PD3: Opening Classroom Doors as a Vehicle for Change
The Park City Mathematics Institute's PD3, PCMI and Districts Partner to Design Professional Development, builds from a three week residence institute for Secondary School Teachers during the summer with the implementation of a comprehensive in-year program of teacher professional development in selected schools from three school districts in the United States: Las Cruces and Gadsden (New Mexico), McAllen (Texas), and Seattle (Washington). The leadership teams at each site include secondary teachers, district personnel, and higher education faculty in mathematics and mathematics education who work together designing professional development offerings that are unique to local needs. The primary objective is increased student achievement in project schools; the strategy is to change the mathematics teaching and learning within a school. As a consequence, the teams at each site work in different ways with the teachers to examine what student learning looks like and as a consequence, address content and pedagogical needs and devise new strategies to improve student achievement. One key aspect common across the project, however, is to have teachers work with each other to reflect on their own teaching as a community of learners.
Observing teaching as a medium for learning about teaching has been a central part of professional development for many researchers (Seago et al, 2004; Lampert & Ball, 1998; Bass et al, 2002; Boaler & Humphries, 2005). Observing teaching can take different forms, and each of the three sites uses a different approach to making teaching a public enterprise.
In Seattle, the focus is a video club in which groups of teachers watch and discuss video footage of their own classrooms with peers. The video club model provides a unique opportunity for understanding how teachers grow in ways of viewing and explaining classroom interactions (Sherin & van Es, 2005). Researchers have suggested that teachers' attention to student thinking (Ball, 1997; Barron & Goldman, 1994; Lampert & Ball, 1998) is a critical step toward teaching for understanding (Franke, Fennema, & Carpenter, 1997). Recent studies have shown that video club in particular supports teachers' development of attention to students' thinking (Sherin & Han, 2004; Sherin & van Es, 2005), providing teachers with the opportunity to "develop new techniques for viewing and explaining classroom interactions" (Sherin, 2000, p.36). Video clubs provide teachers with the opportunity to develop both a shared language and norms for discussing their teaching practices and to engage in detailed analysis of classroom interactions.
In McAllen teachers experience a laboratory-based class where they observe a peer teach a group of students and then debrief as a class with the instructor able to facilitate a discussion and reflection about how information from the sequence of lessons may be used by the observers to shape their own teaching and learning. Ball uses this model in her work with preservice students as well as with her colleagues to further her research about the mathematical knowledge needed for teaching (Lampert & Ball, 1998, PCMI, 2004, 2005). Some researchers claim this works best when the observers then have the opportunity to apply what they have learned with feedback (Israel, 2007). All of these elements are incorporated in the McAllen model.
While the focus of lesson study, an intervention in Gadsden and Los Cruces, is on the whole process of collaboratively thinking about teaching and designing lessons, observing classrooms for learning is at the heart of the work. Based on the Japanese model of professional development, some researchers claim lesson study can be a vehicle to improve mathematics education in the United States (e.g. Fernandez & Yoshida, 2001). Lewis and colleagues (2000) identify key pathways that underlie successful lesson study that can improve instruction including teacher content knowledge, knowledge of instruction, increased ability to observe students, to make stronger connection of daily practice to long term goals and build collegial networks. Recently, however, Lewis (2006) cautions the community to carefully look at how we collect evidence about the effectiveness of lesson study, considering such factors as local norms, curriculum, local capacity to support the work and that we be cautious about distinguishing local proof from general proofs.
The goal of this session is to share strategies each of the sites have used in making teaching public, the barriers they have identified in the process, and raise some of the questions they have encountered. These include:
What kind of evidence will support the link between teachers working together focused jointly on their own teaching and improved classroom pedagogy?
What can STEM faculty contribute to the process of examining classroom practice and how can this contribution be measured?
How do you engage all of the teachers in a building in the process of reflecting on their own practice? What barriers do you have to overcome and what strategies seem to have potential for overcoming them?
