Professional development opportunities for teachers have evolved with the advance of technology. Researchers show there are both advantages and concerns about online education (Larreamendy-Joerns & Leinhardt, 2006). Some mathematics teacher education courses and workshops have incorporated online discussion boards. With appropriate uses, the discussion board has supported mathematics teacher development by providing a forum for teachers with diverse perspectives to address sensitive issues (Li, 2003). Our poster will present a study that examined nine beginning mathematics teachers' use of a discussion board over five years. We focused on what the teachers discussed and how those discussions did or did not evolve over time.

The [Program Name] supports beginning high school science and mathematics teachers in the early years of their career. An asynchronous discussion board provides a support network for cohorts of teachers and allows teachers to post thoughts, concerns, and successes through threaded conversations, links, documents, videos, and other artifacts related to professional growth. Each teacher is responsible for posting (initiating or responding to a thread) twice a month. The program facilitators infrequently intervened in the discussion board postings.

For this study, we examined the discussion board over five years for the mathematics cohort that began the program in 2006. We investigated whether and how the content and depth of the cohort's posts evolved. We used Henri's (1991) analytical framework with five dimensions (participative, social, interactive, cognitive, and metacognitive) to characterize the postings. In our proposed poster we will focus on three of the dimensions—interactive, cognitive, and metacognitive. The interactive model allowed us to examine the way participants reacted to postings. We tracked whether the participants responded directly or indirectly to others' postings, and whether they provided responses, commentaries, or independent statements. The cognitive skills model examined the knowledge and skills related to learning. For example, we considered if the participants posed questions, made inferences, or formulated hypotheses. Lastly, the metacognitive model allowed us to document evidence of awareness, self-control, and self-regulation of learning.

Our preliminary results suggest the 2006 cohort struggled to use the discussion board as a conversation site and often created blog-like postings. For the interactive dimension, the teachers tended to initiate postings by posing questions that were written more like a statement than a true question. In the cognitive dimension, the teachers' responses rarely analyzed (i.e., drew conclusions or made generalizations) the problem identified in the initial post. In response to a post about effective systems for gathering data on student understanding, a teacher shared that her school outsources a company for data, instead of sharing specifics about how the data is collected in the first place. There were few examples of the metacognitive dimension. Self-awareness was the most common. For example, responding to a post about professional development experiences, one teacher wrote "For me, it helped me work through many of my feelings of inadequacies and failure."

The content of the postings did provide insights into struggles that the teachers faced. Some of these struggles were related to general concerns (e.g., classroom management) and others were specific to teaching mathematics (e.g., teachers' struggles with calculator activities, lessons on how to simplify radicals, how to develop mathematical norms, and various mathematics education articles). We noted a shift in the content of the postings. For example, during the first year a thread initiated about students would acquire responses that had a focus on the teacher; however in the fourth year, the focus remained on the students.

Our research has implications for teacher development. Based on our findings, we will describe challenges for teacher education pertaining to online discussion boards and share how the role of the facilitator might support beginning teachers' experiences on discussion boards.

We have selected the poster session because much of our work is preliminary and the poster format will allow for interactive discussions about our research in progress. Our poster will describe the program, outline the study described here, share preliminary findings, and pose some initial thoughts for teacher education. Attendees will learn about struggles faced by these beginning teachers and view actual posts to explore ideas of scaffolding, types of responses, and the role of the facilitator.

Henri, F. 1991. Computer conferencing and content analysis. In A. Kaye (Ed.), Collaborative learning through computer conferencing: The Najaden papers, 117–36. London: Springer-Verlag.

Larreamendy-Joerns, J., & Leinhardt, G. (2006). Going the distance with online education. Review of Educational Research, 76, p. 567–605.

Li, Q. (2003). Would we teach without technology? A professor's experience of teaching mathematics education incorporating the Internet. Educational Research, 45, p. 61–77.

Wallach, T., & Even, R. (2005). Hearing students: The complexity of understanding what they are saying, showing, and doing. Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education, 8, p. 393–417.