This symposium focuses on three studies that investigate the notion of teacher capacity with respect to the use of innovative curriculum resources, such as those found in most Standards-based programs. Brown (2009) uses the term pedagogical design capacity (PDC) to describe how teachers perceive, mobilize, and make decisions with curricular resources. We apply and extend this idea in several contexts to emphasize the reflexive relationship between teachers’ planning and instructional practices and their recognition and uptake of resources in curriculum materials. One goal for this work is to identify high-leverage practices (Ball et al., 2009), both in terms of practices that develop teachers’ understanding of curriculum resources and in terms of how particular uses of curriculum materials may lead to changes in instructional practices. The range of contexts includes pre-service teachers, teachers constructing a STEM curriculum using a variety of materials, and teachers highly experienced in the use of a Standards-based curriculum program. The three studies as a set provide insights into how capacity can be influenced by teachers’ professional experiences and contexts, as well as how capacity develops over time.

 

The central questions that will be used to foster interaction with the audience are:

1. How can curriculum use be characterized as a high-leverage practice in terms of helping pre-service teachers develop ambitious instructional practices?
2. How can capacity be characterized in terms of the ways teachers select, adapt, and design tasks from a variety of resources to design an instructional sequence?
3. What instructional practices, particularly discourse practices, help teachers understand and learn from resources in innovative curriculum materials?

Panelist 1

In our work, we are interested in PSTs’ development of capacity for understanding and enacting educative curriculum materials (Davis & Krajcik, 2005). We claim that learning to use curriculum materials in productive ways is, or can be, a high-leverage practice for novice teachers. At the same time, we are also interested in the ways in which PSTs develop capacity for enacting other high-leverage practices – including identifying mathematical goals and trajectories, questioning students, and organizing a discussion – through their use of educative curriculum materials. In this presentation, we will share student work from several cohorts of PSTs who developed their capacity to identify the mathematical big ideas and “storyline” (Smith & Stein, 2011) of multi-digit addition and subtraction through scaffolded reading and evaluation of a third-grade unit from Investigations (TERC, 2008). These PSTs learned not only about the use of curriculum materials, including strategies for reading and evaluating the materials in educative ways, but also from the materials as they constructed broader ideas about how children can make sense of multi-digit addition and subtraction through problem-solving.

Panelist 2

This case study explores the curricular design work of a mathematics teacher in a small, innovative STEM-focused high school during the school’s first two years. Three adjoining school districts formed the school with the intent of integrating STEM disciplines and problem-based approaches into all subjects, while serving diverse students. Rather than using a single, published textbook, the teacher (and her colleagues) applied the Understanding by Design framework for instructional planning (McTighe, 2010) and used multiple resources to generate curriculum materials. This process entailed identifying big ideas for a course, analyzing state standards, determining essential questions for students to explore and understand, developing standards-based rubrics to measure learning, and then designing instruction to meet these goals. To analyze the teacher’s PDC during instructional planning, this study considered to what extent and how she employed curricular knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge (Grossman, 1990; Shulman, 1986), curricular reasoning (Roth McDuffie & Mather, 2009; Breyfogle, Roth McDuffie, and Wohlhuter, 2010), and curricular vision (Darling-Hammond et al., 2005). Findings indicated that the interplay among these forms of knowledge and thinking, while the teacher negotiated multiple demands (e.g., state standards, students’ learning needs, school-based curricular goals), influenced the design process. This teacher’s practice in an innovative STEM school provided rich examples for how PDC is employed in a complex context.

Panelist 3

The educative potential of curriculum materials has been largely cast as a design principle, whereby curriculum developers include resources intended to help teachers understand content and the representation of content before implementing materials in classrooms (Ball & Cohen, 1996; Davis & Krajcik, 2005). An alternative conjecture is that the transformative potential of curriculum materials and other resources depends on the capacity of those who implement them (Cohen, Raudenbush, & Ball, 2003). Recent work suggests that discourse routines may constitute an essential and generative form of teacher capacity to enact challenging forms of curriculum and instruction (Lampert, Beasley, Ghousseini, Kazemi, & Franke, 2010), a form of capacity that may influence teacher uptake of, and learning from, innovative curriculum materials. This study focused on five middle school teachers who were using a Standards-based curriculum program and investigated how the teachers’ discourse routines were associated with their understanding of the curriculum materials. The routines fell into two categories, one associated with the initiate-respond-evaluate (IRE) pattern, and the other with Accountable Talk (Michaels, O’Connor, & Resnick, 2008). The IRE routines constrained the potential for important curriculum features to emerge, while the Accountable Talk routines helped to make evident the ways that task sequences provided opportunities for students to reason about mathematical concepts, and thus for teachers to attend to student thinking. Ultimately, the Accountable Talk routines were associated with teacher understanding of how the materials helped students to reason mathematically. 

Structure of symposium

1. Chair will provide an overview of the symposium, describing the theme and structure as well as connections between the various panelists’ contributions.
2. Each panelist will present their frameworks and findings, highlighting connections between these findings and the three focus questions of the symposium.
3. The discussant will describe how the presentations extend the current state of knowledge of teacher capacity with respect to the use of innovative curriculum resources.
4. The discussant will post the three questions and then open up the floor for questions and audience participation. 

References

Ball, D. L., & Cohen, D. K. (1996). Reform by the book: what is - or might be - the role of curriculum materials in teacher learning and instructional reform? Educational Researcher, 25(9), 6-8,14.

Ball, D.L., Sleep, L., Boerst, T.A., & Bass, H. (2009). Combining the development of

practice and the practice of development in teacher education. Elementary School Journal 109(5): 458-474.

Breyfogle, L., Roth McDuffie, A., Wohlhuter, K. (2010). Developing curricular reasoning for grades preK-12 mathematics instruction. In B. Reys, R. Reys, & R. Rubenstein (Eds.), Mathematics curriculum: Issues, trends and future directions, (pp. 307-320). Reston, VA: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.

Brown, M. (2009). The teacher-tool relationship: Theorizing the design and use of curriculum materials. In J. T. Remillard, B. Herbel-Eisenmann & G. Lloyd (Eds.), Mathematics teachers at work: Connecting curriculum materials and classroom instruction (pp. 17-36). New York: Routledge.

Cohen, D. K., Raudenbush, S. W., & Ball, D. L. (2003). Resources, instruction, and research. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 25(2), 119-142.

Darling-Hammond, L., Banks, J., Zumwalt, K., Gomez, L., Sherin, M., Griesdorn, J., & Finn, L. (2005). Educational goals and purposes: Developing a curricular vision for teaching. In L. Darling-Hammond & J. Bransford (Eds.), Preparing Teachers for a Changing World: What Teachers Should Learn and Be Able to Do, (pp. 169–200). San Francisco: John Wiley..

Davis, E., & Krajcik, J. (2005). Designing educative materials to promote teacher learning. Educational Researcher, 34(3), 3-14.

Grossman, P. (1990). The making of a teacher: Teacher knowledge and teacher education. New York: Teachers College Press.

Lampert, M., Beasley, H., Ghousseini, H., Kazemi, E., & Franke, M. (2010). Using designed instructional activities to enable novices to manage ambitious mathematics teaching. In M. K. Stein & L. Kucan (Eds.), Instructional explanations in the disciplines (pp. 129-141). New York: Springer.

McTighe, J. (2010). Understanding by design and instruction. In R. Marzano (Ed.), On excellence in teaching, (pp. 270-299). Bloomington, IN, Solution Tree Press.

Michaels, S., O'Connor, M. C., & Resnick, L. B. (2008). Deliberative discourse idealized and realized: Accountable talk in the classroom and in civic life. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 27(4), 283-297.

Roth McDuffie, A. & Mather, M. (2009). Middle school mathematics teachers’ use of curricular reasoning in a collaborative professional development project. In J. Remillard, B. Herbel-Eisenmann, & G. Lloyd (Eds.) Mathematics teachers at work: Connecting curriculum materials and classroom instruction, (pp. 302–20). New York: Routledge, 2009.

Shulman, L. (1986). Those who understand: Knowledge growth in teaching. Educational Researcher, 15 (2), 4–14.

Smith, M.S. & Stein, M.K. (2011). 5 Practices for orchestrating productive mathematics

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TERC (2008). Investigations in Number, Data, and Space. Glenview, IL: Pearson Scott

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