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.