Shifting the Culture of Teaching Through a Focus on Agency, Authority, and Identity

• In Event: 42.057 - Teacher Noticing for Equity: A TRU Perspective

Abstract

This paper reports on an embedded case study involving six teacher communities within Chicago Public Schools (CPS). CPS is the third largest—and third most segregated—school district in the US. Various indicators show that it is not serving Black and Latinx students well. To address racial achievement gaps in mathematics, over the past four years CPS has developed a professional development (PD) program for mathematics teachers, with the TRU framework (especially Dimension 3: Access and Dimension 4: Agency, Ownership, and Identity; see Schoenfeld et al., 2014) as its backbone. The district provides trainings to build a common vision around TRU and to introduce strategies for enacting that vision. The PD also aims to cultivate professional networks in which teachers take the lead in identifying and solving problems of practice. Preliminary data from CPS (Brownell, Mahon & Seward, 2016) indicate greater teacher and administrative cohesion and improved student performance.

One purpose of our ongoing study is to examine how top-down, district-led initiatives converge with bottom-up, teacher-led ones to challenge deficit narratives about students, Black and Brown students in particular. This paper focuses on the role of TRU in this process to examine the possibilities and the limitations of tools which, like TRU, are designed to advance equity but do not explicitly address the racialization of mathematics education.

Data collection is underway at six CPS schools where teachers receive intensive PD support, including opportunities for cross-site collaboration and workshops for teacher leaders. Teachers also collaborate in teams at their school sites, meeting 1-2 times per month. Data sources include teacher interviews and observations of both district-organized PD and site-based teacher collaboration.

The first phase of analysis indicates that teachers are adopting TRU lenses of access and agency in their conversations with one another and in their classroom practice. For example, in a recent site-based meeting, a teacher described running out of time for her lesson and attempting to summarize its main ideas, only to be interrupted by students who exclaimed that it was their job to perform the mathematical work of the class. A teacher at another school told interviewers that he was beginning to see his colleagues come together around an ambitious vision of “kids being the agents of their learning and kids doing the major thinking.”

Yet hierarchies of mathematical ability continue to permeate teacher talk. Although teachers are transforming their mathematics instruction to empower students, they casually label students “high kids” and “low kids.” What’s more, teacher discourse appears to take a “colorblind” stance (Bonilla-Silva, 2006). This suggests that the approach to equity embedded in TRU may not be sufficient to disrupt dominant ideologies of intelligence and race (for discussions of these ideologies, see, e.g., Horn, 2007; Martin, 2009; Oakes, Wells, Jones, & Datnow, 1997).
Future data collection and analysis will investigate how hierarchical discourse functions for teachers, how it relates to racialized discourses about mathematics ability, and how it shifts (or doesn’t) through their continued engagement with TRU.

Author

• Nicole Louie, The University of Texas - El Paso