Project RITE

In our previous post we discussed some early findings from our study. Today, we are going to share a few more details in our analysis. As we previously stated, only one of the three schools developed the type of professional teaching community we sought to develop. In looking to why this took place at that school and not the others, we found that this particular school had several changes in administration over the past few years - leaving teachers to rely on one another for support.  The other schools, with stronger school-based leaders, seem to have teachers that follow the principal’s lead and not seek out leadership roles for themselves.  We see this as evidence of the types of identities related to mathematics teaching that these individuals possess.  For instance, the teachers at the other schools derive a mathematics teaching identity from what the school defines as appropriate ways ofteaching mathematics.  On the other hand, the teachers engaged in the professional teaching community look to one another to define appropriate ways of teaching, and thus hold an identity that is not linked to school norms and expectations, but to goals, values, and beliefs of that particular teaching community.  We see this distinction as integral to understanding the ways in which teachers incorporate the pedagogical suggestions made in graduate coursework into there own classrooms.

This week we collected the last of our data for the project. We completed multiple interviews and observations for each of the participating teachers in our study. The interviews have been sent to the transcriptionist and we should begin analysis within a week or so.  In additional to interviews and observations we collected data from their classroom practices, including lesson plans, lesson reflections, samples of student work, and samples of feedback.  Each of the participating teachers completed two surveys related to their epistemic beliefs and their beliefs regarding mathematics teaching and learning. The analysis on those will be complete within just a few days.

Some initial thoughts on what we saw during the study: The efforts to develop professional learning communities that would be sustainable after the courses were taught seemed to take hold at some schools and not at others. While most of the teachers commented on the benefits of coming together to talk about mathematics content and pedagogy and stated that those opportunities were valuable, only one school has maintained the type of collegiality we sought to develop. There are perhaps multiple reasons why this took place, but observations indicated that local school norms have a strong impact on the opportunities for and the nature of interactions between mathematics teachers.  We hope to elaborate more on these norms as data analysis proceeds.
Additionally, we have observed a wide variety of classroom instructional practices in terms of alignment with reform-oriented instructional practices (which were the instructional practices suggested during the courses), even within the same school. Despite the level of collaboration and shared vision expressed during coursework, observations and interviews seem to suggest that they have yet to adopt a view of mathematics teaching as a shared responsibility, but rather an individual act.More to come …

All but one of our teachers are in the middle of data collection right now. These middle grades mathematics teachers are gathering lesson plans, lesson reflections, samples of student work, feedback on that work, and quizzes and tests from their classroom. We’ll use this information to make characterizations of their classroom practices and to see if it is consistent with the observations we make in the coming weeks.  Lastly, we have scheduled interviews with the teachers that will begin next week.

We are excited to be a part of Project RITE for the 2007 - 2008 academic year!  To provide some context to our study, eight teachers from a local rural school district completed four online courses at UTK using both Centra® (synchronous) and Blackboard® (asynchronous) software.  These courses were designed to increase teachers’ mathematics content and pedagogical content knowledge.  Additionally, researchers on this project sought to bring about changes in teachers’ epistemic beliefs and their beliefs about mathematics teaching and learning.  Prior research suggests that this process takes time, thus our goal here is to follow-up with these teachers a year after they completed these online courses.

To this point, we have obtained IRB approval for the Project RITE study, contacted all participating teachers, and began the logistical process of data collection within teachers’ own classrooms.  Within a few weeks, we will begin to update you on the data we have collected.