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Tracing professional development to practice: connection making and content knowledge in one teacher’s experience

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Abstract

In this study, we examine one teacher’s opportunities to develop a coherent understanding of proportional situations through connection making in professional development (PD) and the ways in which those experiences were evidenced in her own classroom practice teaching the same task from PD. Data from both settings were analyzed using a framework for connection making that highlighted the ways in which the teacher or facilitator promoted discussion, used representations, promoted multiple approaches, and scaffolded learning. Our findings suggest that this teacher treated pedagogy and mathematical content as separable, which led to problematic implementation of the types of teaching practices that PD was intended to foster. We provide suggestions for addressing this shortcoming in future professional development.

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Notes

  1. All names except Rachael’s are pseudonyms. Rachael wrote about her experiences in PD, thus “outing” herself. She commented on earlier drafts of this report.

  2. The assessment form is secure; thus, items from the assessment cannot be shared.

  3. While Donna seemed surprised by this choice of graphs, her own write-up from PD also featured a bar graph. This suggested that something in the way Donna thought, and perhaps taught, about these situations invoked bar graph knowledge. We do not treat this more fully in this paper because of the limited data available.

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Acknowledgments

The work reported here was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number REC-1036083. The results reported here are the opinions of the authors and may not reflect those of the NSF.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, Dartmouth, MA, USA

    Chandra Hawley Orrill

  2. University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA

    Julie M. Kittleson

  3. Department of STEM Education & Teacher Development and Kaput Center for Research and Innovation in STEM Education, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, 200 Mill Road, Suite 150B, Fairhaven, MA, 02719, USA

    Chandra Hawley Orrill

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  1. Chandra Hawley Orrill
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  2. Julie M. Kittleson
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Correspondence to Chandra Hawley Orrill.

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Orrill, C.H., Kittleson, J.M. Tracing professional development to practice: connection making and content knowledge in one teacher’s experience. J Math Teacher Educ 18, 273–297 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10857-014-9284-5

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