Abstract
We examine classroom video recordings as a means of supporting the learning of teacher communities. Drawing on a longitudinal professional development program for middle years mathematics teachers in the USA, we first outline two contrasting episodes in which the teachers analyzed same segments of classroom video in two different points in the program, 2 years apart. We document that the teachers considered dramatically different aspects of video-recorded instruction as relevant to their professional interests and learning in the two episodes. We then analyze the episodes, and the intervening developments, from point of view of the community documentational genesis. In doing so, we highlight the teacher community’s creation of shared repertoire of ways of reasoning.
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Notes
The research team included the authors, Kay McClain, Chrystal Dean, Teruni Lamberg, Qing Zhao, Melissa Gresalfi, Lori Tyler, and Jose Cortina.
Gueudet and Trouche explain that they use the word resources (rather than materials) to include human and cultural resources (Adler 2000) that teachers can draw on in their work. We appreciate this broad view of potential supports of teachers’ work, but consider as resources only those materials and people on which teachers actually draw in their work. For instance, we would not recognize a colleague who never engages in conversations about teaching as a resource even though she is potentially available for such conversations.
Our interest in the documentation work of teacher community reflects our interest in understanding and improving the designed means of supporting teachers’ learning. We do not, at this point, have data to trace the impact of community documentation on the documentation systems of individual teachers.
Not all group members were able to participate in each session. Only two new members took part in the second video analysis along with seven continuing members (5 teachers and 2 mathematics leadership personnel). We analyze contributions of new members when we describe the second video analysis activity.
Others (van Es and Sherin 2008) have reported that when teachers are learning to analyze records of practice, they tend to focus on the actions of the teacher in analyzed classroom, and that transition to focusing on student reasoning requires significant support.
No video clips from statistics design experiment were used in the intervening years.
Seven of the participants were members of the group from its inception and the remaining two joined the group at the beginning of year 3. The newcomers’ names are marked with an asterisk.
Each teacher was given transcripts of the episodes and earphones for viewing digitized videos. The groups conducted their analyses in separate rooms.
Seeing teaching in the video clip as good was not a PD goal. Indeed, there were a number of occasions where alternative courses for the video teacher’s action could be proposed.
We also treat these analyses as products of a single, continuing teacher group. The changes in the documentation work of this group then provide a summary account of its collective development.
One of six teachers who joined the group in year 3 could not take part in the summer institute due to time conflicts, and three changed their career paths at the end of the school year and left the group.
As indicated earlier, these normative practices were re-established within the community after the change in membership.
The discussions of these recordings were significantly less structured than the summer activities that are the focus of this article. Our agenda during these discussions, which usually lasted about 1 h, was to support the teachers in focusing on their students’ reasoning. However, this focus was not achieved during year 3.
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Visnovska, J., Cobb, P. Classroom video in teacher professional development program: community documentational genesis perspective. ZDM Mathematics Education 45, 1017–1029 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11858-013-0523-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11858-013-0523-5