Several studies suggest that supportive, well-organized, and instructionally-rich teaching practices enhance children’s learning and development across various classroom contexts. Yet the ways these “generic” aspects of... [ view full abstract ]
Several studies suggest that supportive, well-organized, and instructionally-rich teaching practices enhance children’s learning and development across various classroom contexts. Yet the ways these “generic” aspects of teaching are motivated and communicated within classroom contexts also matter. In this paper, we explore hypotheses that generic aspects of teaching quality are 1) culturally instantiated and 2) contextually moderated. We use two scoring protocols to code videoed interactions in 58 kindergarten and first-grade classrooms in Central Mexico, sampled from public schools across different communities. The first protocol, the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS), is a widely-used measure of generic quality, organized in a recent factor analysis in Mexico into three domains: Emotional Support, Social Relationships for Teaching, and Instructional Interactions. The second protocol, the Classroom Assessment of Sociocultural Interactions (CASI), measures ten sociocultural (or “local”) dimensions of teaching and is also organized into three domains: Life Applications, Interdependence, and Agency. Life Applications addresses how classrooms explore and value children’s interests, beliefs, knowledge, and experiences in order to make personal connections with classroom content. Interdependence addresses how classrooms socialize children to relate to and work with one another to motivate learning and establish social identities. And Agency concerns how choice and freedom are managed, including opportunities for children to make decisions, have responsibility, and experience new social roles in the classroom. We coded four 20-minute video segments per teacher, using the CLASS and the CASI for each segment, and conducted a series of structural equation models to examine our hypotheses. We found that Life Applications instantiated Emotional Support, Interdependence instantiated Social Relationships for Teaching, and Agency instantiated Instructional Interactions. The strength of these relationships varied by socioeconomic variables at the school level. We discuss the implications of our findings in terms of enriching teaching quality for diverse children in Mexican classrooms and in other settings.
