This dissertation takes on a key and persistent challenge within teacher education: pre-service teacher learning in field experience. I approach this historical problem through its local manifestations, and this study examines an intervention that brought together three university supervisors and six classroom mentor teachers from one university-school partnership for seven meetings over the six months of student teaching. Framed by Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, the emergent design of the Mentoring Study Group intervention aimed to provoke expansive learning (Engeström, 1987; 2001) to transform how practitioners understand their work and to support them in constructing new tools and concepts for practice for themselves. Qualitative methods were used to examine the key problems of practice participants identified, the new tools and concepts for practice they developed, and to interpret learning in terms of the expansive learning conceptual model to understand how features of the model design enabled the group to broaden their understanding and coordinate their work. Results demonstrate that through participation in the structured collaboration offered by the emergent professional development approach, participants were able to uncover a fundamental contradiction embedded within teacher preparation, between goals of helping pre-service teachers develop ambitious instructional practice and preparing pre-service teachers to lead “formula lessons.” In attempting to confront and resolve this contradiction, the Mentoring Study Group devised a shared tool to coordinate their work, The Five High-Leverage Math Practices +1 Protocol and field-based pedagogical practices to guide modeling, observations, and feedback on teaching. This model of structured collaboration for teacher education practitioners holds promise for university-school partnership efforts to come together to develop shared approaches to mentoring and a common language of practice for the purpose of preparing beginning teachers for ambitious practice in the field.

The prominence of networked improvement communities as an approach to educational improvement has grown since its conception by Anthony Bryk and colleagues in 2010. Although NICs have shown promise for addressing complex problems of practice in education, I argue that understanding their enactment enables those leading and studying NICs to gain insight into how these networks can be implemented in ways that are effective, equitable, and just. This three-study dissertation examines how a networked improvement community in teacher preparation was initiated, focusing on practices that network members engaged in as part of this process. To study how the process of network initiation was enacted, I employed an inductive, qualitative approach to see what practices teacher educators and improvement facilitators engaged. Data sources for this study were primarily qualitative, and included meeting recordings, meeting artifacts, one-on-one interviews with teacher educators, and memos generated by the facilitators. The first study examines how teacher educators engaged a central tension between centering multilingualism and centering language acquisition as the network decided on the focus of its improvement efforts. I found teacher educators engaged in a set of practices that resulted in a network aim that centered multilingualism and peripheralized language acquisition. The second study examines the practices that improvement facilitators engaged in as they led the network in the process of constructing a shared theory of improvement. This study examined how power and positionality were produced through facilitation practices. I found that facilitators’ engagement in particular practices shaped how teacher educators participated; additionally, facilitators were positioned in particular ways to engage in those kinds of power-producing practices. The third study examines the process through which teacher educators and facilitators engaged in to construct a shared measurement tool designed to guide the network’s improvement activities. Findings included a set of practices both teacher educators and facilitators engaged in that drove the design process. Together, these three studies highlight a range of practices that facilitators and teacher educators engaged in that constituted the work of launching an improvement network. These studies also highlight the importance of attending to how improvement work comes to be enacted, enabling those leading improvement efforts to improve their practices for doing improvement.

ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION

Mathematics Teacher Identity in the Context of Mathematics Reform:

Elementary Teacher Experiences

By

Jennifer Sun

Doctor of Philosophy in Education

University of California, Irvine, 2017

Associate Professor Elizabeth A. van Es, Chair

Reform efforts and changes in mathematics education have brought on a shift towards a new vision of mathematics teaching in the United States. In light of recent accountability standards, the focus on teacher learning within the context of mathematics professional development is even more pressing. Prior research on teacher learning in the context of professional development has focused on how different teacher characteristics influence teacher learning, such as teaching experience, content knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes. Few studies have considered the role of mathematics teacher identity in relation to teacher learning and participation in professional development. In this dissertation, I explored the relationship between teachers’ mathematics teacher identity and their experiences and participation within professional learning communities. Specifically, this study examined the construct of mathematics teacher identity in relation to teacher tensions and negotiations of tensions as they participated in mathematics professional development. Additionally, this study drew on the experiences of two novice teachers as they transitioned into new professional learning communities with respect to their mathematics teacher identities. Data were drawn from semi-structured interviews, observations of professional learning community meetings, and teacher questionnaires collected over the course of one academic school year. Findings from this study highlight the importance of attending to mathematics teacher identity in relation to teacher learning in professional development. Specifically, mathematics teacher identity was found to play a role in the ways teachers learned, participated, and were positioned by others in their professional learning communities. In light of these findings, I propose the need for teacher educators and professional development programs to recognize the lived experiences and personal narratives that inform the mathematics teacher identity as well as to factor in how community shapes identity and teacher development when designing professional development experiences.

Equity in mathematics teaching has gained increased attention in the last few decades. A growing field of research has provided various definitions of equity, outlined standards, and identified practices that lead to equitable learning opportunities for all students, particularly for students from non-dominant backgrounds. However, few studies have examined how teachers engage in this complicated work. Recently, a limited number of researchers have highlighted the possible connection between teacher noticing and equitable practices. Existing studies on teacher noticing in mathematics have primarily focused on teachers’ attention to student thinking. Noticing for equity expands on the idea of attending to students to explore what teachers attend to in terms of participation, access and power. This dissertation consists of two studies that examined secondary mathematics teachers’ noticing, practices and pedagogical commitments. The first paper examined the noticing, instructional practices and pedagogical commitments of three secondary mathematics teachers who were identified as being committed to equity. Data were drawn from three case studies and included videotaped observations, field notes and interviews. Specifically, this study examined what teachers noticed in the moment of teaching and the relationship between teachers’ in-the-moment noticing, practices, and pedagogical commitments. The study findings highlight the complexity of engaging in equitable practices, associated noticing and the role crucial role of teachers’ pedagogical commitments to students and equity. The second paper examined how teachers reasoned about videos of instruction and the influence of teachers’ pedagogical commitments on their interpretations. This study conceptualized noticing as not just related to what teachers see, but how they also reason about what they see. Teacher noticing is also conceptualized as being tied to broader constructs of instruction that shape what one finds to be noteworthy. In other words, teacher noticing is informed by the expectations teachers have of teaching and learning, what some researchers describe as framing. Findings from this study highlight the interpretive frameworks that teachers use when watching videos of teacher practices and the role of teachers’ pedagogical commitments in framing their interpretations. Drawing from both study findings, recommendations for professional development are provided.

This dissertation examines the development of critical colleagueship among five secondary science teachers in a semester-long video club. The design of the video club was intended to promote a focus on student thinking and experimentation with elements of ambitious science teaching. Over time, participants sustained a focus on interpreting students’ disciplinary thinking using evidence and began to problematize aspects of instruction related to making student thinking visible. Some participants attempted to change instruction to gain greater access to students’ disciplinary thinking while others did not. Efforts to experiment with instructional practice appeared related to alignment between participants’ learning goals and curricular contexts and the goals of the professional development design. Features such as framing activities, types of artifacts used, and facilitation, interacted differently over time to influence participant learning. Analysis revealed various tensions among the elements of the learning ecology that influenced participation. Findings from this study contribute to what is known about the importance of skilled facilitation as part of a learning ecology (Cobb, Confrey, diSessa, Lehrer, & Schauble, 2003) and has implications for the design of site-based professional development with secondary teachers.

Given that teacher professional development is a part of teachers’ professional lives and given that billions of dollars have been invested in teacher professional development, this dissertation advocates for research that studies teacher learning and the conditions under which they learn, as an equally important component of studying the impact of professional development on students’ test scores, achievement, and/or learning.

The Pathway Project, a research-based literacy professional development program, served as the study context. The Pathway Project provides teachers with tools to use in their practice to support students in reading and writing using a cognitive strategies approach (Olson & Land, 2007). Using data in the form of observational protocols, survey measures, teacher focus groups, and field notes, as well as, qualitative analytic methods, I investigated: (1) how teachers appropriated Pathway tools for their practice; (2) teachers’ perceptions about their participation in the Pathway Project and subsequent impact on student perceptions and learning; and (3) how the Pathway Project design impacted opportunities for teachers’ learning.

My findings are centralized around the role tools play in teachers’ enactment of the Pathway Project, teachers’ perceptions, and the design of professional development. Data analysis revealed that teachers appropriated the tools in a variety of ways. The teachers responded positively to tools that were easy or moderately easy to implement and they were more willing to use these tools and often used them soon after they were introduced. I also found that the teachers perceived the Pathway Project as a valuable experience and mainly spoke of the ease of implementation of Pathway tools to help their students read and write more analytically. Importantly, they found assessment tools to be more difficult to navigate. Their students also had positive perceptions, noting that they did more writing, worked harder, and scored significantly better on an on-demand writing assessment. Finally, the design of the Pathway Project professional development program afforded teachers numerous opportunities to grow as professionals, yet they were limited in their opportunities to enact and collaboratively reflect on their practice. Implications for the design of literacy professional development will be presented.