A Successful Professional Development Project’s Failure to Promote Online Discussion about Teaching Mathematics with Technology

This article describes the experiences of an inservice professional development project for secondary mathematics teachers as project staff struggled to build professional community through online discussions of teaching mathematics with technology. Data from two consecutive years of the project are reported and analyzed in terms of Riel and Levin's (1990) framework for network participant structures. The data that we report show that while structural adjustments were made by project staff in an attempt to increase online participation from one year to the next, the discussion forum received little significant use. This failure occurred during two years of workshops that were well-attended and judged highly effective by the participants. Based on our analysis of this data we discuss difficulties associated with the use of online discussion forums in the context of teacher professional development and we make recommendations for teacher educators who wish to incorporate online discussions in their work. ********** Educational technologies are essential tools for learning and doing mathematics (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics [NCTM]. 2000). Although technologies allow students to work more productively than in the past, the teacher's role in a technology-rich classroom is more demanding than ever. Teachers who incorporate technology into their mathematics classrooms must understand when technology can enhance their students' learning and select (or create) tasks that capitalize on the available technologies. These demands signal a need for professional development to help teachers achieve levels of technological literacy that support the goals of mathematics education reform. Less obvious is how to provide this necessary professional development in a way that encourages teachers--who spend most of their time in classrooms isolated from one another and from other opportunities for professional growth--to view themselves as life-long learners. Guskey (1995) argued that teachers themselves must come to view professional development as a process rather than as an event. In order for this to occur, the isolated "inservice days" model of professional development will need to be replaced with a model that continually supports teachers' need for growth. Stein, Silver, and Smith (1998) proposed that teacher development occurs best through the building of communities of collaborative, reflective practitioners. Riel (1996) supported such community building, arguing that through collaborative intellectual exchange teachers can support one another's professional development. If this vision is to be met, professional developers must tackle the difficult task of promoting such professional networking and community building within the limited time that teachers have available in the existing school workplace. In this article we describe the struggles experienced by a professional development project as it attempted to use networking technology to promote ongoing reflection and community building among its participating teachers. We employ Riel and Levin's (1990) framework for participant structures in computer networking environments to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the online portion of the project in terms of the project's goals. Although this professional development project is ongoing, we report data from the first two years, identifying the two separate groups of participating teachers as Cohort 1 and Cohort 2. The results of our study show how difficult it can be to establish online community participation as a component of teachers' work lives. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK Riel and Levin (1990) proposed that five "network participant structures" guide the analysis of group interaction on computer networks, including those for teacher professional development: (a) organization of the network group includes size, common knowledge and interests, past experiences, and the physical location of the participants; (b) network task organization concerns the types of activities in which the participants engage online; (c) response opportunities involve issues of access to technical resources; (d) response obligations include the tacit or formal requirements for responses in terms of time and quality; and (e) evaluation and coordination involves any assessment of the quantity or quality of the online exchanges. …