Paper 2: Collaborating to Meet the Standards: Implications for Professional Development

Researchers from the University of Georgia interviewed 27 Mathematics 1 teachers about their experiences during the first year of the high school implementation of the Georgia Performance Standards (GPS). We report our findings about teachers’ experiences with Mathematics 1 professional development and describe features of professional development that teachers identified as most beneficial. Some teachers offered suggestions for professional development that differed from the professional development they had experienced. In addition, we found that many teachers used collaborative strategies to meet the demands of the new curriculum and the perceived inadequacies of resources and training. We discuss the various models of collaboration that teachers described and conclude with a discussion of the implications of our findings for future professional development that supports the GPS. 1 The work reported here was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation, (Grant No. 0227586). The results reported here are the authors’ and do not necessarily represent the views of the NSF. GAMTE Proceedings 2010 13 Collaborating to Meet the Standards: Implications for Professional Development 2 “How do you teach in a way you’ve never even seen taught? ” (Leandra 3 , Interview) The present study is part of a larger research project conducted during the summer and fall of 2009 with teachers implementing the new Georgia Performance Standards (GPS) high school course called Mathematics 1 (de Araujo, Jacobson, Singletary, Wilson, Marshall, & Lowe, in preparation). One intention of this reform was to provide a curriculum that is mathematically integrated, combining the strands of algebra, geometry, and statistics in each high school course, and reform-oriented, balancing the development of concepts, skills, and problem solving with the expectation that learning takes place in a student-centered classroom and in the context of realistic and relevant mathematical tasks (GADoE, n.d.; GADoE, 2007a; GADoE, 2007b). Howson, Keitel, and Kilpatrick (1981) identified barriers to curriculum change, noting that, “attempts to change the subject matter, its organization, or its mode of presentation have to be accommodated to teachers’ beliefs as to what good teaching is and what it is reasonable to expect of pupils” (p. 66). Discussing curriculum change at a large scale, Burkhart, Fraser, and Ridgway (1990) remarked, “unless goals underlying the innovation are shared by the people who are to implement it, success is unlikely” (p. 10). These observations motivated our interest in studying Mathematics 1 teachers’ conceptions of integrated mathematics in the larger research project. However, the data collected to answer this question also illuminated the teachers’ experiences of professional development before and during the first year of implementation. In this paper, we report teachers’ descriptions of professional development and collaboration in the context of a radical curriculum change. We argue that the collaborative work teachers undertook compensated for the percieved inadequacy of professional development experiences designed to prepare them for teaching Mathematics 1. The present study may inform future professional development in Georgia and teachers’ ongoing efforts to collaborate.