Using Video Cases to Prepare Leaders of Professional Development in Mathematics

• In Event: Issues in the Facilitation of Video-Based Professional Development

Abstract

This presentation discusses the evolving use of video-based professional development in a Leader Initiative Project in mathematics over a two-phased cycle of seminar design, enactment, and research with 71 leaders of mathematics professional development. The Initiative was aimed at supporting leaders to facilitate mathematical tasks with teachers in professional development (PD) and deepen teachers’ mathematical understandings. Seminars grounded work on two frameworks: sociomathematical norms (Yackel & Cobb, 1996) and practices for orchestrating productive mathematical discussions (Stein et al., 2008). In Phase I, leaders attended six full-day seminars across the academic year. Each seminar began with a mathematical task that entailed algebraic reasoning. Leaders’ discussions of the task set the stage for the centerpiece of the seminar—a videocase of a leader engaging teachers in the same task. Leaders discussed both what mathematical explanations were shared and how participants in the videocase engaged in sharing explanations.

We used qualitative methods to analyze leaders’ seminar participation and a subset of leaders’ own facilitation work. By coordinating analyses of video, artifacts and interviews we tracked how leaders responded to videocases and how they attended to teachers’ mathematical understandings in their leadership practice. Findings from Phase I indicated that leaders’ responses to videocases varied in depth and focus such that they did not always consider facilitation moves in the videocase in relation to mathematical goals for teacher learning. Analysis of a sample of leaders’ own facilitation uncovered their challenges in setting goals and deciding how to focus mathematical conversations with teachers.

Phase I findings suggested that our goals for mathematical work were underspecified. We did not provide enough support for leaders to deeply consider the purpose of doing mathematics in PD. Because doing mathematics with teachers is not the same as doing mathematics with students, we realized that teachers need mathematical knowledge specific to what they used in the context of teaching. As a result, we revised our seminars to include attention to mathematical knowledge used in teaching to focus leaders’ mathematical work on specialized content knowledge (SCK) for teaching (Ball, Thames & Phelps, 2008). Our videocase prompts were changed in Phase II to orient leaders to interrelate facilitation moves with specialized mathematical goals for teachers and sociomathematical norms for supporting those goals.

We compare our use of videocases between Phase I and Phase II to show how our revisions to the tasks and associated prompts changed the depth of leader discussion in promising directions. In some but not all cases, leaders attended to the specific mathematical purposes of facilitation moves and the sociomathematical norms that were being cultivated in the group to achieve specialized mathematical goals. The success and limitations of our revisions in Phase II have implications for further refinements to the use of video in both the selection of videoclips and their associated framings. This work on using video-based tasks for leaders and teachers contributes to the scant research on leadership development in mathematics (Even, 2008) and highlights how leader preparation may take-up current calls for developing mathematical knowledge for teaching.

Authors

• Elham Kazemi, University of Washington

• Megan M. Kelley-Petersen, University of Washington

• Judith E. Mumme, WestEd

• Cathy Carroll, WestEd

• Rebekah Elliott, Oregon State University

• Kristin Lesseig, Washington State University Vancouver

• Matthew P. Campbell, Oregon State University