Can Responsiveness Be Specified and Approximated? An Investigation Into Approximations Within Professional Development

• In Event: 32.039 - Approximations of Practice Across Teacher Education Contexts

Abstract

Objectives/Framework
While professional development (PD) is a key avenue to shaping teachers’ practice (Desimone, 2009), we lack knowledge about PD providers’ practice. Without a knowledge base about what PD providers do to facilitate effective PD, we will struggle to achieve consistent outcomes. Grossman et al. (2009a) argue that improving teaching practice will require us to develop ways for teachers to approximate practice. While pedagogies of enactment are beginning to take hold in pre-service teacher education (Lampert et al., 2013), they have yet to take hold in PD. This study aims to understand when, why, and how PD providers structure opportunities for early career teachers to approximate practice. We situate our study within a fellowship for early career teachers at a leading school of education. Our research is guided by the following questions:
1. In a practice-based program, how do PD providers across subject areas use pedagogies of enactment?
2. What similarities and variations exist across PD providers’ practice?

We grounded this investigation in constructs taken from theories of expertise development. Hatano and Inagaki (1986) describe two forms of expertise: experts who enact routines with precision and predictability (routine experts) and experts who are able to innovate in the face of novel problems and contexts (adaptive experts). By applying this framework to our data, we were able to see the characteristics of approximations of teaching designed to highlight the development of adaptability versus those designed to develop efficiency in routines.

Data/Methods
Using a mixed-methods, comparative case study of the four content area cohorts in the fellowship (Yin, 2003), we drew on two primary data sources: 1) video documenting PD providers’ practice and participants’ approximations of practice during PD and 2) artifacts related to the approximation of teaching practice during PD. We first analyzed each content area as its own case by building case narratives that documented how, when, and why approximations were used. From these narratives, we developed a coding scheme to mark variations in approximations of practice that we applied across all videos of PD.

Findings
We identified a spectrum of approximations during PD that ranged from ‘routine’ to ‘responsive’. Some approximations provided opportunities to practice discrete teaching moves with the goal of making those moves automatic or routine. In contrast, other approximations created space for teachers to practice responsiveness to student thinking in the moment. Approximations across all four content areas provided rich examples along the spectrum. Ultimately, we found that approximations which embedded student thinking in the approximation task design provided a space for teachers to routinize responsiveness, engaging in reasoned decision-making within the boundaries of discrete skills.

Significance
Our findings contribute to debates about whether focusing on pre-determined core practices of teaching degrades teachers’ ability to enact instruction that is responsive to context and to student thinking (Zeichner, 2012). In particular, the concept of routinized responsiveness, may offer these field-level debates about practice-based teacher education a new way to differentiate contemporary work on practice from historical process/product research and research on competencies for teaching.

Authors

• Sarah Schneider Kavanagh, University of Washington - Seattle

• Mike Metz, Univeristy of Missouri

• Mary Hauser, Stanford University