PD3: Opening Classroom Doors as a Vehicle for Change
The design varies depending on the local site. Seattle PD3 teachers open doors by participation in a video club, where they work together on a regular basis on a mathematics task from a videotaped lesson, discuss their perception of what students will do, and view and debrief the classroom video, focusing on the question: Using evidence from the tape, what can we tell about what students understand about the mathematics? Supporting activities include school grade level teams working together to design lessons for common classes. In McAllen, middle and high school teachers observe Master teachers conduct a summer camp with an innovative curriculum for middle school or rising ninth grade students each morning and then attend a graduate course on the teaching of middle school mathematics in the afternoon. During the graduate class, these "trainee" teachers describe what they observed in the morning and how it could translate to their classrooms. The trainee teachers then go on to conduct a two-week camp of their own, observed by the master teachers. Academic year support includes in person or ITV meetings with STEM faculty and members of the leadership team and in some buildings lesson study groups. In Las Cruces and Gadsden, teachers use state test data to identify mathematical areas with the lowest success rate and through Lesson Study design lessons aimed at improving students' success rate in the problem areas. Teams of teachers from project schools work together with local leaders and an outside STEM consultant to consider how to construct lessons that enable student learning. The New Mexico teachers are also consulting with the Seattle teachers to use their experience to implement a local video club.
Gathering evidence of how participation in learning communities such as those fostered through video clubs, lesson study, or laboratory-based course work and mentoring changes teachers' behaviors is accomplished through a variety of methods, both formal and informal. Data about teachers are collected through detailed records of conversations and discussions, surveys regarding attitudes and beliefs about mathematics and teaching mathematics, curriculum foci, activity reports, teachers' written reports, classroom observations. Student data are collected via pre and posttests and surveys, standardized tests, and aptitude tests, depending on the site. The Seattle PD3 research team is interested in the kinds of teacher understandings fostered by the video club experience, as well as how these experiences advance teachers' learning. Accordingly, they collect a variety of qualitative data, including audio recordings of the video club sessions, field notes taken at the video club sessions, exit surveys at the conclusion of each session, and end-of-year teacher interviews. The plan for analyzing the data includes decontextualixing and recontextualizing the data to reduce and then expand it (Tesch, 1990) in an effort to think about and with the data (Coffey & Atkinson, 1996), examining patterns within and across data sources and looking for emergent themes (Erickson, 1986).
In McAllen, changes in trainee teacher content knowledge and attitudes towards the teaching of mathematics are measured by pre and post content tests and pre and post surveys of teacher efficacy. These quantitative measures are complemented by daily reflections from the summer program, a final program evaluation and one classroom observation during the school year. Additionally, students in the summer classes are given pre and post tests to look for growth. The data collection for the lesson study work in New Mexico is guided by the work and cautions of Lewis and colleagues (2006), where we are looking at transcripts of discussions during lesson study sessions, teachers' responses to work with outside facilitators, and teachers' written reports about their lesson study experience for evidence of whether teachers begin to shift their teaching from telling to teaching for understanding, whether they are beginning to collect and use data as a basis for making decisions about teaching and designing lessons. In addition, the team leaders are examining their own work as facilitators and collecting data about what works and what does not as they craft and enforce discussion protocols to keep the focus on student learning and how they choose tasks for running a research lesson process so that teachers can get better at thinking about and refining their teaching by focusing on how student learn.
