GATEways to Teacher Education

A journal of the Georgia Association of Teacher Educators

November 30, 2021). Clearly, these participants held different perspectives on the frequency and implementation of lecture upon returning to face-to-face instruction due to their students’levels of participation and progress during virtual school during the previous school year.

Both participants noted that their school administrations, who preferred more student-centered instructional methods for in-person teaching, understood that lecture is a teaching strategy that is frequently used by teachers for a myriad of pedagogical and health reasons. For example, one participant highlighted, “when first returning to the building in August-September…all teachers

I know were nervous about being close to so many different populations of students or classes, afraid of using hands-on resources because of the spread of germs…a lot of my colleagues and sometimes myself included just felt it was overall safer and easier to deliver instruction by lecture” (Field Notes, November 30, 2021).As a result, both participants emphasized that they want to try different “instructional approaches” that meets the needs of students in order to remediate the “limitations that we faced as virtual teachers and the [decline in] performance from students” (Field Notes, November 15, 2021).

Discussion

Overall, these findings suggest that inservice and pre-service middle and secondary social studies teachers lecture because of 1) their familiarity with the instructional method from their experiences as students, 2) the efficiency of the method due to the breadth and depth of the social studies curriculum, and 3) the adjustment to teaching in online or hybrid formats due to the pandemic. However, there was a disconnect between the participants’ decision to lecture as a means to meet the needs of students, and their intentional use of their knowledge of students’prior knowledge to connect content to real-world situations. Consequently, while the participants’decisions to lecture may be based on their beliefs that they are meeting the needs of students and the expectations of administrators, this data does not show evidence that these pre-service and inservice teachers were engaging in powerful and authentic social studies instruction through the implementation of lecture when using technology in face-to-face, hybrid, or online formats.

There were limitations to this study. First, the participant pool was small and was a sample of convenience. Additionally, the first author was the instructor of the methods course participants were enrolled. Consequently, issues of the reliability of responses to the survey and focus group questions could be skewed due to the dynamics of revealing their perspectives on lecture as a teaching method. Future studies should include more participants who are not acquainted with the researcher in order to further verify the reliability of the data collection instrumentation and analysis procedures (Stebbins, 2001). An increased participant pool would provide more data that may strengthen this study with regard to why disconnects exist between pre-service and in-service teachers’knowledge of content, students, and contexts where they teach and their decisions to implement lecture as an instructional method that promotes critical thinking and engaged learning.

Second, another limitation of this study was the lack of pre-service teachers who participated in the study. One pre-service teacher expressed hesitancy to lecture during their student teaching experience due to the fact this college of education emphasizes constructivist teaching. They stated: