Making Teaching Public in a Math Centered Learning Environment: What Did We Learn?

Authors: Gail Burrill, James King, Catherine Giesbrecht

The core of the project PCMI and Districts Partner to Design Professional Development (PD³) is a three week summer residential institute, the Secondary School Teachers Program (SSTP), augmented by a comprehensive in-year program of professional development in selected schools from three 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 by developing a community of teachers who develop the leadership necessary to bring about the looked-for changes. The teams at each site work in different ways to examine student learning, address both content and pedagogy, and devise strategies to improve student achievement. A core group of teachers experience the three week SSTP as a starting point for their work with other teachers in their schools.

A focus of PD³ is on opening classroom doors to make teaching public. Observation of 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 project sites uses a different approach to making teaching a public enterprise.

Seattle and the New Mexico sites have ongoing video clubs in which groups of teachers watch and discuss video footage of their own classrooms with peers. 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 clubs, in particular, support 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 the opportunity for teachers to develop a shared language and norms for discussing their teaching practices and to engage in detailed analysis of classroom interactions.

Collaborative lesson design is a focus in Seattle and the New Mexico sites. In New Mexico, school-based lesson study teams collaboratively think about teaching, design lessons and observe classrooms.  Some researchers claim that lesson study based on the Japanese model of professional development can be a vehicle to improve mathematics education in the United States (e.g. Fernandez & Yoshida, 2001). Lewis and colleagues (2004) identify key pathways in successful lesson study that can improve instruction, including teacher content knowledge, knowledge of instruction, increased ability to observe students, increased ability to make stronger connection of daily practice to long term goals and build collegial networks.  Course teams in the PD³ Seattle schools make use of common planning periods to shape lessons and observe and support each other in their delivery.

In McAllen the teachers experience a laboratory-based class where they observe a peer teach a group of students and then debrief as a class with an IHE instructor facilitating the discussion about the lesson and the reflection about what students were 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 of summer camps for students.

In this session  we will share strategies each of the PD³ project's sites have used in making teaching public, describe the barriers they identified in the process and what they did to overcome them, and share the data collected over the duration of the project that is evidence of progress towards teacher change and student improvement.