Teacher Learning in Mathematics: Using Student Work to Promote Collective Inquiry

Using Social Network Analysis to Study How Collegial Interactions Can Augment Teacher Learning from External Professional Development

“…Of central importance are routines and protocols that scaffold deep conversations among teachers about their practices (Horn and Little 2010;Kazemi and Franke 2004;Little 2003). First, protocols for looking at student work together or examining practice can provide a safe context for opening up and representing one's practice to others and thus facilitate teachers' willingness to experiment with new practices (Curry et al 2003;Little and Curry 2008).…”

“…Case analyses have illuminated the critical conditions for forming such communities, including a shared goal for improvement (Scribner et al 2007), a commitment to opening up one's practice to others (Little 2002), and a strong alignment between the formal or designed social organization of schools and the actual pattern of collegial ties (Bidwell and Yasumoto 1997). These conditions, in turn, enable teachers to reconstruct their practice through repeated interactions around artifacts and representations of teaching practice and student thinking (Kazemi and Franke 2004;Little 2003), opportunities to observe one another engaged in the act of teaching (Lewis et al 2006), and routines for scaffolding interactions about teaching (Horn and Little 2010).…”

Pedagogical sensemaking or “doing school”: In well-designed workshop sessions, facilitation makes the difference

“…During our study, each iteration of the NFW was attended by 60-70 faculty, most within their first 1-3 years of teaching [18]. The workshop Instructors approach problems of practice as opportunities to learn with others, framing these problems as normal and inviting specification, interpretation, and appropriately constrained generalization [40,46,74].…”

Co-planning among science and special education teachers: How do different conceptual lenses help to make sense of the process?

“…Codes were inductively constructed and synthesized to identify patterns in the data. Reported benefits of teacher communities include a shift in their focus from their own teaching to student learning (Kazemi and Franke 2004). Teachers who participate in professional learning communities also describe positive changes in their specific instructional practices, as well as in their general abilities to meet the needs of their students (Butler et al 2004).…”

“…We took up Putnam and Borko's (2000) suggestion to view our two school teams as mini-discourse communities. We then reexamined the methods Grossman et al (2001) and Kazemi and Franke (2004) used to analyze teacher discourse in communities. We found that these researchers triangulated themes that arose from their detailed analysis of community discourse with other types of data collected.…”