FROM
ONE COMMUNITY OF LEARNERS TO ANOTHER:
THE
INFLUENCE OF TEACHER PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT ON PRACTICE
Kimberly Hufferd-Ackles
Northwestern University
khufferd@nwu.edu
This
paper focuses on the teacher learning stimulated by involvement in professional
development (PD) sessions. In earlier
work, I studied changes teachers made as they developed what I call a math-talk learning community
(Hufferd-Ackles, 1999). I identified
key dimensions along which teachers made changes, and the trajectory of change
in each. I adapted these math-talk
trajectories into PD materials to be used during after-school meetings with
teachers implementing a reform-based curriculum (Table 1). In the sessions, we looked at five written
trajectories and corresponding video excerpts and discussed them. Eight teachers (grades 1-3) participated in
the PD sessions at a large urban elementary school. Transcripts of classroom video, video from bi-weekly PD sessions,
and audio-taped teacher interviews were analyzed using an iterative approach.
<<Insert Table 1
Here>>
The
analysis has identified two ways that PD sessions have influenced teacher
learning. First, teachers did in fact
learn about facilitating discourse in the PD sessions. Participants learned: a) about alternative
roles for the teacher that allow discourse to develop in the classroom, and b)
about student capacity to contribute to classroom discourse. Second, participating in the PD sessions
seemed to foster changes in teachers’ classroom practice. Participants: a) began to allow students to
contribute to discussions by encouraging student questioning and fuller
explanations of work, b) changed their physical location during math
discussions to remove themselves from the center, c) did less direct-teaching
of new topics and allowed more student exploration.
References
Hufferd-Ackles, K.
(1999). Learning by All in a Math-Talk
Learning Community. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Northwestern
University.