Examining an Online, International Exchange Professional Development Program for High School Teachers

This project is concerned with investigating the potential that online, cross-national teacher collaboration has for improving professional development that supports mathematics teachers in learning from practice and from one another. Designing professional development that leverages teachers’ experiences and knowledge is one way to support teachers’ professional learning, as it allows teachers to focus on developing skills that are integrated into the particularities of their practice. By collaborating with one another to design and revise lessons, mathematics teachers can support one another’s learning in many ways, including asking questions, suggesting alternatives, and detailing considerations based on their varying professional experiences and knowledge. This project aims to elaborate a structure for practice-oriented, collaborative professional development that increases the capacities for collaborative learning by facilitating teacher-to-teacher interactions within and across cultural contexts. By convening international groups of teachers to design lessons and provide and respond to commentaries on their lesson designs, the project introduces possibilities for surfacing and disrupting common experiences, assumptions, and norms in US mathematics teaching. Specifically, the project will leverage an innovative form of professional development for secondary mathematics teachers called StoryCircles as a context for teacher-to-teacher interaction within and across cultures. StoryCircles is a practice-based form of professional education that gathers teachers to collectively and iteratively design and revise a lesson. The broader impacts of this project lie in the possibility to scale an innovative, practice-based, lesson-centered model of professional development with large numbers of teachers that can be institutionalized at relatively low cost and implemented completely online.

The project will unfold across three interconnected studies that aim to describe and explain how intra- and cross-cultural annotations of lessons, serve to intervene on: (1) the professional development interactions among secondary mathematics teachers engaged in US-based StoryCircles; (2) the set of lesson artifacts constructed by secondary mathematics teachers engaged in US-based StoryCircles; and (3) the professional noticing of secondary mathematics teachers in the US and abroad who were otherwise uninvolved in the lesson’s production. The project will convene eight StoryCircles groups (made up of 6 inservice teachers drawn from the US) who will work together to design algebra and geometry lessons for sharing with other teachers. Each lesson will be reviewed by teams of practicing teachers both in the US and abroad who will leave comments for the authoring team to consider. Once these commentaries are completed, the StoryCircles groups will reconvene to consider the commentaries and make revisions to their lesson storyboards. Project researchers will draw on artifacts collected across the StoryCircles interactions (including video, storyboarded lessons, and lesson commentaries) as well as responses gathered from all project participants to scenario-based surveys to explore aspects of the rationality of mathematics teaching, such as: How are various personal resources of teachers and social resources of the profession assembled in arguments for or against decisions relevant to teaching with open, novel problems? How do those teachers’ arguments for practice vary across national contexts of mathematics teaching? How can that variance be leveraged to support the surfacing, challenging, and disrupting of US teachers’ cultural assumptions about mathematics teaching and learning?