Using Conjecture Mapping to Understand the Interplay of Design Elements and Teacher Participation

• In Event: 58.082 - Roundtable Session 25
  In Roundtable Session: 58.082-15 - The Affordances and Challenges of Design-Based Research Approaches for Addressing Reform Math and Science Instruction

Abstract

Literature on artifact-rich PD indicates the affordances of particular types of facilitation moves, artifacts of practice, and task structures. Less is known about how these elements work together (Levin et al., 2009; Author, 2009; Author, 2014a). This study investigates how features of a video club interact over time to influence participants’ discourse about learning and teaching.
We drew on research on teacher noticing and design based research to design and study the PD (Author, 2014b; Author, 2008). We hypothesized that engaging teachers in PD focused on students’ ideas using artifacts of practice would result in their experimentation with instruction. This approach is consistent with research that highlights the mediating role of artifacts for supporting teacher learning and changes in practice (Hammer & van Zee, 2006; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Windschitl et al., 2012).
Over the course of one semester, five secondary science teachers met monthly to collaboratively examine video clips and student work samples focused on students’ disciplinary reasoning. Facilitation focused on developing an interpretive stance toward analyzing students’ ideas to examine how task structure can afford or limit opportunities for students’ reasoning.
Data consisted of videos and transcripts of five video club meetings, meeting design notes, pre-post interviews, and artifacts of teaching (video and student work both from published sources and participants’ classrooms). Using conjecture mapping (Author, 2014b) to make explicit how design elements were hypothesized to result in mediating practices, which in turn would result in learning outcomes, the data were analyzed using both published frameworks as well as frameworks developed through iterative coding (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). Analytic memos were written to capture both how each design element was utilized in each phase and how patterns of interactions among the elements changed over time (Miles et al., 2014).
Analysis yielded two main findings. First, artifacts, facilitation, and framing activities featured more and less prominently in each phase. Clip quality was of greatest importance in phase 1 meetings, followed by facilitation in phase 2 meetings to develop critical discourse about students’ disciplinary reasoning. When analyzing teachers’ own artifacts in phase 3, tools emerged as critically important to support problematizing of practice. Second, though all participants expressed interest in making their students’ disciplinary thinking more visible, not all participants experimented with their practice during the video club do to so. Five meetings were likely not sufficient for participants to work through several cycles of problematizing.
Though conjecture mapping helped make visible how the design elements influenced participants in the PD space, it did not adequately explain the learning between PD and the classroom. This work contributes to a growing understanding that teacher learning outcomes are not a result of a single PD element and balancing the affordances of artifacts, facilitation, and tools in artifact-rich PD is an important consideration for designers and facilitators. Additionally, it underlines the need for a more rigorous examination of how learning in PD translates into classroom practice.

Authors

• Tara Barnhart, California State University - Fullerton

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