Project RITE

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 …

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