Comments from package users (A)
Comments on using the package to design professional development experiences
for in-service mathematics teachers (by Beatriz D'Ambrosio)
The following comments are provided by Beatriz D'Ambrosio, a faculty member at Indiana University/Purdue University at Indianapolis responsible for teaching several mathematics education courses at both undergraduate and graduate level. Professor D'Ambrosio is also involved in the design and delivery of professional development for in-service mathematics teachers in her role as Principal Investigator in an NSF-funded "Local Systemic Change Project." Professor D'Ambrosio found several possible ways in which the materials in this package could enhance her practice as a teacher educator -- including using the materials to enhance her math content and math methods courses for elementary pre-service teachers, to design some professional development experiences for in-service teachers, and even assigning them as a reading within a seminar for doctoral students in mathematics education.
In this commentary, she reports on how she used the package to design some professional development experiences for in-service mathematics teachers in the context of her "Local System Change" project.
As part of our NSF-funded Local Systemic Change Project we have full-day professional development sessions for middle school mathematics teachers. In these sessions we seek to provide models of inquiry-based teaching as reflected in the NCTM Standards and in the reform curricula for middle schools. We also seek to help teachers understand the complexities of students' construction of mathematical knowledge. We also analyze the teachers' role in the design of a learning space that supports powerful mathematical constructions.
The package of materials by Borasi and Fonzi (1998) has provided a rich resource of ideas for our use during our professional development activities. As we analyzed the package we became aware that we could incorporate some of the suggestions into our plans. We modified the illustrative unit on area (proposed in the package for several days of engagement) into a one-day activity, keeping the main features of the activity as its highlights. The extended engagement served as a generative task, and gave rise to a collection of questions about inquiry-based teaching. Questions emerged about construction of knowledge, about the role of definitions in mathematics, about the role of procedures and formulas, about the dynamics of an inquiry classroom, about the nature of mathematical activity, about the role of the teacher and many more. This activity served to problematize teaching for our participants and to assure that they had raised many of the issues that we were hoping to address throughout the year. The activity served as a springboard for our community's inquiry into teaching.
In subsequent sessions the shared learning experience of the group, namely that which we adapted from the package, served as the catalyst for many conversations. We found many participants referring back to that day's engagement as we continued to make sense of inquiry-based teaching.
I have found the materials very flexible and adaptable to the various constraints of professional development programs. In our particular situation we were limited by the fact that our meetings occurred only once a month. It was very difficult to try to build continuity between sessions, so we were committed to confining the "extended" engagement to one full day of activity. To our surprise the residue of the experience was such that in fact it served as a thread connecting the many subsequent sessions of professional development.
I am really looking forward to the opportunity to use a more extended version of the activity with a new group of teachers, where we will work with the illustrative units for several consecutive days, as we would do with students in the classroom. I also look forward to the chance to have teachers using the illustrative units with their students. This will add yet another dimension to the conversation about teaching and learning mathematics through the use of inquiry-based units.