Supporting and Sustaining the Learning of Professional Teaching Communities in the Institutional Setting of the School and School District

Vanderbilt University, Nashville TN

Investigators

Abstract

This is a five-year longitudinal study of the process of supporting and sustaining the learning of professional teaching communities by building on a collaboration that has been established over the past two years with two groups of middle-school mathematics teachers who work in contrasting urban districts. In one district, administrators have responded to high stakes accountability testing by attempting to monitor and regulate teachers' instructional practices whereas in the second district administrators have responded to accountability pressures by providing teachers with access to new tools and new forms of knowledge. The first goal of the proposed project is to develop an analytic framework designed to situate mathematics teachers' instructional practices in the institutional setting of the school, the school district, and the broader policy environment. A major purpose of this framework will be to assist, within the institutional setting, in scaling up innovations. As second goal, the framework will be pilot tested and refined through ongoing collaboration with the teachers and administrators in the two districts by using it to guide the formulation of specific strategies for supporting substantial change in mathematics teaching in the two contrasting districts. In doing so, strategies and conjectures will be tested and revised on an ongoing basis, thereby revising the framework in the context in which it is designed to be used. The third goal of the project will be to investigate the travel of an innovation by testing, modifying, and revising a conjectured trajectory for the development of professional teaching communities, in the process relating the actual learning trajectories of two professional teaching communities to the contrasting organizational contexts at the two sites. The fourth goal will be to investigate the organizational conditions necessary for sustainability by documenting the development of the two professional teaching communities when the researchers' direct support is withdrawn in the final year of the proposed project. The goal in analyzing these data will be to develop longitudinal accounts of the initial emergence and subsequent development of the professional teaching communities over a five-year period. In doing so, the two communities will be situated within the institutional settings of respective districts, thereby locating the collaborating teachers' evolving instructional practices in both the social contexts of the professional teaching communities and the organizational settings of the districts. The student outcome data will allow the researchers to document the consequences of changes in the teachers' instructional practices for the students' mathematical learning.