Mapping the Process of Collaborative Inquiry for Teacher Learning

• In Event: Collaborative Approaches to Noticing for Anti-Oppressive Mathematics Education

Abstract

Objectives or purposes
Research partnerships have become more widely employed for professional development to respond to challenges of local enactment, to locate professional learning within the communities and contexts of teachers’ work, and to position teachers as agents of change in educational systems (Zeichner, 2016; Lefstein et al, 2020). These partnerships raise the challenge of positioning teachers simultaneously as researchers and learners and understanding the affordances of that positioning for the development of teaching practice. This study asks: a) How do teacher participants in one site of CoATTEND experience collaborative inquiry as a generative process for teacher learning?; and b) What conditions and practices facilitate participants’ engagement in that process?

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
We situate this study in two lines of inquiry. The first is research regarding the power of co-design and collaborative research for transforming educational systems and practices; this transformative character emerges from the perspectives of practitioners and members of non-dominant communities (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016; Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009). The second is research that argues that teacher noticing develops through learner-generated inquiry and insight (Kennedy, 2016; Mason, 2009). Given CoATTEND’s goal of facilitating insight, examining participants’ experiences of the process can help reveal how participatory professional development can support teacher learning.

Methods and Data Sources
Data for this study include recordings and transcripts of reflective interviews, noticing interviews, and research team meetings. In the first round of qualitative analysis, we used in vivo coding (Saldaña, 2013) to highlight key words and phrases that reflected participants’ perspectives on the program. Next, we reduced codes around themes related to generative conditions and activities. We turned to process mapping (Damelio, 2011) to characterize how phases of activity built on and extended from each other. We then triangulated our process map with video of the activities participants referenced.

Results
In this paper, we present a model for how collaborative activity developed over the course of CoATTEND. This model consists of three interrelated phases, each of which leveraged essential conditions and activities to provoke deeper insight into noticing as a core construct of teaching. The first phase involved building awareness of one’s noticing practices. The second phase involved elaborating on that awareness by situating practices in the context of personal history and social positioning. In the third phase, teachers co-designed a professional learning program, thereby articulating insights and making connections to support teacher learning more broadly and systemically.

Scholarly significance of the study or work
This study indicates how professional development can support developing new concepts and practices for equitable teaching. Positioning teachers as agents in understanding and addressing problems of practice has been found to lead to sustained improvement (Penuel et al, 2011), but organizing for and facilitating participant inquiry is challenging and complex (Kennedy, 2016). Through CoATTEND, practitioners became agents in the effort to improve teaching, and this retrospective analysis outlines the structure and character of their experience. Consequently, this model can inform the design of other PD to create the conditions for insight-based teacher learning.

Authors

• Ethan Rubin, University of California - Irvine

• Elizabeth A. van Es, University of California - Irvine

• Elizabeth Mendoza, University of California - Irvine