: rigor of instruction and teacher caring. Overall, teachers’ espoused and enacted beliefs are observable factors that shape conditions for learning. This study finds that, in addition to teacher ideology and beliefs, previous teacher training, which establishes teachers’ content and pedagogical knowledge, and teachers’ view of their role in the classroom affect their behavior toward students, the rigor of their instruction, exhibitions of caring, and their curricular and pedagogical decisions. Furthermore, using Valenzuela’s (1999) categories of caring, this dissertation posits that because rigorous instruction is a crucial element of authentic caring, content and pedagogical knowledge is a necessary attribute of authentically caring teachers. This dissertation emphasizes the need for observational data in educational research about improving teacher practice and offers implications for teacher education.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Loh, Jeanne Chun-Pei (author)

Core Title Which grain will grow? Case studies of the impact of teacher beliefs on classroom climate through caring and rigor

School Rossier School of Education

Degree Doctor of Education

Degree Program Education

Publication Date 07/26/2012

Defense Date 05/15/2012

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag aesthetic caring,authentic caring,caring,classroom climate,classroom observations,enacted beliefs,espoused beliefs,explicit behavior,implicit behavior,instruction,interviews,OAI-PMH Harvest,rigor of instruction,teacher behavior,teacher beliefs,teacher practice,teacher-student relationships

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Slayton, Julie M. (committee chair), Anderson, Lauren (committee member), Valdes, Rosa (committee member)

Creator Email jloh@usc.edu,yomsloh@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-68017

Unique identifier UC11290155

Identifier usctheses-c3-68017 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-LohJeanneC-1008.pdf

Dmrecord 68017

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Loh, Jeanne Chun-Pei

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

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