Aug. 2005 – May 2006

Aug. 2006 – May 2007

Aug. 2007 – May 2008

Aug. 2008

Baseline Data Collection Study Group

Mapping & Reflecting on Personal Beliefs

Identifying & Reflecting on Performance Gaps

Pilot Study Cycles of Action Research A.R. cont…

Report onActivity Structures

& Turn LengthAnalyticMemos

Confronting Practice: Critical Colleagueship in a Mathematics Teacher Study Group Lorraine Males, Michigan State University

Research Questions

• Is it possible to identify the aspects of critical colleagueship in a mathematics teacher study group?

• What are some of the aspects of critical colleagueship exhibited by a group of mathematics teachers participating in a teacher study group as part of a project focused on teachers engaging in action research to improve mathematics classroom discourse?

Brian Lord’s (1994) “Critical Colleagueship”

1. Creating and sustaining productive disequilibrium through self reflection, collegial dialogue, and on-going critique.

2. Embracing fundamental intellectual virtues. Among these are openness to new ideas, willingness to reject weak practices or flimsy reasoning when faced with countervailing evidence and sound arguments, accepting responsibility for acquiring and using relevant information in the construction of technical arguments, willingness to seek out the best ideas or the best knowledge from within the subject-matter communities, greater reliance on organized and deliberate investigations rather than learning by accident, and assuming collective responsibility for creating a professional record of teachers' research and experimentation.

3. Increasing the capacity for empathetic understanding (placing oneself in a colleague's shoes). That is, understanding a colleague's dilemma in the terms he or she understands it.

4. Developing and honing the skills and attributes associated with negotiation, improved communication, and the resolution of competing interests.

5. Increasing teachers' comfort with high levels of ambiguity and uncertainty, which will be regular features of teaching for understanding.

6. Achieving collective generativity – "knowing how to go on" (Wittgenstein, 1958) as a goal of successful inquiry and practice.

TR Grade School Setting Cert Years Teach

Curr. Materials

Tonya 6 Rural, MS Elem 21 NSFDave 6 Urban, MS Elem 7 TradAnnie 7 Rural, MS Elem/MATa 17 NSFPenny 8 Urban, Title Ib, MS Sec 18 TradJackie 8 Suburban, MS Sec/Msa 14 NSFLisa 8 Urban, Giftedc, HS Sec 9 TradJim 8 Urban, MS Sec/MSMa 14 TradMatt 10 Suburban, HS Sec/MAT 2 Trad

a MAT is a Masters of Arts in Teaching; MS is a Masters of Science; MSM is Masters of School Mathematics.b A Title I school has a high percentage of students living in poverty (at least 40%) and is therefore provided with additional financial assistance from the government.c Students in this school scored in the 95th percentile on standardized tests. Students in eighth grade math in this school might actually be in sixth or seventh grade

Herbel-Eisenmann, B., Drake, C., & Cirillo, M. (2009). ‘‘Muddying the clearwaters’’: Teachers’ take-up of the linguistic idea of revoicing. Teaching and Teacher Education.

Participants

1 This data was collected as part of an NSF grant (#0347906) focusing on mathematics classroom discourse (Herbel-Eisenmann, PI). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of NSF. We would like to thank the teachers for allowing us to work in their classrooms.

Herbel-Eisenmann, B. & Cirillo, M. (Editors, 2009). Promoting purposeful discourse: Teacher research in mathematics classrooms. NCTM, Reston, VA.

Findings

• The corpus was reviewed (41 project meetings) and summarized in broad terms (Fairclough, 1992), using codes that reflected the topic of the discourse. • 10 transcripts where chosen based on topic codes for transcripts

in that contained discourse in which the teachers shared • Each transcript was broken up into episodes by topic or theme. • Episodes broken up into question/advice blocks. • Each question/advice block coded for of which was coded for who was doing the questioning, and who was being questioned, and the type of question(s) asked (clarification, elaboration, probing, challenging) [Choularaki & Fairclough, 1999]. • Notes were taken on how these question/advice blocks related to the components of critical colleagueship (i.e., pushing someone to reject flimsy reasoning, evidence of openness).

Project1 Phases

Data Analysis

Praising Colleague Advising Colleague Challenging Colleague

Frequency common common not common (only with one TR)

Identifying Characteristics

multitude of praiseLittle questioning (mostly clarification)

TRs offer solicited or unsolicited adviceLittle questioning (mostly clarification)

frequent questioning (elaboration, probing, challenging)

Examples of Teacher Utterances

Tonya: “I liked how you…”Matt: “I liked…”Annie: “You’re successfully…”Tonya: “That was a really neat strategy.”

Jackie: “It might be interesting to ask them…”Lisa: “I find that like two or three times a week to see if there's an open ended thing”Jackie: “What I do with mine is I have alternate assignments that are more challenging but there's fewer problems.”Annie: “I had that, too..., I was trying to engage them in conversation I never felt like I could get them engaged with their backs to each other. So I moved 'em so that they were in a U and then the outside U, so when we're discussing everybody is facing each other.

Annie: “How are you going to determine that?”Lisa: “What do you mean?”Penny: “So you couldn't say…”Penny: “ So how is that different than…”Jackie: “You might have a lot of people who are…”Annie: “I don't think that's the issue, I think the issue is whether or not you can really make the initial statement, this is procedural, this is [conceptual].You're not giving conceptual tasks, it's hard to justify the claim that…”

Aspect 1 Self-reflection – TRs share their progress and reflect on the difficulties and successes they experienced

Aspect 2 Openness to new ideas – willingness to try new things in their classroom

Tonya: “I thought that was a really neat strategy and one I’m gonna take”Dave: “…activities like this I can always use. Cause I’m willing to try them now where before I wasn’t” Matt: “ that would be good. So we're doing parametric equations and I could do that.”

[Willingness to reject flimsy reasoning when] faced with countervailing evidence and sound arguments –

TRs pushed 1 TR (Matt) to reject flimsy reasoning by providing countervailing evidence and sound arguments

Penny: “So you couldn't say, that a kid said, oh this is how you did it, so that's how I'm supposed to do it. So how is that different than, I know the distance formula, so that's how I’m going to do it?”Annie: “I don't think that's the issue, I think the issue is whether or not you can really make the initial statement, this is procedural, this is [conceptual].You're not giving conceptual tasks, it's hard to justify the claim that…”

Aspect 3 Empathetic Understanding – Expressing an understanding of what other TRs are going through

Tonya: “I like the fact, I mean have so many kids that come up to me and say…”Tonya: “I guess I relate to Dave, well, because we’re both teaching sixth grade…”Penny: “I’ve got students that ask that too.”

Data for this study