Beginning Teachers and Strategies for Asset-Based Pedagogy

Purpose: Asset-based pedagogy (ABP) values what students bring to the classroom and is responsive to their individual needs. Yet teachers, particularly beginners, fail to integrate these types of strategies throughout K–12 classrooms. It is imperative to explore to what extent beginning teachers understand ABP as well as the variation within who knows what information. Research Methods/Approach: We examine roughly 2,000 novice teachers’ responses about how they account for students’ cultural, ethnic/racial, and linguistic diversity. We qualitatively analyze robust open-ended survey responses to explore teachers’ reported strategies for how they integrate ABP. We identify codes related to these strategies and then investigate these codes by participant and school demographics. Findings: Beginning teachers accounted for student diversity overwhelmingly through various instructional or lesson-based strategies. Albeit less frequently, beginning teachers accounted for student diversity by connecting with students’ families and emphasizing social emotional learning. The most consistent result was that variation was largely driven by elementary and special teachers relying on Family Communication, whereas all other teachers reported Adjusting Instructional Planning or Supporting Linguistic Diversity. In addition, racial/ethnic, socioeconomic, and English learner composition alongside grade level each accounted for variation in the percentage of teachers reporting ABP strategy. Implications: Our findings inform practitioners of a suite of ABP strategies, as well as districts and policy makers, about how novice teachers are processing asset-based instruction and who to target for support in this vital pedagogical area. Findings also emphasize the importance of considering student and contextual characteristics when determining what ABP strategies may be most important to utilize.