Category Archives: LDT – GSE – Stanford

Brazilian Education – Week 9 – Class Notes

We had a very controversial and heated discussion in class today. The presentation was lead by Professor Grün:

“Professor Roberto Grün is the author of 4 books and 50 articles on immigration, economic and financial sociology. Professor Grün teaches Organizational Behavior and Sociology in the Federal University of São Carlos, Brazil, where he leads the “Center for Economic and Financial Sociology (NESEFI)”. He is currently the Joaquim Nabuco Chair in Brazilian Studies at Stanford’s Center for Latin American Studies.”

He believes that scandals, regardless of guilt, happen when stakeholders, the opposition, the media, and the public opinion are in synchronicity and start acting at a fast pace. Loosely quoting him: ‘We as scientists look at the mechanisms, not at guilt.’

Regardless of the phenomena, guilt should be evidenced and punished, regardless of the size of the scandal, in my opinion.

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Teacher PD – Week 9 – Class Notes

Did a great group activity of proposing an online PD to the rest of the class:

  • Affordances and limitations of going to scale via online PD and by preparing PD facilitators
    • Affordance is something you may afford / buy – it’s on the shelf, it’s available but you might choose or not be able to buy it.
    • Limitation is something that is absent from the shelf – it’s not available
  • Were the teachers required to participate in the PD?
  • Was there data on the online participation?

Teacher PD – Week 9 – Reading Notes

Borko, H., Koellner, K., & Jacobs, J. (2011). Meeting the challenges of scale: The importance of preparing professional development leaders. Teachers College Record, Date Published: March 04, 2011. http://www.tcrecprd.org ID Number: 16358.

  • What Must Math Professional Development Leaders Know and Be Able to Do?
    • Engaging teachers in productive mathematical work
      • Have to give more than SCK but also multiple forms of representations and how to lead discussions about common misconceptions
    • Leading discussions about student reasoning and instructional practices
      • Must maintain focus and anchor discussions
      • Analyze student work and videos is practice
    • Building a professional community
      • PD leaders must establish norms for constructive discussions
      • Create a safe space
  • Challenge is to train PD leaders but little support from stakeholders

Borko, H., Koellner, K., & Jacobs, J. (2014). Examining novice teacher leaders’ facilitation of mathematics professional development. The Journal of Mathematical Behavior, 33, 149–167.

  • Facilitators are generally successful with
    • Workshop culture
    • Video clip selection for use in the PD workshops
  • Facilitators have a hard time with
    • Supporting discussions to foster SCK and PCK
      • Mathematical Knowledge for Professional Development (MKPD)
  • Need to prepare novice PD facilitators
    • Need to show what quality PD looks like
    • Draw candidates from practicing mathematics teachers for local, site-based PD
      • Working with adults is different than working with kids
  • 3 phase agenda for designing, implementing, and investigating scalable PD
    • 1) Design for positive impact on teacher learning
    • 2) Design for repeatability in different contexts and with different facilitators
      • Specify role of facilitator
      • Develop resources and training for facilitators
    • 3) Compare multiple PD programs on impact on teacher and student learning
  • Conceptual framework: Scalable high-quality mathematics PD
    • Structure
      • Opportunities to engage with learning community, situated in the practice of learning
      • Select and use artifacts such as student work and videos
      • Safe space: trust and respect to be able to look at own’s work
      • Model instructional strategies
    • Content
      • Mathematics Knowledge for Teaching (MKT)
        • Common content knowledge
        • Specialized content knowledge
        • Knowledge of content and students (KCS)
        • Knowledge of content and teaching (KCT)
    • Preparation of PD leaders
      • Often a missing step in educational reform efforts
      • Need to know the content and how to lead
        • “leaders must be able to identify mathematics problems and discussion prompts that promote in-depth conversations focused on the mathematics content, support productive social interactions, and orchestrate discussions that help teachers unpack their often highly symbolic or incomplete reasoning (Elliott et al., 2009).” (Borko, Koellner, & Jacobs, 2014, p151)
  • Project Design: preparing teacher leaders to facilitate the Problem-Solving Cycle (PSC)
    • How well do teacher leaders (TL) implement PSC with fidelity
      • What did they enact well?
      • What was hard to enact?
    • PSC
      • PD for TLs
      • PD for teachers
      • Improved quality of teaching
      • Improved student learning
    • Cycle
      • Teachers collaboratively solve math problems & develop plans for teaching it
      • Implement plan with own students & video tape lessons
      • Facilitators select video that represent key moments
      • Analyze and discuss material
    • Supports needed
      • Create a professional learning community
      • Facilitate discussions with teachers
      • Facilitate video-based discussions to examine student thinking and classroom instruction
  • Results
    • Workshop culture
      • TL were able to establish a safe space and engage teachers in discussions
        • “As Mandy explained, “I already knew the teachers, so the comfort level and things like that were pretty much set.” Jordan agreed, noting that “the group came together rather quickly.” (Borko, Koellner, & Jacobs, 2014, p157)
      • Eliciting thoughts about their own students’ work helped in engagement
      • Challenge is to get participants to share ideas and take intellectual risks
    • Specialized Content Knowledge
      • Solution strategies are rated higher than mathematical representations
    • Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK)
      • Video clip selection
        • Often hard to find examples from teacher’s practices – easier when videos are selected by PD designers
        • TL did a good job at selecting the videos though
          • BUT were not as successful in leading discussions on instructional practices or student thinking
        • TL’s training focused on video selection & launching questions
          • Have to focus more on leading discussions
      • TLs find it harder to lead discussion where teachers critique their instructional practices
        • Easier to analyze student’s mathematical reasoning
  • General Discussion and Implications
    • TLs were able to replicate PSC model in PD
    • Easily enacted characteristics
      • Climate of respect and trust
      • Collaborative working relationships
      • Suggestions for establishing and maintaining community
      • Video clip selection – teach teachers to select their own videos and share
    • Hard characteristics to enact
      • Difficulty in supporting deep analysis in discussion to foster SCK, PCK: KCS & KCT
        • They did get extensive preparation and support… but still might need more
      • TL’s content knowledge must also be increased
        • They were able to show multiple solution strategies or mathematical representations
          • BUT had a hard time discussion the relationship, affordances, and limitations of the solutions/representations
          • High- and Low-Press Exchanges
            • “The three indicators on which the TLs were rated more highly—generating and analyzing ways to solve the task, discussions of various representations, and discussions of various solution strategies—are similar to what Kazemi and Stipek (2001) referred to as “low-press exchanges” in the elementary mathematics classrooms they studied, exchanges such as solving open-ended problems in groups and sharing solution strategies. In contrast, the five indicators that entail analyzing reasoning, discussing relationships among representations or solution strategies, and discussing affordances and constraints of representations or solution strategies are similar to the “high-press exchanges” they described.” (Borko, Koellner, & Jacobs, 2014, p164)
      • More opportunities for practice
        • It’s an art just like teaching
        • Need skillful improvisation
  • Conclusion
    • Scale PD, scale PD Facilitators
    • Create a research body on MKPD
      • “We believe that these three possible domains of MKPD—specialized content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, and learning community knowledge—go beyond and look different than the knowledge that a typical mathematics classroom teacher holds. Because PD leaders are expected to promote the development of teachers’ knowledge in these domains, they must hold a deeper and more sophisticated knowledge of mathematics than their colleagues, just as teachers must hold a deeper and more sophisticated knowledge than their students.” (Borko, Koellner, & Jacobs, 2014, p165)

Jackson, K., Cobb, P., Wilson, J., Webster, M., Dunlap, C., & Appelgate, M. (2015). Investigating the development of mathematics leaders’ capacity to support teachers’ learning on a large scale. ZDM Mathematics Education, 47, 93-104.

  • Revised learning goals for math leaders’ learning
  • Principles for supporting math leaders’ capacity to design and lead high-quality PD
    • Sustained over time and involve the same group of teachers working together (Darling-Hammond, Wei, Andree, Richardson, & Orphanos, 2009)
    • Supports for teachers’ learning should be close to practice (Ball & Cohen, 1999)
    • Co-participation with accomplished others
    • Pedagogies of investigation and of enactment (Grossman et al., 2009)
      • Video-cases for teaching (Borko, Koellner, Jacobs, & Seago, 2011; Sherin & Han, 2004)
    • Pressing productively on teacher’s ideas
  • Worked with district over 4 cycles of PD design and deployment
  • Treating teacher learning as a progression is a must
  • Productive types of PD activities that are useful to enact in Teacher PD
    • Modeling a lesson with follow-up discussion
    • Viewing video-recordings with follow-up discussion
  • Discussion and conclusion
    • PD leaders understood and supported teachers’ learning progression
    • PD leaders used more “show-and-tell” than deep discussions and facilitations
    • Need to add a goal that focuses on the “development of new practices as a process of reorganizing their current practices that requires explicit guidance.” (Jackson, Cobb, Wilson, Webster, Dunlap, & Appelgate, 2015, p102)
    • Investigate prior Teacher PD sessions (video) and jointly plan for upcoming sessions with accomplished others, worked.
    • Need to work on supporting PD Designer “in learning how to press on particular teacher understandings and specific aspects of their practice.” (Jackson, Cobb, Wilson, Webster, Dunlap, & Appelgate, 2015, p102)
    • Use videos of the PD session itself to inform improvements in their design

Fishman, B., Konstantopoulos, S., Kubitskey, B.W., Vath, R., Park, G., Johnson, H., & Edelson, D.C. (2013). Comparing the impact of online and face-to-face professional development in the context of curriculum implementation. Journal of Teacher Education, 64 (5), 426-438.

  • Online vs face-to-face PD sessions
    • No significant differences in outcomes
    • Used the same content as a base for comparison
  • Research question and subquestions:
    • How does online PD compare with face-to-face PD in terms of effects on teachers and students when the PD content is held constant?
      • Are there differences in teachers’ learning in terms of changes in beliefs and knowledge as a function of different PD modalities?
        • Changes in teacher CK
        • Teacher’s beliefs about self-efficacy to teach
        • Teacher’s beliefs about teaching in general
      • Are there differences in teachers’ classroom practice?
        • Videotaped teacher’s practice
      • Are there differences in student learning outcomes as a function of PD modalities?
        • Student test scores
  • The Evolution of Research on Teacher Learning from PD
    • From studies of attitude and beliefs (self-reported) to teacher and student learning (classroom practice and student learning data)
    • New curriculum providers offer PD on how to implement/adopting their curriculum
  • Online PD has many benefits
    • Accommodate teachers’ busy schedules
    • Access to powerful resources no available locally
    • Supports ongoing learning
    • No need to assemble in same location
    • BUT – how about building a community amongst teaches?
  • Online PD in the research had a face-to-face general orientation session: blended/hybrid online model
  • PD standards that were being taught:
    • Making connections
    • Evidence-based decision making
    • Technology use
  • Online PD self-pacing is a great benefit
    • Teachers can go at their own pace
    • Teachers can access material in a need-to-know basis
    • Looking at material while teaching, not in a separate session

Moon, J., Passmore, C., Reiser, B.J., & Michaels, S. (2014). Beyond comparisons of online versus face-to-face PD: Commentary in response to Fishman et al., “Comparing the impact of online and face-to-face professional development in the context of curriculum implementation.” Journal of Teacher Education, 65 (2), 172-176.

  • Review of Fishman et all study
    • Design of the PD itself was underspecified
    • Assumptions on PD learning goals were not made clear
    • Not much detail about evaluation measures
  • Face-to-face vs online benefits might vary depending on specific activities and goals
    • “The relative merits of online versus face-to-face conversation may vary across activities depending on the type of work planned for the teachers and the nature of sense-making and collaboration required.” (Moon, Passmore, Reiser, & Michaels, 2014, p2)
  • PD tenets
    • Embedded in the subject matter
    • Involve active sense making and problem solving
    • Connected to issues of teachers’ own practice
  • Next Generation Science Exemplar System (NGSX)
    • Web-based learning environment for teachers
    • Does not require a skilled facilitator on-site
  • Online PD
    • Better affordances…
      • “There are affordances of online systems that simply cannot be matched in a traditional setting. However, as a field, we know little about how these web-enabled and social media capacities interact with teacher learning and whether or how they are in line with established ideas about professional learning in general.” (Moon, Passmore, Reiser, & Michaels, 2014, p3
    • Limitations of community building but the next generation of teachers is used to that!

Fishman, B., Konstantopoulos, S., Kubitskey, B.W., Vath, R., Park, G., Johnson, H., & Edelson, D.C. (2014). The future of professional development will be designed, not discovered: Response to Moon, Passmore, Reiser, and Michaels, “Beyond comparisons of online versus face-to-face PD.” Journal of Teacher Education, 65 (3), 261-264.

  • Response to Moon’s response to Fishman
  • Looked at different media in PD delivery
    • “The heart of our study was the experimental comparison of PD delivered in two different media. Our study was a “media comparison” study, the value of which has been hotly debated in the field of educational technology (Clark, 1983, 1994; Kozma, 1994).” Fishman et al, 2014)

Beyond Bits and Atoms – Week 8 – Reading Notes

Eyeo 2014 – Leah Buechley

  • Thinking about Making
    • Humans are natural makers
  • Demographics
    • Predominantly men and white or asian
    • Has nothing changed?
  • Maker’s movement promise not achieved
    • Does not reach a wide demographic
    • Is not affordable to lower income classes
    • Investment is guided towards the same old people.
  • Every child is a maker
    • Telling minorities they should aspire to be rich white men
  • What is showcased on MakeMagazine
    • Leaves tons left unseen
    • Limited in scope (electronics)
    • Why hasn’t the LoRider movement get any funds for a non-profit?
  • Art & Tech should be funded

Eyeo 2014 – Leah Buechley from Eyeo Festival // INSTINT on Vimeo.

Turkle, S., & Papert, S. (1992). Epistemological pluralism and the revaluation of the concrete. Journal of Mathematical Behavior, 11(1), 3-33.

  • Epistemological pluralism
    • “epistemological pluralism, accepting the validity of multiple ways of knowing and thinking.” (Turkle & Papert, 1992)
  • 3 challenges
    • Feminist scholarship – science is male
      • “Our culture tends to equate soft with feminine and feminine with unscientific and undisciplined.” (Turkle & Papert, 1992)
    • Lab mentality – deep knowing only occurs there
    • Computers as a tool for concrete thinking (and now creativity)
  • Computer transforming culture
    • “computer holds the promise of catalyzing change, not only within computation but in our culture at large.” (Turkle & Papert, 1992)
  • Lisa and Robin
    • had to fake it to adapt the dominant culture of computer teaching
    • wanted to express their way of thinking but were not allowed
    • “they can pass a course or pass a test. They are not computer phobic, they don’t need to stay away because of fear or panic. But they are computer reticent. They want to stay away, because the computer has come to symbolize an alien way of thinking.” (Turkle & Papert, 1992)
  • Soft vs Hard programming styles
    • Conceptual vs Logical
    • Male vs Female
  • Bricolage – Levi-Strauss
    • “Bricoleurs construct theories by arranging and rearranging, by negotiating and renegotiating with a set of well-known materials.” (Turkle & Papert, 1992)

Curriculum Construction – Week 8 – Reading Notes

Eisner, E. (April 2002). The Kind of Schools We Need. Phi Delta Kappan, pp. 576-583.

  • Education is not a science (more of an art) and assessments can’t be void of judgment
    • “Artistry and professional judgment will, in my opinion, always be required to teach well, to make intelligent education policy, to establish personal relationships with our students, and to appraise their growth.” (Eisner, 2002, p577)
    • “Although good teaching uses routines, it is seldom routine. Good teaching depends on sensibility and imagination. It courts surprise. It profits from caring. In short, good teaching is an artistic affair.” (Eisner, 2002, p578)
  • Kinds of school’s desired and concerns about the desires
    • Time for teachers to build a community of practice
      • Teachers need a paradigm shift – they haven’t seen what is expected of them – not taught that way to begin with.
    • Teaching as a professionally public process – share what they do behind closed doors
      • Primary ignorance – what you know you don’t know
      • Secondary ignorance – what you don’t know you don’t know – need guidance and discourse
    • School Principals in the classroom
      • Time and scale constraints
    • Look at teaching exemplar examples on video, discuss, and reflect
      • Time and expert facilitation constraints
    • Questions students ask are more important than answers they give
    • Differentiation for more variance rather than reducing gaps
      • “The idea that getting everyone to the same place is a virtue really represents a limitation on our aspirations.” (Eisner, 2002, p580)
      • “The British philosopher and humanist Sir Herbert Read once said that there were two principles to guide education. One was to help children become who they are not; the other was to help children become who they are.” (Eisner, 2002, p580)
    • Develop child’s personal signature
      • “Of course, their ways of seeing things need to be enhanced and enriched, and the task of teaching is, in part, to transmit the culture while simultaneously cultivating those forms of seeing, thinking, and feeling that make it possible for personal idiosyncrasies to be developed.” (Eisner, 2002, p581)
    • Literacy with a broader definition / application
      • “I want to recast the meaning of literacy so that it refers to the process of encoding or decoding meaning in whatever forms are used in the culture to express or convey meaning.” (Eisner, 2002, p581)
    • Learning that transfers to outside of school skills
      • “The point of learning anything in school is not primarily to enable one to do well in school – although most parents and students believe this to be the case – it is to enable one to do well in life. ” (Eisner, 2002, p581)
    • The joy is in the journey
      • “It is the quality of the chase that matters most.” (Eisner, 2002, p582)
      • “Alfred North Whitehead once commented that most people believe that a scientist inquires in order to know. Just the opposite is true, he said. Scientists know in order to inquire.” (Eisner, 2002, p582)
      • “There is a huge difference between what a child can do and what a child will do.” (Eisner, 2002, p582)
      • “It is the aesthetic that represents the highest forms of intellectual achievement, and it is the aesthetic that provides the natural high and contributes the energy we need to want to pursue an activity again and again and again.” (Eisner, 2002, p582)
    • Encourage deep conversations in the classrooms – they are lacking in schools and in personal life
      • “… that is why we often tune in to Oprah Winfrey, Larry King, and other talk show hosts to participate vicariously in conversation. Even when the conversations are not all that deep, they remain interesting.” (Eisner, 2002, p582)
    • Responsibility for own learning
      • “Helping students learn how to formulate their own goals is a way to enable them to secure their freedom.” (Eisner, 2002, p582)
      • Teachers should also be responsible for what is taught – contextual content
      • “… in discourse about school reform and the relation of goals and standards to curriculum reform the teacher is given the freedom to formulate means but not to decide upon ends.” (Eisner, 2002, p582)
    • Public education should educate people outside of school as well
      • “And so I invite you to begin that conversation in your school. so that out of the collective wisdom of each of our communities can come a vision of education that our children deserve and, through that vision, the creation of the kind of schools that our children need.” (Eisner, 2002, p583)

Pope, D. (2001). Doing School: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed out, Materialistic, and Miseducated Students. New Haven: Yale University Press. pp. 1-28, 149-175.

  • Points of view
    • Administrators show off their students.
    • Students are overwhelmed – they are “doing” school
  • Cases
    • Kevin – the people pleaser
    • Teresa – hard worker
  • Must listen to students’ needs, frustrations, and desires

Teacher PD – Week 8 – Class Notes

Groups of 4 discussed the readings. My group discussed Heller:

Heller: Differential Effects of Three Professional Development Models on Teacher Knowledge and Student Achievement in Elementary Science

  • Conceptual Framework
    • 3 Phase of Research PD
    • Quantitative and Qualitative Research mix
    • Same content but differing methodologies
  • PD Interventions/Conditions
    • Conditions
      • Teaching Cases
        • Dilemmas of practice
        • Focuses on student body diversity
        • Looked at other teacher’s cases
        • Cases were used as models – good for scalability
      • Looking at Student Work
        • Only intervention teachers were implementing the work in the classroom
        • Assessments became more informative about student knowledge and misconceptions
      • Metacognitive Analysis
      • Control Groups
    • All had PCK embedded
  • Research Questions
    • What effects do the teacher courses have on teacher science content test scores?
    • What effects do the teacher courses have on teacher written justifications?
    • What effects do the teacher courses have on student science content test scores?
    • What effects do the teacher courses have on student written justifications?
    • What effects do the teacher courses have on English language learner science content test scores?
    • What effects do the teacher courses have on English language learner written justifications?
  • Research Methods
    • (no time to complete)
  • Results
    • (no time to complete)
  • Why it matters
    • Better improvement for ELLs
    • (no time to complete)

Joan I. Heller, the author, came in to reply to our questions! Here were ours:

  • Only the “Looking at Student Work” group were teaching the content at the same time as the PD was being delivered – could this have affected/biased the results!?
    • Implicitly they are looking at their own practice
  • Control group with just the same content?

Then did a very informative PD simulation – lighting a lite bulb – by WestEd

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