Educators' Opportunities to Learn in Structures Designed to Support Observation of Live Instruction

• In Event: Investigating Legitimate Peripheral Participation in Instructional Laboratories to Enhance Teaching Practice

Abstract

Purpose
This paper aims to investigate opportunities for learning within a practice-based professional development (PD) design that treats as imperative teachers’ responsibility to attend to and work to disrupt oppressive status hierarchies that shape and limit Black children’s experiences in elementary mathematics classes. To better understand how to support teachers’ observation of practice in real time, this paper addresses the research question: What patterns exist in the way that participants took up opportunities to notice and interpret Black children’s brilliance and the work of teaching mathematics in real time?

Perspectives
In practice-based PD, there is a broad consensus that learning theories such as legitimate peripheral participation and communities of practice help teachers collectively develop skills and build a professional vision in and from practice (Ball & Cohen, 1999; Goodwin, 1994; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Sherin et al., 2011; Wenger, 2000). In this study, traditional forms of practice-based analysis and reflection are stretched to take Black children's brilliance as axiomatic (Leonard & Martin, 2013). For many practice-based PD participants, incorporating this axiom into the way they analyze and reflect on Black children in mathematics class breaches the deep-rooted, historical, and unspoken norm that whiteness and White children are the standards against which learning should be measured (Bullock et al., 2012). Within a critical race theory frame, this study acknowledges how white supremacy marginalizes Black children by way of their experiences in school. Within a professional noticing frame, the research study acknowledges that noticing Black students’ brilliance as a resource during instruction is not intuitive. I further examined how these opportunities to learn are complicated by the ways that intersecting systems of oppression shape the patterns that emerge from the interactions that are represented in the instructional triangle (Cohen et al., 2003). I consider how a practice-based PD design might scaffold what participants attend to during observation of the instructional laboratory and intervene on traditional ways of noticing Black children.

Methods and Data Sources
This case study focuses on two structures surrounding participants’ observation of the laboratory across five days of a practice-based PD: prebrief discussions held before observation and debrief discussions held after observation. I conducted an analysis to identify patterns in the enacted supports to learn within these structures. Data sources included 10 hours of video recordings of the pre-brief and debrief discussions across all five days of the workshop, field notes, artifacts, interviews, and daily logs.

Results
The analysis suggested that throughout the weeklong practice-based PD, educators did not fully take up ideas developed through enacted supports and apply them to their observations. Instead, educators toggled back and forth between overcompensating for the negative experiences that students likely experienced in schools and showing forms of resistances in their interpretations and analysis of instruction.

Scholarly Significance
The findings reveal challenges in the use of legitimate peripheral participation in the instructional laboratory observation of live instruction. Future work must continue to design and study structures to support teachers in their observation of live instruction, which will contribute to the practice-based PD knowledge base.

Author

• Amber Willis, The University of Michigan