Building teachers’ content and pedagogical knowledge through a problem solving-based professional development program: lessons learned from a Ghana program

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Building teacher’s content and pedagogical knowledge in early mathematics

Proposal

Ghanaian children’s low level of performance on national numeracy assessment has been a subject of concern over the last three decades (Acquaye, 2010; Gadugah, 2011; Mereku, 2013; MOE, 2014a). The 2013 National Education Assessment (NEA), for example, revealed that while early primary children in Ghana they have significant gaps in their conceptual understandings of key concepts. A 2014 report commissioned by the Ministry of Education postulated that to rectify the situation:

…Teachers need to move away from prescriptive and procedural pedagogies that do not necessarily ensure conceptual understandings in favor of active and inquiry-based teaching (games, mental mathematics, investigations, problem solving, projects, collaborative problem solving etc.). (p.33)

Changing teachers’ instructional practices is a difficult and complex process. Schoenfeld (1998) postulates that this is because teachers enter the classroom with a complex set of beliefs about the mathematics and mathematics teaching and learning. These beliefs serve as filters, causing them to either reject the new instructional practices outright if they do not align with existing beliefs (Schoenfeld 2002; Speer 2005). If this is the case, professional development programs focused on the adoption of new practices must raise teachers’ awareness of their beliefs about mathematics, particularly those that limit pupils’ learning. Schoenfeld and Ball & Cohen (1999) maintain that this is best accomplished by having teachers engage in mathematics learning experiences, and then deconstructing these experiences to identify: 1) what was learned, 2) how it was learned, and 3) what that says about mathematics as a discipline, as well as about the teaching-learning process. Such experiences can be a powerful catalyst for restructuring beliefs and, as a result, increasing teachers’ willingness to adopt new instructional practices.
This presentation looks at the extent to which a year-long numeracy pilot in Ghana was successful in encouraging teachers to adopt new numeracy instructional practices having them engage in authentic problem-solving activities and then deconstructing the activity to identify the instructional practices at play: what teachers learned through the problem solving, how they went about learning it, and the implications for them as classroom teachers. The discussion will be framed by the results of three different studies:
1) An initial survey of teachers’ initial beliefs and attitudes about mathematics teaching and learning collected prior to the start of the intervention.
2) An endline survey of teachers’ perceptions on the elements of the numeracy program that contributed the most to their understanding of effective numeracy practice.
3) the results of a random control trial comparing the procedural and conceptual understanding of pupils in pilot versus non pilot schools after one year of intervention.

The findings suggest that in-service programs that engage teachers in authentic problem-solving experiences may be a powerful, cost-effective means of challenging teachers’ tacitly held beliefs about what mathematics is and how it should be taught, and by extension, helping them understand and adopt new mathematics instructional models.

Authors

• Norma Evans, Evans and Associates Educational Consulting Ltd.

• Candace Debnam, School-to-School International