Using Curriculum to Facilitate Mathematics Teacher Learning in Professional Development

• In Event: Facilitating Teachers’ Learning: Practices That Support Math Teachers in Developing Ambitious Practice

Abstract

Introduction/Research Question
The adoption of new curricula to support ambitious instruction is often a key feature of district plans to improve student learning (Hirsch & Reys, 2009; Kazemi, Franke, & Lampert, 2009; Stein & Kim, 2009). This adoption is frequently accompanied by professional development (PD) to support teachers to use the curriculum. In any PD, learning opportunities for teachers are dependent on the focus and facilitation of that professional development (Elliot et al., 2009). In curriculum-focused PD, it is up to the facilitator to plan, develop and facilitate conversations that create greater opportunities for teachers to learn in ways that support ambitious instruction through the curriculum. This leads to the research question: How do facilitators support teachers’ learning using curriculum-based lesson discussions?

Framework
Curriculum has the potential to support teacher learning (Ball & Cohen, 1996). As the framework from Remillard (2005) describes, there is a participatory relationship between teachers and curriculum that is influenced by context. Participatory relationship describes the interaction between teachers and curriculum and how it the relationship is influenced by the characteristics of each (Remillard, 2005). In this study, PD will be part of the context that mediates the relationship between curriculum and teachers in order to demonstrate how facilitators can influence the extent to which curricula support teachers in developing ambitious practices.

Data sources
The data for the analysis comes from Year 2 of a four-year study of instructional improvement in middle-grades mathematics across two large, U.S. urban districts. Each year district-level PD and school-level teachers’ collaborative time is video-recorded.
First, we taped district-led professional development on a particular lesson at the 7th grade level in the curriculum. Then we identified schools that used the school-based collaborative time to discuss the district PD on curriculum. We analyzed the district video using discourse analysis with a focus on facilitator moves that appear to support teachers' development of ambitious teaching practices and we analyzed the school videos for insight into teacher thoughts about the effectiveness of the PD.

Results
We found that facilitators supported teachers’ opportunities to learn from curriculum by: 1) Asking teachers to work on the math tasks in the curriculum themselves 2) Creating discussions around different teacher-created strategies and introducing other potential strategies that may be generated by students to press teacher’s thinking about the goals of the lesson 3) Modeling instruction and the end of lesson discussions that connected the ideas that the teachers developed in working the task themselves 4) Pushing on how the lesson from the curriculum fits into larger goals for students’ mathematical learning. Opportunities for teacher learning seemed to be missed when facilitators were hesitant or did not address points of contention in the teacher discussions.

Significance
The contribution of this paper is an in-depth qualitative analysis of how facilitators support teachers in developing ambitious teaching practices using curriculum. We argue that these types of analyses are necessary if educators are to systematically support teachers to improve opportunities for teacher learning in curriculum-based mathematics professional development.

Authors

• Mollie H. Appelgate, Iowa State University

• Jonee Wilson, Vanderbilt University