Professional Development

Confronting Practice: Critical Colleagueship in a Mathematics Teacher Study GroupLorraine Males, Michigan State University

Professional Development • “ticket to reform” (Wilson & Berne, 1999, p. 173) • little empirical evidence of the effects of PD on practice or on student learning (Elmore, 2002) Confronting Practice: Critical Colleagueship in a Mathematics Teacher Study Group

Professional Development We still do not know how teachers learn from professional development Confronting Practice: Critical Colleagueship in a Mathematics Teacher Study Group

Professional Development • Common thread in “highly regarded” projects was the “privileging of teachers’ interaction with one another” (Wilson & Berne, 1999, p. 195). • learning is a collaborative activity and “educators learn more powerfully in concert with others who are struggling with the same problems” (Elmore, 2002, p. 8). • Highly regarded projects all had similar conceptions of professional development and were “aiming for the development of something akin to Lord’s (1994) ‘critical colleagueship’” (p. 195). Confronting Practice: Critical Colleagueship in a Mathematics Teacher Study Group

Research Questions Is it possible to identify aspects of critical colleagueship exhibited by mathematics teachers by observation (or listening to their talk)? What are some of the ways that critical colleagueship is exhibited by the teachers in this study group? Confronting Practice: Critical Colleagueship in a Mathematics Teacher Study Group

Theoretical Framework Critical Colleagueship “For a broader transformation, collegiality will need to support a critical stance toward teaching. This means more than simply sharing ideas or supporting one’s colleagues in the change process. It means confronting traditional practice – the teacher’s own and that of his or her colleagues – with an eye toward wholesale revision” (Lord, 1994, p. 192). Confronting Practice: Critical Colleagueship in a Mathematics Teacher Study Group

Critical Colleagueship Creating and sustaining productive disequilibrium through self reflection, collegial dialogue, and on-going critique. Confronting Practice: Critical Colleagueship in a Mathematics Teacher Study Group

Critical Colleagueship Embracing fundamental intellectual virtues. Among these are openness to new ideas, willingness to reject weak practices or flimsy reasoning when faced with countervailing evidence and sound arguments, accepting responsibility for acquiring and using relevant information in the construction of technical arguments, willingness to seek out the best ideas or the best knowledge from within the subject-matter communities, greater reliance on organized and deliberate investigations rather than learning by accident, and assuming collective responsibility for creating a professional record of teachers' research and experimentation. Confronting Practice: Critical Colleagueship in a Mathematics Teacher Study Group

Critical Colleagueship Increasing the capacity for empathetic understanding (placing oneself in a colleague's shoes). That is, understanding a colleague's dilemma in the terms he or she understands it. Confronting Practice: Critical Colleagueship in a Mathematics Teacher Study Group

Critical Colleagueship Developing and honing the skills and attributes associated with negotiation, improved communication, and the resolution of competing interests. Confronting Practice: Critical Colleagueship in a Mathematics Teacher Study Group

Critical Colleagueship Increasing teachers' comfort with high levels of ambiguity and uncertainty, which will be regular features of teaching for understanding. Confronting Practice: Critical Colleagueship in a Mathematics Teacher Study Group

Critical Colleagueship Achieving collective generativity – "knowing how to go on" (Wittgenstein, 1958) as a goal of successful inquiry and practice. Confronting Practice: Critical Colleagueship in a Mathematics Teacher Study Group

Participants Two university researchers (one faculty member and one graduate student other than myself) Eight middle-grades (grades 6 – 10) mathematics teacher-researchers from seven different schools in one Midwestern state who all volunteered to be part of this professional development project Confronting Practice: Critical Colleagueship in a Mathematics Teacher Study Group

Participants Confronting Practice: Critical Colleagueship in a Mathematics Teacher Study Group

Context All teachers and the university researchers engaged in a long-term NSF-funded project (PI: Herbel-Eisenmann) that involved studying teachers engaged in action research to improve middle-grades mathematics classroom discourse. Confronting Practice: Critical Colleagueship in a Mathematics Teacher Study Group

Project Timeline Report on Activity Structures & Turn Length Analytic Memos Identifying & Reflecting on Performance Gaps Mapping & Reflecting on Personal Beliefs Baseline Data Collection Study Group Pilot Study Cycles of Action Research A.R. cont… Aug. 2005 – May 2006 Aug. 2006 – May 2007 Aug. 2007 – May 2008 Aug. 2008 Phase II Phase III Phase IV Phase V Confronting Practice: Critical Colleagueship in a Mathematics Teacher Study Group

Data Analysis Transcripts from all action research meetings (19 in total) were reviewed and summarized in broad terms using codes to reflect the topic of discourse Confronting Practice: Critical Colleagueship in a Mathematics Teacher Study Group

Data Analysis Ten meetings were chosen to be analyzed • meetings came from the beginning, middle, and end of this phase • meetings involved the teachers sharing their own work with each other Confronting Practice: Critical Colleagueship in a Mathematics Teacher Study Group

Data Analysis Each of these meetings was then: • Broken into episodes by topic or theme of the talk These episodes where the: • broken up into question/advice blocks Confronting Practice: Critical Colleagueship in a Mathematics Teacher Study Group

Data Analysis Finally each question/advice block was coded for: • the initiator and receiver • the nature of the question/advice • aspects of critical colleagueship Confronting Practice: Critical Colleagueship in a Mathematics Teacher Study Group

Findings First, it was possible to identify aspects of critical colleagueship by examining transcripts form these project meetings. Confronting Practice: Critical Colleagueship in a Mathematics Teacher Study Group

Findings First, it was possible to identify aspects of critical colleagueship in the talk by reading transcripts of the meetings Some aspects may have been more difficult than others. Confronting Practice: Critical Colleagueship in a Mathematics Teacher Study Group

Interaction Patterns Three interaction patterns emerged in the data: • praising colleague • advising colleague • challenging colleague Confronting Practice: Critical Colleagueship in a Mathematics Teacher Study Group

Interaction Patterns Confronting Practice: Critical Colleagueship in a Mathematics Teacher Study Group

Challenging Colleague Example Gwen: When you are teaching them distance, you just taught as Pythagorean theorem. So, you never actually gave them a problem where they did this? Owen: Oh no, we did, there are homework problems like this. Gwen: In class, did you show them using Pythagorean theorem to solve the problem? Owen: Yes. That's the way we did them. Gwen: So you couldn't say, that a kid said, oh this is how you did it, so that's how I'm supposed to do it. So how is that different than, I know the distance formula, so that's how I’m going to do it? Confronting Practice: Critical Colleagueship in a Mathematics Teacher Study Group

Critical Colleagueship within the Interaction Patterns Confronting Practice: Critical Colleagueship in a Mathematics Teacher Study Group

Questions Is it possible that other aspects of critical colleagueship were being enacted by the group, but these were just difficult to observe? It seemed that the teacher-researchers engaged as critical colleagues mostly around one teacher-researchers work. Why is this? How do issues of status impact this development? Confronting Practice: Critical Colleagueship in a Mathematics Teacher Study Group

Questions How does the context of talk around mathematics allow for this development? How do different professional development contexts allow for this development? Confronting Practice: Critical Colleagueship in a Mathematics Teacher Study Group

Future Directions Expanding the analysis to examine both the action research phase and the and reading group phase that came before it Looking more critically at the university-researchers and their role in this development Possibility of examining other populations – such as preservice teachers Confronting Practice: Critical Colleagueship in a Mathematics Teacher Study Group

Acknowledgements I’d like to thank all the teacher-researchers and university-researchers who participated in the project and my colleagues at Michigan State University Confronting Practice: Critical Colleagueship in a Mathematics Teacher Study Group

Thank You Questions? Lorraine Males Michigan State University maleslor@msu.edu Confronting Practice: Critical Colleagueship in a Mathematics Teacher Study Group

Professional Development