Conducting Design Experiments to Support Teachers' Learning: A Reflection From the Field

Abstract

This article focuses on 3 conceptual challenges that we sought to address while conducting a design experiment in which we supported the learning of a group of middle school mathematics teachers. These challenges involved (a) situating teachers' activity in the institutional setting of the schools and district in which they worked, (b) developing an interpretive framework that enabled us to document the collective learning of teacher groups, and (c) reconceptualizing the relations between teachers' activity in professional development sessions and in their classrooms. For each challenge, we describe both the initial approach that we developed while preparing for the experiment and the modifications that we found it necessary to make once the experiment was in progress. Our goal in sharing these reflections from the field is to contribute to the task of extending the design experiment methodology to investigate the learning of groups of practicing teachers rather than groups of students.

Notes

¹This was a conscious design decision and reflected the overall goal of the project, which was to investigate how the travel of an innovation to a new site might be supported when the contact time is limited to that typically available for district professional development providers.

²In addition to looking for discontinuities in group practices, Visnovska also examined the frequency of newcomers' and old-timers' contributions to group activities and conducted detailed analyses of cases in which the newcomers' ways of reasoning about mathematical and pedagogical situations differed from those that were normative among the old-timers.

³Follow-up trials with the instructional sequences with middle school students, high school students, and elementary and secondary school teachers in which one of the research team served as the teacher indicated that these successive normative forms of reasoning are relatively stable.

⁴For ease of explication, we speak of a single conjectured learning trajectory. However, in actuality, the trajectory evolved in the course of the experiment as we tested and revised conjectures (cf. Simon, 1995).

⁵It was only later that we learned that this distinction has a long and venerable history in sociology (cf. Feldman & Pentland, 2003).

⁶J. S. Brown and Duguid (1991) anticipatedWenger's observation, noting that the designed organization reflects the dominant assumptions of what they referred to as the organizational core.

⁷Here and elsewhere in this article, we speak of a group of teachers rather than a professional teaching community because supporting the emergence of a community in the true sense of the term is one of the goals of the experiment and can be a non-trivial accomplishment in our experience. We discuss the criteria that we use for determining whether a group of teachers constitutes a professional teaching community when we discuss the challenge of developing an interpretive framework for documenting teachers' collective learning.

⁸ Wenger (1998) proposed an extensive list of characteristics of a community of practice, and Barab, Schatz, and Scheckler (2004) proposed eight critical characteristics of online communities. Our goal in differentiating between a teacher group and a professional teaching community was to identify the minimum number of characteristics sufficient to make the distinction.

⁹The depth of discipline-specific knowledge that leaders need in particular content domains to be effective is still a matter of debate (Cobb & Smith, 2008; Stein & Nelson, 2003).