confronting practice: critical colleagueship in a mathematics teacher study group lorraine males,...

Confronting Practice: Critical Colleagueship in a Mathematics Teacher Study Group

Lorraine Males, Michigan State University

Professional Development

2Confronting Practice: Critical Colleagueship in a Mathematics Teacher Study Group

• “ticket to reform” (Wilson & Berne, 1999, p. 173)

• little empirical evidence of the effects of PD on practice or on student learning (Elmore, 2002)



We still do not know how teachers learn from 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).

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 waysthat critical colleagueship is exhibited by the teachers in this 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).

Theoretical Framework



“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).



Creating and sustaining productive disequilibrium through self reflection, collegial dialogue, and on-going critique.



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.



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.



Developing and honing the skills and attributes associated with negotiation, improved communication, and the resolution of competing interests.



Increasing teachers' comfort with high levels of ambiguity and uncertainty, which will be regular features of teaching for understanding.



Achieving collective generativity – "knowing how to go on" (Wittgenstein, 1958) as a goal of successful inquiry and practice.

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

Participants


TR Gr School Setting Certification Yrs Teach Curriculum

Cara 6 Rural, MS Elem 21 NSF reform

Robert 6 Urban, MS Elem 7 Trad

Stacey 7 Rural, MS Elem/MAT 17 NSF reform

Gwen 8 Urban, Title I, MS Sec 18 Trad

Kate 8 Suburban, MS Sec/MS 14 NSF reform

Holly 8 Urban, Gifted, HS Sec 9 Trad

Mike 8 Urban, MS Sec/MSM 14 Trad

Owen 10 Suburban, HS Sec/MAT 2 Trad

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.

Project Timeline


Baseline Data Collection

Aug. 2005 – May 2006 Aug. 2006 – May 2007

Study Group

Aug. 2007 – May 2008 Aug. 2008

Mapping & Reflecting on Personal Beliefs

Identifying & Reflecting on Performance Gaps

Pilot Study Cycles of Action Research A.R. cont…

Report onActivity Structures

& Turn Length AnalyticMemos

Phase II Phase III Phase IV Phase V

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

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

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

Data Analysis


Finally each question/advice block was coded for:• the initiator and receiver• the nature of the question/advice• aspects of critical colleagueship

Findings


First, it was possible to identify aspects of critical colleagueship by examining transcripts form these project meetings.

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.

Interaction Patterns


Three interaction patterns emerged in the data:

• praising colleague• advising colleague• challenging colleague



Interaction Pattern

Characteristics Examples

Praising

(frequent)

Expressed praise;Involved little questioning; usually directed at the teacher-researcher presenting

“I really like…”

“… a really neat strategy”

advising

(frequent)

Offer solicited or unsolicited advice; involved little questioning;often in the form of a story about their own experience;

“One of the things I used to do…”

“Can you try….”



Interaction Pattern

Characteristics Examples

challenging

(not frequent)

Involved elaboration, probing, and challenging questions

Occurred over multiple turns

“How are you going to...”

“What do you mean….”

“So, you never actually…”

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?

Critical Colleagueship within the Interaction Patterns


Interaction Pattern

Critical Colleagueship Examples

Praising&

Advising

Openness to new ideas “neat strategy and one I’m gonna take”“I’m willing to try them now…”

Empathetic Understanding “I guess I relate to…that’s the exact concepts I work with”

Self-reflection “and just using materials… and I was able to understand”

Critical Colleagueship within the Interaction Patterns


Interaction Pattern

Critical Colleagueship Examples

Challenging

Rejecting flimsy reasoning by providing countervailing evidence

“it is hard to justify that…”

“So how can you...”

“So you couldn’t …”

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?

Questions


How does the context of talk around mathematics allow for this development?

How do different professional development contexts allow for this development?

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

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

Thank You


Questions?

Lorraine MalesMichigan State University

[email protected]

confronting practice: critical colleagueship in a mathematics teacher study group lorraine males,...

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