Educational infrastructure, professional learning, and changes in teachers’ instructional practices and beliefs

Abstract

School systems around the world are adopting more intellectually ambitious academic content in the hopes of improving their educational productivity. In the United States, these efforts have required significant changes to teachers’ instructional practices, and increased attention to teachers’ formal and on-the-job professional learning opportunities. Focusing on the initial implementation of a reform-oriented approach to teaching mathematics in two local school systems in the United States, this paper examines whether – and under what circumstances – elementary teachers’ professional learning opportunities predict changes in their instructional practices and beliefs related to mathematics. Our findings reveal that teachers’ on-the-job interactions during the first year of reform predicted changes in their instructional practices; further, these changes were associated with the infrastructures that local school systems created to support teacher learning in mathematics. Teachers’ participation in formal professional development, in contrast, predicted changes in their instructional beliefs, but not their practices. These findings have implications for future efforts to design formal and on-the-job professional learning opportunities that support ambitious educational reforms.

Keywords:

• Teachers
• professional learning
• mathematics
• practices
• beliefs
• educational infrastructure

Notes

1. Statistics are from 2010 to 2011.

2. The single exception was in teachers’ years of teaching experience, where teachers that responded in both years had slightly more teaching experience than single-year respondents. The magnitude of this difference was not great (12 years of teaching experience versus 10 years in Auburn Park, and 16 versus 12 in Twin Rivers).

3. Teachers who reported that they asked no colleagues for advice about math were assigned a zero value for the on-the-job exposure measures, since they were not exposed to any of their colleagues’ practices or beliefs about math through their on-the-job professional interactions.