CAREER: Math Teachers in Online and Live Communities of Practice

San Francisco State University, San Francisco CA

Investigators

Abstract

This project will construct a set of tools and protocols to identify and analyze the important structural features of online and live communities of practice. The analytical perspective used brings together ideas from research fields that too rarely intersect: the study of online communities from ethnographic and social network theory perspectives; accumulated experience from design experiments; the anthropological study of professional communities of practice; and teacher professional development research. An essential part of the project will be the enhancement of current professional development for two specific communities of teachers, graduate instructors teaching gatekeeper courses with high minority populations. A combined online and live course and support structure will be developed for graduate algebra instructors at San Francisco State calculus teaching assistants, and the ideas will then be adapted for graduate instructors of the PDP Treisman workshops at UC Berkeley. The project will assess the growth of the participants, in terms of teaching skill, attitudes and their pedagogical content knowledge.