TENSIONS INVOLVED IN PROVIDING PROFESSIONAL
DEVELOPMENT
Victoria Jacobs
San Diego State
University
Rebecca Ambrose
San Diego State
University
Lisa Clement
San Diego State
University
Lclement@mail.sdsu.edu
We examined our own decision-making in the
planning and implementation of professional development that focused on
understanding children’s mathematical thinking. Data included
transcripts of planning meetings and workshop sessions, field notes from
classroom visits, surveys completed by the teachers, and
debriefing interviews with the teachers at the end of the year-long project.
Below
we identify the significant tensions that we had to negotiate:
·
Workshop Facilitators: Given the limited
workshop time, we struggled with the balance between addressing substantive
issues and establishing a supportive learning community. Final interviews suggested that teachers
held various perspectives with some requesting more presentations of
information while and others
preferred preferring more
informal sharing time.
·
In-Class Support
Providers: During
classroom visits, we viewed ourselves as resources who could help teachers by
observing children, posing reflective questions, and jointly brainstorming next
steps. In contrast, the teachers
sometimes viewed us as evaluators with our own agenda. We struggled with how to change this
perception.
·
Researchers: We often found the
goals of researchers and professional developers to be incompatible. For example, as researchers, we wanted to
collect baseline data in order to document teachers’ growth. As professional developers, we wanted to use
our initial interactions to begin to build a supportive, non-evaluative community that encouraged teachers to take
risks. We struggled with these
discrepant goals and learned later that a few teachers even declined to join
the program because of our baseline data requests.
We
hope to begin a dialogue about these tensions as we feel they are not unique to
our project.