**7. Methodology**

Teaching standards from three sources were applied as guidelines to determine the use of culturally responsive teaching through GoReact Annotations. These standards included: 1) the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation standards (CAEP), 2) the Interstate Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium standards (InTASC), and 3) the Virginia Department of Education standards (VDOE). Terms were pulled from these three standards to determine an alignment with culturally relevant statements found in GoReact. GoReact has a specific icon representing culturally responsive pedagogy, in which students, site or university supervisors may click to indicate culturally responsive teaching. There were four guiding questions. The findings indicated compliance with educational standards, term alignment, and indicated usage of GoReact.

Information from GoReact was accumulated from over the last four years (2019– 2022) and included comments from 23 teacher candidates. These comments were originally color coded in GoReact and the color systems were removed to secure and ensure anonymity among the 118 responses over the time frame in GoReact particularly associated with cultural responsiveness. The comments were dissected, examining keywords that matched wording in the national and state education standards dealing with cultural responsiveness and ethics. Inferential statistics were used to produce percentages of how the responses aligned with the three educational standards that address cultural relevance. The highest percentage correlated to the most common and most used responses and the lowest percentage correlated to the least and less used response. **Table 2** shows the breakdown of responses by standard in GoReact.

GoReact reports on three responses: 1) cooperating teacher, 2) teacher candidate, and 3) university supervisor responses. Each response adheres to a color-coded system that allows for the categorization and subsequent separation of responses. Cooperating teachers and university supervisors have experience in culturally relevant education and ethics, making their positions ones of supervision meaning



#### **Table 2.**

*National and state educational standards' correlation to GoReact responses.*

sponsorship, mentorship, coaching, observation, directorship, guidance and support, and facilitation or growth and development which makes their responses more supervisory commentary [22, 23]. Their responses in GoReact were identified as exclusionary, in that their responses were not those of teacher candidates in an education preparation program.

Responses from teacher candidates were collected from students who would receive their initial license to teach in United States public schools. The number of teacher candidates from a top 20 HBCU in Virginia varies from semester to semester, thus the number of responses changed per semester with course enrollment. However, the group size from 2019 to 2022 included 23 teacher candidates. All teacher candidates require a practicum/internship with at least three schools and each school representing diverse cultural and socioeconomic demographics. The practicum/internship experiences are recorded by teacher candidates in GoReact, and they have opportunities for selfreflection by clicking a corresponding icon. Site and university supervisors used the GoReact Rubric with four scoring levels: Distinguished-4 points, Proficient-3 points, Emerging-2 points, and Unsatisfactory-1 point to evaluate teacher candidate experiences. Teacher candidates who successfully completed practicum/internship receive their teaching license and start their professional careers as teachers.

### **8. Findings**

The purposes of this study were to determine how GoReact culminated awareness in teachers to become culturally relevant and ethical in their teaching practices and responses. The data to answer these questions were gathered through an analysis of text from GoReact with a teacher candidate group from 2019 to 2022. During the year of Fall 2021, there were no teacher candidates. Data collected during the 4 years per semester indicated appropriate application of standards as presented in GoReact. The culmination of responses provided evidence of specific terms reoccurring within the text. Reoccurring terms represent both the understanding and the application of the digital

*Teacher Candidates Using Annotated Technology Foster Cultural Responsiveness and Ethics DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.112310*

performance of teacher candidates' usage of culturally relevant pedagogy and are displayed in **Figure 2**. Terms from Standards Used in GoReact, which shows the three standards (CAEP, InTASC, and VDOE), are presented in relation to terms in GoReact.
