Teachers' Recontextualization of Practices Learned in Professional Development: The Importance of Professional Learning Goals in Context

• In Event: Understanding the Transformative Power of Teacher and Student Agency in Changing Educational Contexts

Abstract

Objectives
Much research on teacher learning obscures learning processes, instead relying on teacher self-reports. As a result, we have little understanding about the relationships among teachers’ learning, professional development (PD), and the role their own goals and contexts play in what is ultimately learned. For this reason, we conducted an observational study of teachers’ transformations of practice as evidence of learning in PD.

Theoretical Framework
To study implementation of PD practices, we take a situated perspective on teachers’ learning (Putnam & Borko, 2000). This view emphasizes the co-constitution of learners and contexts, highlighting interrelations, while also illuminating learners’ agency, as they navigate their worlds (Holland et al., 1998). Thus, we emphasize teachers’ recontextualization of PD practices (van Oers, 1998), the processes by which teacher tried, modified, and took ownership of them.

Methods
Our primary question was how do teachers recontextualize practices learned in PD into their own classrooms? As a part of a 4 year study, we followed two mid-career mathematics teachers, Lee and Brian, who identified practices encountered at a professional conference that they “liked.” We observed them at the conference, in classroom implementations, and presentations of these practices to colleagues. Data include: fieldnotes and artifacts from PD, classroom observations, collaborative planning meetings, teacher presentations to colleagues, interviews and email exchanges. Using the constant comparative method, we built narratives of the teachers’ sensemaking over time and place (authors, 2013). To investigate agency, we looked at teachers’ goals and related influences. To analyze adaptations of PD practices, we identified innovations in practice.

Findings
Teachers exert agency in recontextualizing practices, but this agency is negotiated in part, by competing goals from their teaching contexts. Lee’s adaptation of a PD discourse practice integrated technology, reflecting his goals to encourage students’ resourcefulness and foster discourse, along with his school’s emphasis on technology use. Brian’s adaptations of a PD assessment practice emphasized workload reduction, reflecting his goals to not overwork in an unstable school.

Significance
These cases, along with others in our data set, reveal how the teachers’ emerging understandings and implementations of PD practices reflected their agency while limited by context, sometimes in ways that distorted the original design of PD practices. This study shows teachers’ contributions to their sensemaking of PD practices, illuminating ways that teachers’ agency and negotiations with their context contribute to their learning.

Authors

• Samantha Marshall, Vanderbilt University - Peabody College

• Ilana S. Horn, Vanderbilt University