Researchers have bemoaned the lack of a shared professional knowledge base for teaching and have called for teacher inquiry as a way to begin to generate this knowledge base. Policy makers have also embraced the idea of teachers using data to evaluate and improve their teaching.  As a result, many teachers now are expected to collect classroom data and document how they use that data to improve their instruction.

            This study examined secondary mathematics teachers who set goals for their teaching and gathered evidence to see if those goals were met.  The goals they set and the evidence they used demonstrated a mismatch between the intentions of researchers and policymakers and the realities of practice, as well as the difficulty of this increasingly common aspect of teachers’ work. 

Theoretical Framework:

            Many researchers and policy makers have proposed that a promising route for teachers to improve their practice and to build a useful knowledge base for their profession is to engage in on-going systematic inquiry of their own teaching (Ball & Cohen, 1999; Hiebert, Gallimore, & Stigler, 2002).  There are examples in the literature of teachers engaged in this work with the help of experts (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009; Gallimore, Ermeling, Saunders, & Goldenberg, 2009), but there are also indications that such work may be difficult for teachers (Gallimore et al., 2009; Stigler & Hiebert, 1999). This study describes how a small group of teachers responded when given the opportunity to engage in this kind of systematic inquiry. 

Research Questions:

When pushed for evidence of improvement in teaching for conceptual understanding what do teachers attend to when they:

• Create goals?
• Anticipate, collect and use evidence to evaluate their teaching?

Methods/Data sources/Analyses:

Ten mathematics teachers from three different high schools volunteered to participate in this research. The researcher met with each of the three groups four times in four months.  At each meeting, teachers responded in writing to prompts that asked them to define goals, describe how they would collect evidence to evaluate progress towards those goals, and to evaluate what progress they had made over the last month based on evidence they had collected.  Participants also discussed the project in a final individual interview.

            To answer the first research question, the participants’ written responses to the monthly prompts were coded according to whether they were attending to teacher moves, student outcomes, or explicit connections between the two.  These codes from the beginning of the project were compared to those from the end of the project to see if teachers moved closer to explicitly linking changes in their teaching with improvements in students’ learning. 

            To answer the second question, participants’ written responses were coded according to whether the evidence they cited was aligned with their stated goals.  In addition, all instances of participants explicitly addressing any aspect of data interpretation and collection were culled from the transcripts of the participants’ final interviews. Themes were identified, and claims about those themes supported by relevant quotations from participants themselves. 

Results:

            When creating goals and gathering evidence teachers did not attend to links between teaching and learning.  Rather they generally attended to student outcomes in isolation.  Teachers also did not collect and analyze data systematically.  The data they used to inform and evaluate their teaching were anecdotal and often impressionistic, even if sometimes highly detailed.  Teachers did not turn this anecdotal and impressionistic data into forms more aligned with those called for by researchers. 

Importance:

There are several important implications of this research. 

• These teachers struggled to engage in inquiry, despite their own willingness and the supports integrated into the research project.  This implies that simply mandating that teachers set goals and collect evidence will probably not result in teachers systematically engaging in inquiry in ways envisioned by policymakers and researchers.
• A key feature of teacher inquiry, the explicit linking of teacher actions to student outcomes, was often not visibly present in teacher thinking and discourse, undermining the potential of teacher inquiry to inform practice and create new, actionable knowledge. 
• The profession may lack important tools that would support teachers in using inquiry to improve their practice.  In particular the lack of specific shared language describing teacher moves, and shared evidence-gathering instruments that reflect the complexity of practice act as obstacles to systematic teacher inquiry.
• Teachers’ cultural understandings of data may conflict with the information that teachers use to inform their teaching, making it difficult for teachers to see the value of collecting and using data to improve their practice or to envision creating effective tools for data collection. 
• Despite the many difficulties teachers had, they found the process fruitful and helpful, indicating that teachers value the ability to think and reflect on their practice, and that teacher growth may be long, sporadic, and difficult to measure. 

Organization of the Session:

The presenter will present for fifteen minutes, followed by discussion based on questions of interest to the audience.

References:

Ball, D. L., & Cohen, D. K. (1999). Developing practice, developing practitioners: Toward a practice-based theory of professional education. In L. Darling-Hammond (Ed.), Teaching as the learning profession: handbook of policy and practice (pp. 3-32). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Cochran-Smith, M., & Lytle, S. L. (2009). Inquiry as stance: Practitioner research for the next generation. New York: Teachers College Press.

Gallimore, R., Ermeling, B. A., Saunders, W. M., & Goldenberg, C. (2009). Moving the learning of teaching closer to practice: Teacher education implications of school-based inquiry teams. The Elementary School Journal, 109(5), 537-553.

Hiebert, J., Gallimore, R., & Stigler, J. W. (2002). A knowledge base for the teaching profession: What would it look like and how can we get one? Educational Researcher, 31(5), 3-15.

Stigler, J. W., & Hiebert, J. (1999). The teaching gap: Best ideas from the world's teachers for improving education in the classroom. New York: Free Press.