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Becoming a community of novices: How teacher agency bolstered professional learning in a pandemic context, at American Educational Research Association (AERA), San Diego, CA, Thursday, April 21, 2022:
aera_2022_becoming_a_community_of_novices.pdf

The COVID and #BlackLivesMatter pandemics elicited an unprecedented need for professional learning spaces wherein teachers could learn to deliver effective instruction in the midst of ever-evolving instructional contexts. Given the rarity of the circumstances, we used a convergent mixed methods design to survey 203 teachers and conduct...

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Accounting for student voice: Surveys, school quality, and state accountability systems, at American Educational Research Association, Thursday, April 8, 2021:
aera21_accounting_for_student_voice.pdf
For the past two decades, schools and districts have increasingly used student surveys as a means of expanding their data collection efforts. At the state level, however, “student voice” is still used sparingly. In this paper, we examine how student survey results might alter state accountability determinations. Reconstructing the accountability system in Massachusetts, we draw on a unique set of student survey data, which we add to the state’s formula in varying doses. As we find, such data shift accountability determinations in small but meaningful ways and appear to enhance functional... Read more about Accounting for student voice: Surveys, school quality, and state accountability systems
(Re-)learning to lead: Helping educators manage crises of professional identity and loss, at ICSEI Virtual Congress 2021, Tuesday, March 9, 2021:
re-learning_to_lead.pdf

The language of adaptive leadership has much in common with the language of a pandemic: diagnosis, loss, resistance (see Heifetz et al., 2009). Each are characterized by significant, hard-to-fathom changes to how we live, work, and walk through the world. In more ordinary times, the art of adaptive leadership involves helping members of an organization to interrogate often-tacit values and beliefs that are holding in place the status quo. Interrogating these beliefs can, over time, lead to transformations in organizational structures and practices. However, this deliberate process – a...

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"Taking care of our own": Parochialism, pride of place, and the drive to diversify teaching, at American Educational Research Association (AERA), Toronto, Ontario, Friday, April 5, 2019:
parochialism_aera19.pdf
As the student population in the U.S. becomes increasingly diverse, many district and school hiring personnel – especially those in districts with large numbers of students of color – have taken proactive approaches to hiring teachers of color (TOC). The drive to diversify the teaching force is supported by a broad range of promising academic and non-academic outcomes for students of color. And yet, many districts face struggle with the recruitment and retention of TOCs. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 65 participants in a small urban district and applying the analytic lens of... Read more about "Taking care of our own": Parochialism, pride of place, and the drive to diversify teaching
A technical problem, a just solution: School quality measurement as a tool for social justice and equity, at Association for Moral Education (AME), Barcelona, Spain, Saturday, November 10, 2018:
noonan_justsolution_v3.pdf
Over the last two decades, local education authorities in the United States have created systems for measuring school performance and student learning. Most of these systems rely heavily on student standardized test scores. Given that results from these tests consitently reveal more about student demographics than the schools they attend (Sirin, 2015), parents, policymakers, and others making decisions based on these data are using misleading and incomplete information (Schneider et al., 2018). The advancement of educational equity and justice, then, may rest in part upon what seems like a... Read more about A technical problem, a just solution: School quality measurement as a tool for social justice and equity
"Regard me": Learner engagement and the satisfaction of basic needs in professional development, at American Educational Research Association (AERA), New York, NY, Saturday, April 14, 2018:
noonan_aera18_v3.pdf
Learner engagement and motivation are essential for deep and sustained learning, and yet they are seldom included in empirical frameworks for effective professional development. In this critical case study, I explore this gap by applying the lens of self-determination theory (SDT) to analyze a transformative professional learning experience. Noting the ways in which learner motivation and pedagogical strategies combine to satisfy the basic needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness and to transform teaching practice, I offer theoretical and practical implications for the design and study... Read more about "Regard me": Learner engagement and the satisfaction of basic needs in professional development
Layers of learning: Multi-dimensional agency in powerful professional development, at Ethnographic and Qualitative Research Conference (EQRC), Las Vegas, NV, Monday, February 26, 2018:
noonan_eqrc18_layers.pdf
Teacher agency is a promising lever for improving teacher practice, but too often it is presented as an “all-or-nothing” prospect. Moreover, teacher agency as it relates to professional development is under-studied and under-theorized. Responding to this gap and drawing on 25 teachers’ in-depth accounts of professional development (PD), I propose a multi-dimensional (and thus more practically useful) conception of agency. Specifically, I identify three dimensions of agency vis-à-vis PD: agency over refers to teachers’ capacity to opt into or out of learning experiences; agency during refers... Read more about Layers of learning: Multi-dimensional agency in powerful professional development
An affinity for learning: Teacher identity and powerful professional development, at International Study Association on Teachers and Teaching (ISATT), Salamanca, Spain, Wednesday, July 5, 2017:
noonan_isatt17.pdf
Professional development (PD) is seen by a broad cross-section of stakeholders as essential for instructional improvement and student learning. And yet, despite deep investments of time and money in its design and implementation, the return on investment remains low and teachers’ subjective assessments about PD in general are ambivalent at best. In this study, I asked 25 teachers to identify and reflect on their most powerful professional learning experiences and considered what these experiences might suggest toward improving PD design, policy, and research. Observing tremendous variation... Read more about An affinity for learning: Teacher identity and powerful professional development