The Contesting and Stabilizing of Teachers’ Understandings and Participation in Professional Development

• In Event: Integrating Issues of Knowledge and Interaction in Analyses of Cognition and Learning

Abstract

We examine teacher knowledge and learning in the “Learning Progressions for Scientific Inquiry” project , which investigates science learning and teaching in elementary classrooms and guides professional development (PD) focused on responding to the substance of students' ideas. Over three years, the project affected teachers' understandings and classroom practices, as evident in data from PD sessions, interviews and teachers’ classrooms (Maskiewicz & Winters, 2010; Lineback & Goldberg, 2010; Radoff, Goldberg, Hammer, & Fargason, 2010). Themes emerging in these studies include shifts in teachers’ understandings and experiences of scientific inquiry; their developing a stable “framing” (Hammer, Elby, Scherr, & Redish, 2005; Scherr & Hammer, 2009; Tannen, 1993) of attention to students’ reasoning and engagement; and their understanding of instructional “next steps” as responsive to student thinking. In this paper, we use methods of “knowledge analysis” and “interaction analysis” to explore whether and how these perspectives can be employed complementarily to produce an account of the emergence, contestation and stability of teachers’ understandings and forms of participation within the PD.

While prior work suggests that teachers’ framings shifted over the course of the PD, these changes did not occur smoothly or without disruption. Within a given PD session, we find dramatic moment-to-moment shifts in the nature of the activity. We selected a particularly intense and problematic PD episode for analysis in order to 1) compare and coordinate research commitments and methods focused on individual cognition with those focused on the interactional accomplishment of cognition and 2) explore how teachers’ understandings and framings are shaped by and produced in their interactions in the PD activity.

The focal episode took place as teachers discussed a video snippet from the classroom of one of the participating teachers, Chris. The PD meeting facilitator, David, sought to establish, as a “standard” activity for this group, a focus on attention to the substance of the students’ ideas within the clip. However, salient affective dynamics in the clip — one student saying to another that she didn’t want to “hurt” him with her disagreement —captured teachers’ interest, including Chris’s.

We find evidence in this episode of several interwoven, often competing framings of what they were doing and discussing together, including the substance of the students’ thinking, the nature of students’ interactions, and the instructional “next steps” for Chris. Each of these framings shows stability — persistence and recurrence — over the course of the episode, though not without contestation and repair. Further, some individuals are evidently stable in their framings while some stabilities are produced and maintained in participants’ interactions. With respect to the agenda of comparative methodologies, we argue that an adequate account of this episode requires attention to dynamics at multiple scales, including the understandings held by individuals as well as the interactional production of those understandings, blending the commitments of “knowledge analysis” and “interaction analysis.”

Authors

• Ann R. Edwards, University of Maryland - College Park

• David Hammer, Tufts University

• Chandra Anne Turpen, University of Maryland - College Park

• Lama Ziad Jaber, Florida State University

• Andrew R. Elby, University of Maryland - College Park

• Janet E. Coffey, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation