SITUATING TEACHER LEARNING IN THE PRACTICE OF MATHEMATICS AND SCIENCE TEACHING

by

Monica Louise Hartman

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillmentof the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy(Education)

in The University of Michigan2004

Doctoral Committee:

Professor Deborah Loewenberg BallProfessor Carl F. BergerProfessor Elizabeth DavisProfessor Karen M. Staller

© 2004

DEDICATION

For Mike and Meghan

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is time to close the chapters to this dissertation, but this experience has been

more than a dissertation. It has been an adventure in my life’s journey. I want to thank

the many wonderful people who were with me for all or part of the way and helped to

make this possible.

I begin with my husband who has been steadfast in his support, encouragement,

understanding and love. He knew I would finish, but he waited so long for those words,

“It’s done!” Next on this list is my daughter who was a source of inspiration. I started

my degree when she left home for college. For a short time, I actually thought I would

graduate with her, but she finished ahead of me - by five years!

I also wish to acknowledge and thank my entire family for their love and support.

My dad, his wife, my sisters and brother, their spouses and children, all waited patiently

and seemed to understand my absence at some of those family get-togethers. My mother,

who passed out of my life but not out of my heart so long ago, instilled in me so many of

my values and ideas about loving and teaching children as I watched her love and teach

the eight of us. My dear brother whose memory remains deep in my heart taught me to

see the diamond in the rough. His face appears to me in the faces of so many of the

children I encounter everyday in my work as I work to help them overcome the many

challenges they face in their young lives.

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Next, I would like to thank every member of my committee. As chair, Deborah

Ball guided me through the difficulties of this process with expert advice, strong support,

care and understanding. I know I presented an additional challenge as I continued to

work full time while working on this degree, but she found the time and a way to guide

me along this process, even when she was not in the country. She knew what I needed

and when I needed it. She was always there.

Carl Berger believed in me and supported my work from my first year at the

university. He was my advisor for a short time but an illness prevented him from

continuing in that capacity. His steadfast belief in me provided the encouragement

through the times that were tough and this kept me working toward achieving this goal.

Although partially retired, he found the time to serve on my committee and for this I am

ever so grateful.

Betsy offered guidance and support in my work, not only with this dissertation but

also in my first research paper and in collaboration while teaching the elementary science

methods course. She helped me better understand the meaning beneath the ideas and the

words - knowing what they might look like in practice.

When Karen gave a mini-presentation on qualitative research to a packed room of

graduate students, I knew a person with her expertise would be of great help to me on my

committee. I was so pleased when she agreed. Her expertise with qualitative

methodology greatly assisted me in the completion of this work, but her perspective on

university life also proved to be invaluable.

This group of professors gave me a truly integrated committee that represented

my interests in teacher education for mathematics, science and technology. They were

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excellent coaches, but their encouraging words bounce around in my head and provided a

cheering section too.

There are other professors I also wish to acknowledge. Shirley Magnusson was

my first advisor and started me along this path. Nancy Songer gave me research

experience with the One Sky Many Voices project. She and her team of graduate

students will always be remembered as special people in my life. Also, special thanks go

to Barry Fishman, Joe Krajcik, and Ron Marx.

Many colleagues influenced me throughout my teaching career, too many to

mention them all, but I want to especially acknowledge Bill Grogan from the curriculum

lab who became my first mentor and Hattie Brown, a wonderful principal, who first

asked me to come to the edge . She provided me with the opportunities I needed to help

me break from my experience.

Finally, a very special thanks goes to all the teachers who participated in this

study. I learned so much from all of them and without them, this dissertation would not

be possible. I thank them for their generosity in allowing me to study them as they were

engaged in this process, making it possible for me to share what I learned with others in

the larger community of American educators. Last, but not least, a most special thanks

also goes to my friend, the district Curriculum Director, who supported me through all

the stages of this dissertation work and who helped me to make my ideas come to life.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

DEDICATION.....................................................................................................................ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS..................................................................................................iii

LIST OF FIGURES............................................................................................................ix

LIST OF APPENDICES......................................................................................................x

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION..........................................................................................1

THE RESEARCH QUESTIONS............................................................................5

THE PROBLEM......................................................................................................5

Characterizations of the Teaching Practice.................................................7Knowledge is Situated, Social and Distributed...........................................9Conceptual Change for Teachers...............................................................11Professional Development.........................................................................13The Disposition of Inquiry.........................................................................14Challenging Teachers’ Experience............................................................16

PROMISING PRACTICES...................................................................................17

Japanese Lesson Study..............................................................................17Features of Lesson Study...........................................................................19A Collaborative Lesson Study Project at Paterson School........................21Results of Research at Paterson School.....................................................23

CHAPTER II RESEARCH DESIGN AND PROCEDURES...........................................26

THE EVOLUTION OF MY RESEARCH PROGRAM.......................................26

RESEARCH METHOD........................................................................................29

Participants and Setting.............................................................................29

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Procedure...................................................................................................31Materials....................................................................................................32Collecting Data..........................................................................................33Transcribing Data......................................................................................35Importing Data...........................................................................................35Analyzing Data..........................................................................................36Reporting the Data.....................................................................................38

CHAPTER III THE PROJECT STORY...........................................................................39

IDEAS ABOUT TEACHING MATHEMATICS AND SCIENCE......................42

SETTING THE GOALS........................................................................................49

The First Mathematics Session..................................................................49The First Science Session..........................................................................51Reflections after the First Session.............................................................63The Second Mathematics Session.............................................................65The Second Science Session......................................................................71

THE PLANNING SESSIONS...............................................................................78

The Multiplication Lesson.........................................................................79The Science Lesson...................................................................................86

IMPLEMENTING THE LESSONS......................................................................94

The Science Lesson...................................................................................95The Mathematics Lesson.........................................................................104

THE FEEDBACK SESSIONS............................................................................115

The Science Feedback Session................................................................115The Mathematics Feedback Session........................................................129

CHAPTER IV THE THEMES........................................................................................134

INDIVIDUALISM..............................................................................................134

TIME....................................................................................................................144

Too Much to Teach, Too Little Time......................................................144The Need to Control What to Do With Their Time.................................146The Need for Time to Construct Meaning and Process New Learning...150The Benefits of Taking the Time.............................................................155

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TALK...................................................................................................................159

Small Talk and Big Talk..........................................................................160Developing Big Talk................................................................................162Comparing Their Ideas about Critical Feedback.....................................164

SUMMARY.........................................................................................................175

CHAPTER V THE CHALLENGES...............................................................................177

The Surprise Announcement...................................................................177Their Reasons..........................................................................................179Behind the Closed Doors.........................................................................188Satisfaction with Learning Outcomes of All Their Students...................200Administrative Support and Knowledge and Purpose of the Program....207Collegial School Atmosphere..................................................................209Relationship with the Knowledgeable Other...........................................212

CHAPTER VI BUILDING KNOWLEDGE IN THE COMMUNITY...........................214

What Teachers Appeared to be Learning................................................214Affordances of a Collaborative Investigation..........................................220

CHAPTER VII CONCLUSION......................................................................................227

Characteristics of Their Engagement in this Intervention.......................227Challenges................................................................................................229Why Did Some Leave?............................................................................231New Opportunities...................................................................................232Implications for Professional Development............................................233Implications for Research on Professional Development........................237

APPENDIX......................................................................................................................239

BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................................................................................260

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure

1. Craig’s response to 1/2 of 12.....................................................................105

2. Mark’s response to 1/2 of 12.....................................................................106

3. Rick’s response to 1/2 of 12......................................................................106

4. Angel’s response to 1/4 of 12....................................................................108

5. Rick’s response to 1/4 of 12......................................................................108

6. Bobbie’s response to 1/3 of 24..................................................................112

7. Tori’s response to 1/3 of 24.......................................................................113

8. Rick’s response to 2/3 of 12......................................................................114

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LIST OF APPENDICES

Appendix

A. The Teachers in this Study..........................................................................239

B. Initial Interview Questions..........................................................................240

C. Final Interview Questions...........................................................................241

D The CoWeb Page........................................................................................247

E. Fifth Grade Fraction Pre-Test.....................................................................248

F. Multiplying Fractions Lesson.....................................................................249

G. The Science Lesson: Brick Slide................................................................252

H. Power Point Slides for the Science Lesson.................................................254

I. The Science Worksheet...............................................................................256

J. Classroom Observation Protocol................................................................257

K. Feedback Session Protocol.........................................................................259

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CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Come to the edge.

We might fall.

Come to the edge.

It’s too high!

COME TO THE EDGE!

And they came

and he pushed

and they flew…

Logue (1969, pp. 65-66)

More than thirty years ago, it was this teacher’s first year of teaching. Her

assignment was sixth grade mathematics in a kindergarten through sixth grade school

located in a large urban district. The classes were structured under the platoon system.

This meant groups of later elementary students spent half of their day in the language arts

and social studies classroom and the other half of the day traveling to mathematics,

science, art and physical education classes. She had eight sections of students, with more

than thirty students in each section.

Perhaps it was because her classes were noisy or perhaps this was something the

administration did with all new teachers, but she was invited to observe a more

experienced fourth grade teacher whose quiet, well-behaved students filed into the class,

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listened to directions and then worked on their mathematics assignments in silence.

During one of her three planning periods she was assigned to each week, this new teacher

visited the experienced teacher’s classroom. After observing the teacher explain the

lesson, she gave her students an assignment and sat at her desk. Curious about what the

students learned from the instruction, this first year teacher walked around the room to

see what the students were doing. Until this day, what she remembers best is the

students’ independent work. Working in silence, students were practicing, incorrectly,

algorithms they seemingly did not understand. Problem after problem, students were

making numerous mistakes. Their teacher did not see that this was happening because

she was at her desk. They would not learn about their errors until papers were returned,

if at all.

From this experience she learned that teachers need to find out what students are

doing, thinking and learning during the lesson. But who was she to criticize what other

experienced teachers consider an example of good teaching? She also discovered that

she would have to struggle with issues of teaching and learning some other way.

Fortunately, this teacher did find a place where she could learn more about her

teaching. The place was called the district curriculum lab where material resources were

made available to teachers. There were machines to make thermal masters for activity

sheets, construction paper to cut out letters for a bulletin board, poster board for making

manipulatives, idea books and much more. These were things that were not available, or

available in such limited quantities that made them useless, in her school. She would go

to this lab at the end of her school day.

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Better than material resources, she found human resources too. Working side by

side with other teachers, she would engage in casual conversations about teaching. Most

helpful of all was the director of the lab. He was a mathematics demonstration teacher

and had a wealth of ideas for teaching mathematics concepts to children. He became her

mentor and shared many ideas about teaching mathematics. She tried many of his ideas

in her classroom. When it came time for her to open the doors to be observed as a new

teacher, her children were adding and subtracting integers using a walk-on number line.

Maybe her room was noisy but the administration did not seem to worry as much any

more. This occurred in the early 70’s, but I wonder how different things are for new

teachers in many schools today. How do teachers develop their practice? Where can

they go to get help?

For more than twenty years, this teacher worked to increase the skills and

knowledge of her students, teaching by telling them, she thought, the things they needed

to learn. When her daughter went away to college, she returned to school too, for an

advanced degree in education. As part of her coursework, she was assigned to read many

research articles and books. Among them was Lave and Wenger’s work (J. Lave &

Wenger, 1991). She remembers a conversation with her professor when she told her how

interesting and valuable the readings from the class were, but she did not see how Lave

and Wegner’s ideas about the social construction of knowledge applied to the classroom.

This did not make sense. Didn’t the construction of knowledge belong to the individual?

Her professor told her that it was good that she was questioning these ideas, but she

wondered what she said that. In retrospect, was she asking her to come to the edge in her

beliefs about teaching and learning, as in Logue’s poem?

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This teacher changed over the next few years. She began to think more about her

own learning as she took university courses and attended professional development

activities. Besides the obvious role of a learner, she took on a new role, the role of an

observer of her own learning. How was she learning? What made it easier? The

struggle to learn something new was particularly evident for her in her technology classes

because it was with some of these classes she had little prior knowledge, everything was

so new. This helped her think about what her students may experience during lessons in

which they had limited or no prior knowledge, making connections difficult. When did

she feel more successful with her own learning? What did the instructor do to enable, or

not, the learning process? She learned this process was called reflection and thinking

about her thinking was metacognition. These were very powerful for her and she thought

this would also be powerful for her students. She also began to realize the power of

interacting with others during the learning process. She came to understand and believe in

the social construction of knowledge.

I know this teacher and am aware of her reflections because I am this teacher. I

was asked to come to the edge. I was afraid, but I came; I was pushed, and I flew. My

practice as a teacher today involves working with other teachers in their classrooms as

they work with their students. I recognize their beliefs about teaching and learning as

some I once had. My job is to help them think about their practice in different ways. In

this study, you will read about what happened as I asked teachers I work with everyday to

come to the edge.

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The Research Questions

This study grew out of my need as an Instructional Specialist in my district to

facilitate teachers’ learning in mathematics and science. Although there is a drive to

improve education, there continues to be substantial debate around what constitutes

effective opportunities for teachers to learn. My dissertation research takes up this

question by investigating an approach to support teachers’ learning that is rapidly

growing in popularity. I follow a group of teachers engaged in collaborative inquiry that

is situated in the context of their own teaching. My overall research question is:

How does a collaborative professional development experience, situated in

teachers’ own practice, help elementary public school teachers develop their

knowledge of teaching?

My sub questions include:

1) What are the characteristics of these teachers’ engagement in a collaborative

examination of practice?

2) What are the challenges these teachers face?

3) Why do some teachers stay and other teachers leave?

4) What do these participating teachers appear to be learning about content,

pedagogy and their students?

The Problem

Turn now to consider the background of this problem. The focus of education

today has changed from the acquisition of simple reading, writing and calculating skills.

Today, the goal of education can be described as “helping students develop the

intellectual tools and learning strategies needed to acquire knowledge that allows people

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to think productively about history, science and technology, social phenomena,

mathematics and the arts” (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 1999, p. 5). Different learning

goals require different content and pedagogy for students as well as their teachers.

Reform in education today focuses on developing teachers’ practice to consider these

new ideas and building structures within districts and schools to support their efforts.

Transmission models of teaching and learning were prevalent through the 1960’s

and 1970’s. It was believed that teachers’ knowledge could be transferred to their

students. Learners were thought to be blank slates or empty vessels that could be filled

with knowledge. Research focused on teachers and the relationship between their

behaviors and student learning.

Now the term constructivism is used because it is assumed that students construct

their own knowledge. The early transformation models focused on students’ individual

construction of knowledge and were influenced by information processing. In this model

knowledge is stored and then retrieved in students’ memory in representations called

schemas. The teacher’s role is to influence students’ thinking strategies so they learn to

access this information like experts (Winne & Marx, 1982).

More recent transformation models of teaching and learning (Blumenfeld, Marx,

Patrick, Krajcik, & Soloway, 1997) focus on the students’ cognitive processes that

recognize social and situational factors because communities and discourse influence

learning (Bruer, 1994; J. Lave & Wenger, 1991; Rogoff, 1998). Brown, Collins and

Duguid (1989) argue, “knowledge is…in part a product of the activity, context, and

culture in which it is developed and used” (p.32). Real world or authentic tasks,

collaborative discourse, cultural tools and the production of artifacts used as assessment

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are components of instructional programs within a sociocultural perspective of teaching

and learning (J. S. Brown et al., 1989; Marx, Blumenfeld, & Krajcik, 1997; Newman,

Griffin, & Cole, 1989; Papert, 1990). Since learners construct knowledge and

understanding based on what they already know and believe (Cobb, Perlwitz, &

Underwood-Gregg, 1998; Shapiro, 1994), instruction also needs to consider their prior

knowledge.

Cognitive research has advanced our understanding of how students learn and

influences educational reform. “The emerging science of learning underscores the

importance of rethinking what is taught, how it is taught, and how learning is assessed”

(Bransford et al., 1999, p. 13). Different approaches to teaching also require different

approaches to teaching teachers. What is known about students’ learning can apply to

teachers as well. However, teachers’ learning has not been consistently conceived in

parallel with these ideas. It is a relatively new topic for research and there is not yet

much data about it.

Characterizations of the Teaching Practice

Learning to teach can be characterized as a socialization process that starts with

sixteen years of continuous contact with other teachers, followed by a brief mini-

apprenticeship of practice teaching (Lortie, 1975). Lortie found the formal socialization

of teaching, the university’s teacher education program, is secondary to the informal

socialization process of personal experience and the influence of colleagues when it

comes to how teachers say they learn to teach. Two-thirds of the teachers in his study

express experience as their major means of learning how to teach; 44% indicate

employment as teachers as their experience and 23% indicate practice teaching. More

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than one-third of the teachers say they learn from other teachers, although the teachers in

Lortie’s study qualify this by saying they are highly selective about adopting other

teachers’ ideas. The ideas teachers choose to adopt are consistent with their individual

way of doing things or the new ideas worked when the teacher tried them (Lortie, 1975,

p. 77).

Assumptions or myths exist about teachers’ knowledge. After completing their

mini-apprenticeship of practice teaching, they are expected to know everything and be

independent. They are not encouraged to talk about classroom failures; only the less

experienced teachers are given a grace period during which they may ask questions

(Lortie, 1975). Teachers are left on their own to learn about their practice; to sink or to

swim. Some teachers eventually develop effective practices and then they retire. New

teachers who come along must start over. Reform efforts bring teachers together to

collaborate to improve education, but there is no shared knowledge base to improve

practice and teachers do not look to research-based knowledge to inform their efforts

(Hiebert, Gallimore, & Stigler, 2002; Richardson & Placier, 2001). There are no

structures in the present system for building practitioners’ knowledge.

Individualism, conservatism, and presentism characterize the role of teachers

(Lortie, 1975, p. 212). School is perceived as a collection of individual teachers

influencing students; improvements center on strengthening the individual teacher rather

than arranging a better total environment for children. Teachers’ practice is conservative;

they choose to do things the way they have always been done. Presentism is seen in the

lack of enthusiasm for working together to build a stronger professional culture. The

existing tenure system does not support long term goals; it encourages teachers to

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concentrate on the short term as a source of gratification. “Individualism supports

presentism by inhibiting work with others in search for common solutions. Teachers do

not undertake the collegial effort which has played so crucial a role in other occupations”

(Lortie, 1975, p. 212).

Traditional teaching practices are hard to change because teaching is a system of

interacting elements embedded in culture (Hiebert & Stigler, 2000; Stigler & Hiebert,

1999). These elements include: behaviors of the teacher, expectations and behavior of

the students, the physical setting, the participation structures, the discourse, the lesson,

the curriculum, the materials and more. Everyday teaching routines have evolved and are

so widely shared that they are nearly invisible, even to the teachers. It is though there is a

script for teaching and almost any adult could enter a classroom and act like a teacher.

Changing only one of these elements makes little difference. When one element

is changed and it does not work in the same way as the element it replaced, the system is

either impaired or it swallows up the new element and everything returns to the way it

was before the change. Teachers in the United States seem to be bound by this cultural

script for teaching. Reform is not a simple process and involves more than changing

parts. “The kinds of changes envisioned by reformers require changes not only in

features of instruction but in the very goals of the teaching system” (Hiebert & Stigler,

2000, p. 7).

Knowledge is Situated, Social and Distributed

Three bodies of work inform my study: work on situated learning, conceptual

change, and the work on the role of professional development in educational reform.

These come together in my study because my study looks at an improved form of

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professional development in which the teachers are engaged in a situational form of

learning. The theoretical framework for my study draws from research on learning that

suggests knowledge is situated, social and distributed (H. Borko & Putnam, 1996; A. L.

Brown & Campione, 1994; J. S. Brown et al., 1989; J. G. Greeno, 1997; J.G. Greeno,

Collins, & Resnick, 1996; Jean Lave, 1991; Putnam & Borko, 2000). The situative

perspective focuses on authentic activities, which Putnam and Borko define as tasks that

serve the goal of preparing students to be lifelong learners. It also focuses on interactions

of the participants with each other and with objects in the system (J. S. Brown et al.,

1989; Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt [CTGV], 1990; Jean Lave, 1991;

Scardamalia, Bereiter, & Lamon, 1994). Learners are actively engaged with the

phenomena they study, in the context that makes it authentic. In the case of learning to

teach, the context is situated in the classroom or with artifacts from the classroom like

student work or classroom videos (Feiman-Nemser & Remillard, 1995).

Knowledge building is social and involves enculturation into the community (A.

L. Brown & Campione, 1994; Jean Lave, 1991). Collaborative learning environments

create multiple zones of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978) so students can learn

from each other as well as the teacher. Discourse within collaborative groups provides

ideas, theories and concepts that individuals may appropriate as their own as they try to

make sense of their experiences. Within the group, members are likely to disagree over

ideas, answers and ways to solve a problem. Change in thinking is more likely to occur

in environments that encourage questioning, evaluating, criticizing, and where there is

dissatisfaction with the existing states of knowledge (A. L. Brown & Palincsar, 1989).

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Learning is distributed over the individual, the members of the groups, and the

physical and symbolic tools (Salomon, 1993). Discourse in the community shares the

burden of thinking (Bruer, 1994). The distribution of cognition across the members of the

community makes it possible for the group to accomplish more than what otherwise

would be accomplished by individuals working alone.

Conceptual Change for Teachers

In the science literature, Posner, Strike, Hewson & Gertzog (1982) describe

student learning and how students change their conceptions that are not productive to

more productive ones. They argue:

Learning is concerned with ideas, their structures and the evidence for them. It is

not simply the acquisition of a set of correct responses, a verbal repertoire or a set

of behaviors. We believe it follows that learning, like inquiry, is best viewed as a

process of conceptual change. The basic question concerns how students’

conceptions change under the impact of new ideas and new evidence. (Posner et

al., 1982, p. 212)

They describe two phases of conceptual change in the contemporary view of

science. In the first phase, central commitments or paradigms (Kuhn, 1970) define

problems, determine strategies for solving them, and establish criteria for evaluating

solutions. In the second phase of conceptual change the scientist encounters phenomena

that cannot be explained with an existing central commitment or paradigm; therefore the

central commitments or paradigms require modification. For Kuhn, the change in

paradigms for the scientist is a scientific revolution.

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Posner et al. (1982) argue that these phases of conceptual change in science apply

to student learning; the term assimilation is used to represent the first phase and

accommodation to represent the second phase. In order for a change to occur in a learner,

several important conditions must exist. These conditions include dissatisfaction with

existing conceptions and the presence of an intelligible and plausible new conception to

take the place of the old. By intelligible, they mean that individuals are able to explore

the possibilities of the new conception because they understand what the words or

symbols defining it means. By plausible, they mean that the new conception must appear

to have the potential to solve the problems created by the existing conceptions.

I argue that this perspective can be applied to teacher learning as well. Like

scientists and student learners, teachers hold conceptions about teaching that they use to

define problems in their practice, determine strategies for solving those problems, and

establish criteria for evaluating solutions. If teachers are to modify their conceptions or

accommodate new ones, they need to be confronted with a problem that their existing

conceptions cannot solve and recognize a new conception as intelligible and plausible.

Teachers who are dissatisfied with the learning outcomes of their students or uncertain

about their practice meet one of the conditions for accommodation and are more apt to

change when another idea is presented.

Teacher learning can be considered a process of conceptual change. These

teachers came to this program with their ideas. I did not expect a revolutionary change in

ideas, but I wondered what would happen if they had an opportunity to expose their ideas

to themselves and to their colleagues.

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Professional Development

Professional development provides the opportunity for teachers to continue to

learn about teaching and subject matter. The nature of professional development

programs available to teachers will, to a large extent, determine the changes in students’

learning experiences (Loucks-Horsley, 2001). What we learned about student learning

should also apply to professional development for teachers.

There are problems with professional development. Traditional methods are

criticized for being decontextualized and a patchwork of opportunities stitched together

into a fragmented and incoherent curriculum (Ball & Cohen, 1999).

Much of what constitutes the typical approaches to formal teacher professional

development are antithetical to what research findings indicate as promoting

effective learning. The typical workshops tend to occur once, deal with

decontextualized information, and often do not resonate with teachers’ perceived

needs. (Bransford et al., 1999, p. 192)

Some of the problems of professional development may stem from the assumption we

have that teachers’ knowledge for teaching is complete when they graduate and only

needs to be updated through a menu of in-service and one-shot workshops.

A new curriculum of professional development is needed, but it needs to be

powerful enough to overcome the influence of the traditional school culture and help

teachers break away from their individualistic practices. “Teaching is a process of co-

constructing knowledge and curriculum with students, and that the most promising ways

of learning about teaching across the professional lifespan are based on inquiry within

communities rather than training for individuals” (Cochran-Smith, 1999, p.115). Since

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knowledge is situated in context (J. S. Brown et al., 1989; Jean Lave, 1991), teacher

learning should be situated in some aspect of their practice. “If teachers professional

learning could be situated in the sorts of practice that reformers wish to encourage, it

could become a key element in a curriculum of professional development” (Ball &

Cohen, 1999, p. 6).

Ball and Cohen (1999) describe a pedagogy of professional development that is

based on contemporary knowledge of how people learn. This pedagogy of professional

development includes a community of teacher learners actively constructing knowledge

during authentic teaching activities and learning from each other. It is based on inquiry

into practice with time for reflection and analysis. It includes analyzing student work to

determine if they are learning. It would include exposing teachers to the ideas of others,

which has additional benefits. If teachers discussed and analyzed student learning and

worked in collaboration with others, they would be exposed to different interpretations

and judgments that would broaden and enhance their individual capabilities (Ball and

Cohen, 1999). Change is more likely to occur in environments that encourage

questioning, evaluating, and criticizing (A. L. Brown & Palincsar, 1989).

The Disposition of Inquiry

According to Ball and Cohen (1999) the disposition of inquiry is a big challenge

during a collaborative investigation of practice. By disposition of inquiry, they mean that

teachers need to cultivate the ability to frame interpretations as conjectures, avoid

definitive conclusions, and learn how to identify and use appropriate evidence. New

norms of interaction are necessary. Teachers need to practice argumentation and the

probing of their own and others’ ideas. They need to value critique and learn that

14

challenges of ideas and interpretations are not meant to be personal challenges to

individuals. They need to learn to take risks about expressing uncertainty of their ideas.

Reflection tools, including guidance in observing salient details that are seen and heard in

the classroom and a method for interpreting and analyzing the different views expressed,

need to be developed.

Ball and Cohen (1999) argue that for teachers to improve their teaching, they

would need to learn how to learn in and from their practice.

…much of what they would have to learn must be learned in and from practice

rather than preparing to practice. Or, perhaps better, they would have to learn,

before they taught and while teaching, how to learn in and from practice.

Teaching requires improvisation, conjecturing, experimenting, and assessing.

Teachers must be able to adapt and develop practice. (p. 10)

Lesson study seemed to fit the recommendations for a collaborative investigation of

practice as described by Ball and Cohen, but teachers need new skills and attitudes that

are contrary to the present day culture in schools in the United States and this could be a

problem.

Obstacles to Action Research

Research by teachers in their own classroom is supported by reform documents in

Mathematics (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 1991) and Science (National

Research Council, 1996). Cochran-Smith and Lytle (1993) also warn that obstacles

deeply embedded in the cultures of schools and universities need to be overcome for

practitioner research to be successful. Cochran-Smith and Lytle (1993) describe four of

these obstacles. Similar to Lortie’s (1975) findings, they describe teacher isolation as one

15

obstacle. Although this isolation can be viewed from the perspective of loneliness, it can

also be perceived by teachers as a loss of autonomy and privacy, making research in their

classroom a threatening experience. A second obstacle is a cultural perception that

teachers should be independent and know the answers to any question about their

practice, but researching teachers need to ask questions, pose problems, and challenge

common routines. A third obstacle is the notion that the knowledge base for teaching is

constructed by university-based researchers and transmitted to practitioners, but if

teaching is to be considered a profession, then practitioners should play a role in

generating professional knowledge. Last, there is a negative reputation of research among

practitioners. Cochran-Smith & Lytle (1993) argue that in order to overcome these

obstacles, communities of teachers and researchers need to be built and a means to

sustain them need to be developed. Lesson study and a collaborative inquiry of practice

are forms of teachers’ action research and the early research about these practices could

offer some guidance and promise.

Challenging Teachers’ Experience

The idea that education works best when it is built on people’s experience needs

to be challenged. Instead of supporting learning, experiences can hamper it. Teachers

need to find a way to become unbound, to break from their experience. They need to be

allowed to question their beliefs about teaching and learning. They need to develop new

roles, skills and different expectations for their students while they unlearn their long-

held practices and beliefs (Ball & Cohen, 1999; Darling-Hammond & McLaughlin,

1996; Kochan, 2000).

16

We know that teaching is a cultural activity and is resistant to change (Stigler &

Hiebert, 1999) and teachers are a key to educational reform (Cohen & Ball, 1990; Hiebert

& Stigler, 2000). We recognize what is needed for change to occur: “Change is enhanced

through deep reflection on beliefs and practices…the change process entails

understanding one’s beliefs and knowledge and determining whether or not to change

practices” (Richardson, 1999, p. 150). But it is not the teacher that needs to change, it is

their teaching (Stigler & Hiebert, 1999). The process of changing complex ideas and

structures about teaching that are deeply embedded in our culture will be long-term. The

ultimate goal is to improve student learning, but this goal should not be lost by focusing

on any particular feature in this complex system. Improvements will result, but they will

be from accumulating small changes over time (Hiebert & Stigler, 2000, p. 9).

Promising Practices

There are many effective programs that help teachers develop their practice as

recommended by educational reform (Hilda Borko & Putnam, 1998; Cognition and

Technology Group at Vanderbilt [CTGV], 1997; Schifter & Fosnot, 1993), but not all

teachers have access to them and providing these kinds of opportunities to all teachers is

problematic. Without support, teachers often misinterpret the recommendations in the

standards. A quality program of professional development that has the potential to give

every teacher an opportunity to improve their classroom teaching is needed.

Japanese Lesson Study

A Japanese practice of professional development that holds promise for the

change needed in American classrooms was recently introduced into the United States.

Catherine Lewis was the first to write about this practice. While collecting research in

17

Japanese classrooms for her book, Educating Hearts and Minds: Reflections on Japanese

Preschool and Elementary Education (1995), she noticed that she learned many science

concepts with the students. She asked the Japanese teachers how they learned to teach

science in their engaging way. They were surprised at this question and told her they

learned their techniques from the United States. Impressed with this practice, Lewis

describes how U.S. teachers could benefit from this type of professional development:

As I listened to conversations … --in which Japanese teachers debated whether it

was more important for students to acquire correct scientific knowledge or to

practice scientific processes -- I imagined how differently it would be in the U.S.

if teachers with opposing viewpoints planned, viewed, and discussed lessons

together. The more frequently different views of science education come into

contact around a shared, concrete lesson, the more likely teachers are to find ways

to see and combine strengths of content-centered and process-centered approaches

–and the more likely they are to notice the benefits that students can derive from

each. (Lewis, 2000)

She argues that through their professional development referred to as lesson

study, Japanese teachers changed their teaching practices from teaching as telling to

teaching for understanding (Lewis & Tsuchida, 1997). She continued to study this

Japanese practice and shared what she learned (Lewis & Tsuchida, 1997, 1998a, 1998b),

but colleagues on both sides of the ocean told her were they were not surprised that the

Japanese were able to make this change in their teaching. One said, “Japan has a

centralized education system; you just tell the teachers to change and they change”

(Lewis, 2002a, p. 3).

18

Hiebert and Stigler were impressed with the video tapes of the Japanese lessons

during their analysis of the TIMSS Video Study (Hiebert et al., 2003). They wondered

how Japanese teachers learned to teach in ways that were more consistent with the

NCTM standards (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 1989, 1991) than

lessons taught in the United States. Stigler’s doctoral student, Makoto Yoshida,

conducted a six month dissertation study in Japan about this practice. Informed by

Yoshida’s dissertation study (Yoshida, 1999b), Stigler and Hiebert included one chapter

about lesson study and described it as a promising practice for teachers in the United

States in their book, The Teaching Gap (Stigler & Hiebert, 1999). The book sparked

much interest in this practice of lesson study.

Features of Lesson Study

Lesson study is a simple idea. To improve instruction, teachers collaboratively

plan a lesson with colleagues, then observe and reflect on it. The lesson study cycle

consists of (a) goal-setting and planning; (b) the research lesson; (c) the lesson

discussion; and (d) the consolidation of learning (Lewis, 2002b, p. 3). Although the idea

is simple, the process is complex and protocols are developed to help teachers navigate

through discussions of the difficult issues.

Goal setting and planning. Teachers work together to formulate long and short

term goals for the lesson. Long term goals are affective in nature and may include

visions of student as active problem-solvers, taking initiative in their learning, being

active problem-seekers, or learning to be good friends. The long term goals are school-

wide goals because they believe all the teachers in the school should be working toward

the same goal. The short term goals involve academic content, usually a topic that

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represents a weakness of their students’ learning, a topic that is difficult to teach, or one

that is new to the curriculum.

The Japanese have a proverb: “When you gather three people, you have a genius”

(Lewis, 2002b, p.29), so the lesson is collaboratively planned. Usually taken from their

curriculum, the lesson improves because it represents the best thinking of all the teachers.

An outside expert who has expertise in the topic studied is invited to the planning. The

role of the expert may be to offer advice, teach the lesson or provide a summary at the

faculty colloquium after the lesson is taught. During this process the teachers’ subject

matter and understanding deepens. An important feature included in the lesson is the

description of where it fits in the curriculum. This gives the teachers the opportunity to

see how the topic develops across the grade levels as they consider the ideas that precede

and follow the concepts taught.

The research lesson. Other teachers are invited to observe the lesson. Sometimes

these teachers are visitors from outside the school. The observers usually have specific

assignments while observing the lesson. Some might be asked to record changes in

student thinking, others might record the questions student ask or how students treat one

another during the lesson. They try to take on the eyes of the students. Data collected are

used as evidence to study their lesson and its effectiveness with respect to student

learning and development.

The lesson discussion. The lesson discussion follows a certain protocol. The

protocol I describe is adapted from the one suggested by the Lesson Study Research

Group at Teachers College (Chokshi, Ertle, Fernandez, & Yoshida, 2001). The feedback

session begins with a moderator who outlines the agenda. The teacher who taught the

20

lesson first comments on the lesson and gives reactions. She describes what was studied,

what worked, what didn’t, what she would change about the lesson. She sometimes picks

a particular feature of the lesson and asks for feedback from the rest of the group.

When observers give their feedback, they first thank the teacher who taught the

lesson and then discuss what they liked about the lesson. Observers are careful to offer

critical feedback by phrasing it in a statement that might begin like, “When I taught this

lesson, I did this differently because…” Then they ask the teacher to explain their

reasons for why they did it their way. Each observer comments on a specific aspect of the

lesson. Then other observers have the chance to reply or comment on related aspects.

This avoids the problem of one observer dominating the conversation and allows others

to share feedback. The teacher who taught the lesson doesn’t comment until all observers

have a chance to comment about a particular aspect of a lesson. This establishes a waiting

etiquette and allows all participants to voice and absorb feedback in a reflective manner.

The teacher who taught the lesson has an opportunity to see her teaching through the eyes

of her students and her colleagues.

The consolidation of learning. Revisions of the lesson are made after the lesson is

taught. Sometimes the revised lesson is taught to another group of students. The

completed lesson is then published so it can be shared with other teachers nationally.

This is what builds the knowledge base for teaching in Japan.

A Collaborative Lesson Study Project at Paterson School

The teachers at Paterson Public School Number 2, a high-poverty pre-

kindergarten through grade 8 school in New Jersey, were among the first to implement

the practice of lesson study in the United States. In the spring of 1997, the eighth grade

21

teachers participated in a district-sponsored activity during which they watched the

TIMSS videos of U.S. and Japanese teachers teaching mathematics to their students.

Jackson, an eighth grade mathematics teacher at Paterson, was among them. In her

handbook on lesson study, Lewis (2002b) describes Jackson’s account of what happened,

“Many of the teachers reacted defensively to the videotaped lessons, seeing TIMSS as yet

another indictment of American teachers. But others, including myself, were intrigued

by the tapes and interested in learning more” (Wang-Iverson, Liptak, & Jackson, 2000).

Jackson and a fellow teacher wrote lessons that summer that were modeled after

the kinds of lessons they observed on the Japanese video tapes. These lessons were

aligned with the New Jersey core curriculum and implemented during the 1997-1998

school year. The principal was excited about their initiative and invited other teachers

from the school to become a part of this initiative. She arranged their schedule so that the

ten teachers who volunteered could meet once a week for eighty minutes during the

school day to plan, teach and discuss their mathematics lessons.

Later Patsy Wang-Iverson from Research for Better Schools joined this group as

an outside expert. Soon after that, Fernandez from Teachers College in New York and

Yoshida became involved and set up a partnership between Paterson Public School

Number 2 and the Greenwich Japanese School in Connecticut. The Japanese teachers

were lesson study coaches for the American teachers, meeting with the American

teachers to teach them first-hand their practice of lesson study. In February 2000, the first

public research lesson was taught in the United States at the Paterson School.

22

Results of Research at Paterson School

Fernandez and her colleagues (Fernandez, Cannon, & Chokshi, 2003) studied the

early collaborative efforts of these two groups of teachers during the 1999-2000 school.

They observed that the American teachers encountered many challenges. The U.S.

teachers found it difficult to generate powerful research questions and to focus on

concrete evidence in student work. Fernandez and her colleagues argue that, for U.S.

teachers to fully realize the power of lesson study, they will need to engage in the

examination of their practice through three lenses: researcher, student and curriculum

developer.

While looking at lesson study through the lens of a researcher, teachers ask

questions about their practice and conduct classroom experiments to collect data to help

answer their questions about teaching. Differences in opinions occur in deciding the best

way to conduct a lesson. This gives teachers exposure to different perspectives and

opportunities to discuss the rationale for using them.

By lens of a student, they mean that teachers should take on the role of a student

while observing the lesson. They found that U.S. teachers in the study naturally want to

interact with the students and help them during the lesson, but by doing this, they miss

out on an important aspect of lesson study – to develop the vision to see children (Lewis,

2000). Focusing on the student while planning instruction helps teachers anticipate what

the student might think. Teachers should ask: Were the students really interested? Did

the lesson match the students’ understanding and prior knowledge? Did the students

understand instruction? Did the lesson motivate the students to work together to solve a

problem? After the lesson, did the students feel like they accomplished something?

23

By the lens of a curriculum developer, teachers could learn how to sequence and

connect children’s learning experiences. Besides planning specific lessons, teachers need

to understand what concepts come before and after the lesson. Teachers need a complex

and well-articulated view of the curriculum they teach.

Lesson study is a promising practice that includes the features of professional

development recommended by the research. It is collaborative, sustained over time and

situated in teachers’ practice. Teachers are actively engaged in an inquiry process with

time built in for reflection. But the teachers at Paterson had the benefit of the Japanese

teachers nearby. What about schools that do not have the benefit of the Japanese experts?

The features of lesson study matched my developing ideas about professional

development. I wanted to implement lesson study in my own school, but we would not

have the expertise of Japanese teachers to guide us. To inform my study, I watched the

videos available from Mills College1 and read the research available at that time. It

seemed the more I learned about lesson study, the more questions I asked. I knew there

would also be challenges and teachers were already individually doing research in their

classrooms. Before I started this program, I wondered more about the challenges we

might face.

Informed by the research on situated learning (J. S. Brown et al., 1989), the

pedagogy of professional development (Ball & Cohen, 1999), conceptual change (Posner

et al., 1982), and lesson study (Fernandez et al., 2003; Lewis, 2000; Lewis & Tsuchida,

1997, 1998b), I developed a program of professional development for my school district.

In Chapter 2, I discuss the research design. Chapter 3 tells the story of these teachers, the

planning sessions, the lesson implementation and the feedback session. The themes that

1 Videos are available at http://lessonresearch.net/res.html.

24

develop are discussed in Chapter 4. Half way through the study, the teachers from one of

the schools leave because they say they are too busy. I give my insights for why this

happened in Chapter 5. In Chapter 6, I describe what teachers said they learned about

content, pedagogy and their students. Finally, I conclude this dissertation with my

reflections and give implications for professional development and research for

professional development.

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CHAPTER II

RESEARCH DESIGN AND PROCEDURES

The Evolution of My Research Program

As the Learning Specialist at Forest Hills Elementary School, a small suburban

district on the border of a large urban Midwestern city, I modeled and coached teachers in

the implementation of standards-based instruction. Missing from this schedule was time,

during the school day, to discuss teaching strategies and to reflect with the teachers on

how those strategies impact student learning. I needed time to prepare and discuss the

lessons with the teachers. My own ideas about teaching and learning changed; I

developed a more social constructivist perspective during my studies at the university.

While working with teachers in their classroom I recognized some of their ideas as my

own that have since changed. I wanted to provide the teachers with better opportunities

to develop professionally. Collaboration was missing from my work with teachers. I

needed to find a way to increase collaboration time with my colleagues and create an

environment where we could learn from each other.

To compensate for the lack of time during the school day, I tried different

strategies. I organized after-school study groups. Small grants from our county’s

mathematics and science consortium provided books, software and other materials.

During one study group session we designed fraction units. Another time, we explored

lessons involving two and three dimensional geometry concepts; still another after school

group met to learn Hyperstudio. We designed lessons to integrate this multimedia tool in

26

their instruction. The participating teachers enjoyed the interactions with their colleagues,

but not every teacher could meet after school.

My principal told me about grant money she received that needed to be spent on

professional development during the following school year. I shared with her the practice

of lesson study, how it meets the standards for professional development as

recommended by the research literature and national organizations, and how it could help

to create an environment that includes time for discussion and reflection in my work with

teachers. She agreed with this idea; the grant funds would pay for substitute teachers so

all teachers could participate during the day. County grant funds were requested and

received to provide materials, fees for continuing education units, and lunch during our

meetings. I spent that summer learning more about Japanese lesson study. I also

received permission from the superintendent to use this program in my dissertation

research.

But that summer brought changes in administration. My principal was appointed

Curriculum Director and another principal was assigned to my school. At a meeting with

the Superintendent and the Curriculum Director just before the school year started, I was

told my job changed too; I was now assigned to the district. The superintendent

suggested that I think about doing the lesson study project with the whole district. She

directed me to arrange my schedule with the newly appointed Curriculum Director. We

reached agreement. Instead of working with the entire district, however, I would provide

services to the Title I elementary schools and the middle school. The lesson study project

would start that year beginning with the two elementary schools.

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Lesson study dates and times were planned during the first week of school. This

was a complex task because the program would involve all the elementary teachers in

two schools. Dates and times that avoided these teachers’ planning times were needed

because heir planning times were preparation periods negotiated by the union contract

and could not be used for other district meetings. The dates scheduled included two

separate 6-session opportunities for lesson study, one late in fall and the other in early

spring. Substitute requests were placed on the district calendar.

Professional development was a big focus of the district that year with the new

Curriculum Director. On the first day of school teachers were notified of the state’s

requirements for professional development. They were not previously aware of these

requirements. Teachers were encouraged to attend outside conferences and workshops

and were supported by the district with substitutes and payment of conference fees. In

addition, the district had other plans for professional development. Two large grants

were awarded the district that year. One was a technology grant for the three elementary

schools. Time was needed to give the teachers opportunities to learn the new software

programs and the project-based learning strategies that were part of this grant. The

second grant was for a state reading improvement initiative. Elementary teachers were

released from their classrooms for half-day sessions for training and assessing their

students. With the teachers involved in all these activities, the fall sessions of my lesson

study program were canceled.

By the second semester teachers complained about being out of their classrooms

so much. Principals complained about the problems they had to deal with when the

regular classroom teachers were out of their rooms or buildings. Parents raised

28

objections to the idea of their children’s teachers being out of their room. The program

of lesson study had long been forgotten by most, but not by me. It was time to start the

spring sessions but because of the complaints the superintendent thought it would be best

to also cancel the spring lesson study group meetings too or have teachers meet after

school. With the support of the Curriculum Director, however, a compromise was

reached. Notes were sent in February to inform twelve fourth and fifth grade teachers that

they would be participating in the lesson study program.

Research Method

This study seeks to understand the themes of teachers’ engagement in what

appears to be a promising form of professional development and to compare and contrast

issues that arise. This study uses the qualitative research paradigm, which is concerned

primarily with the process and meaning – how people make sense of their lives,

experiences, and structures of their world (Creswell, 1994). The strength of using

qualitative data is that such data focus on naturally occurring, ordinary events in natural

settings (Miles and Huberman, 1994). My role in this study was that of a guide,

facilitating teachers in the planning of a lesson based on reforms in mathematics and

science and can be described as participant as observer (Creswell, 1994, p. 150). This

study is considered critical inquiry because I hoped to shift teachers’ perceptions and

practices by giving them an opportunity to make their beliefs about teaching and learning

visible to themselves and their colleagues for discussion and reflection.

Participants and Setting

There are about 2200 K-12 students enrolled in this district. Most of the students

are Caucasian. There are small numbers of Arabic and African American students.

29

Scores for the state-wide assessment program are below state averages. More than 50%

of the students receive free or reduced-price lunches.

The study took place over a three-month period in the spring of 2002. It included

11 fourth and fifth grade teachers from the two elementary schools where I am assigned,

Greenfield and Forest Hills2. Originally, 12 teachers were selected to participate in the

study, five from Greenfield and seven from Forest Hills. However, when the program

was ready to begin, one of the teachers from Greenfield was on a short leave of absence. I

thought it would be important for each teacher to be able to participate in the program

from the beginning; therefore this teacher from Greenfield was not included in this study.

Fourth and fifth grade teachers were chosen for two reasons: first, they were not already

involved with the professional development activities for the reading program; second,

the fourth and fifth grade students take state mandated assessments in mathematics and

science. The program would involve lessons in mathematics and science. For more

diversity in the groups I included the special education teacher from Forest Hills and the

computer teacher from Greenfield.

I organized the teachers in two groups, but instead of organizing them by school, I

chose to organize them by grade level. This allowed me to focus on subject matter

content for each grade. Since the district is small, most of the teachers were somewhat

acquainted with each other from other district activities. The fifth grade group was

composed of six teachers - four from Forest Hills and two from Greenfield. They focused

on a mathematics lesson. The fourth grade group had five teachers - three from the Forest

Hills and two from Greenfield. They focused on science instruction. To protect the

identity of these teachers, I use pseudonyms - last names are used for the teachers from

2 These names are pseudonyms as are the names of the teachers.

30

Greenfield and first names are used for the teachers from Forest Hills. The teachers

planning the mathematics lesson have names that begin with “M”; teachers planning the

science lesson have names that begin with “S”. Appendix A is a matrix showing the

structure of the participants. One of these teachers was male, but to mask his identity, he

will be referred to in the feminine gender.

The teaching experience of these ten females and one male teacher ranged from

beginning to 14 years. Four teachers were in their first or second year of teaching; five

teachers had four to seven years of experience. Two teachers taught for fourteen years,

but this was the first year in the district for one who was returning to her teaching career

after several years as a stay-at-home mom. A grant from the local math and science

consortium provided funds for lunches, materials, and continuing education units for the

teachers who needed them. We met in the district’s central office for planning and

reflecting and in the schools for the lesson implementation.

Procedure

The schedule for this study included six half-day sessions for each group spread

out over a three month period. This time frame included two vacation days for winter

break, a six day spring break, and three half-days for parent conferences. The district

provided substitute teachers so these teachers could be released from their classroom

duties to meet together during the regular school day. With a half-day schedule of

meetings, the substitutes would remain in the same building and move from the fifth

grade classroom in the morning to a fourth grade classroom in the afternoon. This block

of time would give the teachers time to focus on determining goals and planning the

lesson in the short period of time that we had.

31

Teachers chose the topic for the lesson. They were encouraged to base their

choice on a topic that they would be teaching soon but one they thought would be

difficult for themselves or their students. Four sessions were spent identifying goals and

planning the lesson. Because some of the teachers dropped out of the program, I

combined the two groups for the fifth and sixth sessions. The fifth session, the lesson

enactment, took place in the morning; the sixth session, the feedback session, took place

that afternoon. We observed both lessons that morning and held both feedback sessions

that afternoon. Because we were running out of time, revisions were discussed during the

feedback session. There was not an opportunity to re-teach the revised lesson.

Materials

A county grant made it possible to order materials for the participating teachers.

The teachers in the mathematics group received a copy of Principles and Standards for

School Mathematics (2000); the teachers in the science group received a copy of Inquiry

and the National Science Education Standards (2000). Both groups also received copies

of the Michigan Curriculum Framework (1996) for their subject.

Three videos were used during the session to help teachers better understand the

lesson study process. Two videos are from the Lesson Study Research Group at Mills

College. The first, Can You Lift 100 Kilograms? (2000) shows the three parts of the

lesson study cycle: the planning, the research lesson and the faculty discussion

afterwards. It was filmed in Komae School #7 in Tokyo. The lesson topic for the video

was levers and was taught to fifth grade students. The second video, Three Perspectives

of Lesson Study (2001) is a 53 minute video of Lewis, Fernandez and Stigler answering

questions about lesson study. The third video, Drag Races (2001) was used in the

32

science planning sessions. In this video, fifth grade students explore the forces that

brought their plastic cars to a stop after they bumped into and displaced barriers at the

end of their run. In this video, as viewers watch the teacher and her children in the

classroom, Dr. Sally Baliunas from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

explains the science concepts.

Collecting Data

Data collected include audio tapes of the planning and feedback sessions, video

tapes of the lesson implementation, audio tapes of the initial and final interviews, direct

observations, journal entries, lesson plans, samples of student work, and my field notes.

Additional data include CoWeb (Guzdial, 1999) journal pages developed online by

teachers during the goal setting and lesson-planning sessions.

Interviews took place at the beginning of the program. They were designed to

gain an insight into teachers’ perspectives about teaching mathematics and science and to

gain insights about their perceived ability to offer constructive criticism to a colleague.

To learn more about their perspectives on teaching I asked these teachers to describe a

typical mathematics or science lesson, how they assess their students’ learning, and if

they were satisfied with the learning outcomes of all their students. Other questions

during the interviews focused on their comfort in teaching mathematics or science, how

they felt their students learned those subjects best, and previous experiences with

collegial collaboration including opportunities to observe others teach (see Appendix B

for the questions asked during the initial interview).

Teachers were interviewed again after the intervention to find out what they felt

they learned about their students, content, and pedagogy. A general protocol for the final

33

interview was developed for all the teachers who completed the program (see Appendix

C for the final interview questions). These questions include their overall impression of

the program, which features they found most beneficial, and which features were least

useful. I also asked them if they ever considered dropping out of the program, if they had

insight into why the teachers from Greenfield left, how they thought that occurrence

impacted the program for the rest of the teachers, and if their reasons for participating

changed during the study. Additional questions were designed for the teachers who

taught the lesson. These questions were specific to the lesson they taught or to comments

made during the program. I also was curious about their reasons for volunteering to

teach. The teachers who dropped out were also interviewed. These teachers were asked

about their impressions of the program and their reasons for leaving.

The final interviews did not take place until August and September of the

following school year. This decision was made for two reasons. First, the teachers were

very busy with end-of-the-school-year reports and activities. I wanted them to have

more time to be reflective. Second, I needed more time to reflect on this process myself

and give more thought to the final interview questions. The elapsed time may have made

it difficult for them to remember some of the details, but I selected and prepared quotes to

help them remember the episodes for which I had specific questions. Involvement in this

program was memorable for these teachers and they were able to answer my questions

easily and with surprising detail.

Transcribing Data

The interviews and all the sessions, except the video tape of the lesson enactment,

were transcribed and imported into HyperRESEARCH to help manage the coding and

34

analysis process. Videos were partially transcribed. Those transcriptions focused on

discourse between teacher and student while students explained problems presented in

the lesson. I transcribed all interviews and planning sessions myself. This was helpful

and served as an early analysis as I came to hear things that I missed during my

participation in the study. Since it is easy for a person to make assumptions during

conversations with others and this can prevent them from hearing what is said, I found

transcribing the session gave me an opportunity to hear every word.

Importing Data

The transcribed data were imported into HyperRESEARCH and organized by

sessions and interviews. By design, HyperRESEARCH forces the researcher to start with

a case as a unit of analysis (Staller, 2002). I created five cases. They were: (a) Initial

Interview, which linked the beginning interviews of all the teachers; (b) Goal Setting,

which linked sessions one and two; (c) Lesson Planning, which linked sessions three and

four; (d) Feedback Session, which linked the Mathematics and Science feedback

sessions; and (e) Final Interviews, which linked the final interviews of all the sessions.

Sessions one and two were combined because it was during those sessions the

teachers were involved in setting long term and short term goals for the lesson. The third

and fourth sessions were combined as a case because it was during those sessions

planning for the lessons occurred. The fifth session was the lesson implementation and

this session was video taped. Although HyperRESEARCH now supports video, I did not

use that feature. Instead, I captured the videos with Studio 8 (Pinnacle, 2002) to use

during the analysis and I also created images of student work from the blackboard.

35

Analyzing Data

Data analysis was guided by the research questions. I engaged in five coding

steps. First, I identified the practices, attitudes and behaviors that I would code from my

research question, the theoretical framework, and from the data. Second, I identified

codes, reviewed the data and conducted the first level of coding. This was accomplished

not only by reading the transcripts but also by listening to the audio tapes. Third, I noted

recurring practices, attitudes and behaviors and generated temporary themes. Some codes

were combined and others expanded to get a greater level of detail. Fourth, I went back

to the data to search for confirming or disconfirming evidence. Fifth, I reported general

themes.

Identifying practices, attitudes and behaviors. In the conceptual change literature,

Posner et al. (1982) argue that for a change to occur, learners must be dissatisfied with

their present conceptions and see that a more intelligible or fruitful one exists. Informed

by this literature, I looked for teachers’ satisfaction with the learning outcomes of their

students. Informed by the pedagogy of professional development (Ball & Cohen, 1999),

teachers need to develop the disposition of inquiry. I looked for instances of teachers

using new norms for discourse such as questioning each other, probing for details,

arguing, using evidence to justify claims, and expressing uncertainty of their own ideas.

Fernandez et al.’s (2003) study described the lenses of student and researcher. I also

looked for examples of teachers’ statements that expressed the perspective of students

and their ability to offer critical feedback. For teachers to be able to teach to the reform

standards in mathematics and sciences, they would need to develop more constructive

beliefs about teaching and learning. I looked for statements that expressed those beliefs.

36

First level coding. Codes were developed to identify attitudes of satisfaction or

dissatisfaction of student learning, behaviors that displayed the disposition of inquiry, the

lens of the student, traditional or constructivist beliefs about learning, and examples of

giving critical feedback. Then I reviewed the data and conducted the first level of

coding. In doing so, new codes were identified. Some of these codes include

individualism, a curiosity or desire to learn more, influence of other teachers, time,

anxiety about features of the program, comparisons to other forms of professional

development, stated reasons for participating, stated reasons for dropping out, benefits

received, statements of what they learned about content, pedagogy, or students.

Identify recurring patterns and temporary themes. With the identification of

attitudes, practices and behaviors I did not anticipate, I identified patterns that repeated

within and across the cases. Teachers were always talking about the lack of time to teach

or to participate in this program. Teachers expressed concern for losing their

individualism. I developed temporary themes. I hypothesized reasons for why some

teachers left while others, faced with the same constraints on their time, continued to the

end.

Searching for confirming or disconfirming evidence. After identifying themes and

developing new hypotheses, I went back to the data. I listened to the tapes on different

occasions looking for evidence to confirm or disconfirm my hypotheses. The process of

identifying themes and searching for confirming evidence repeated itself in several

cycles.

Reporting general themes. After several cycles of developing themes and

searching for evidence, the main themes were reported and conclusions were made.

37

Reporting the Data

I will report the data in the next chapters. Chapter 3 tells the story about the

program. It starts with a description of the ideas and attitudes these teachers have about

teaching mathematics or science. Then I describe the characteristics of their engagement

in this collaborative examination of practice through the planning sessions, lesson

implementation and feedback sessions. I interweave description, literature and analysis.

In Chapter 4, I discuss the themes of individualism, time and talk. In Chapter 5, I give

my interpretation of why some teachers left the program early. Teachers reported that

they learned many things about the content, pedagogy and their students. They also

report receiving many benefits from participating in this study. Chapter 6 describes these

benefits. Finally, I conclude this dissertation in Chapter 7 with my reflections and

implications for professional development and research on professional development.

38

CHAPTER III

THE PROJECT STORY

In this chapter I tell the story of the eleven teachers who I ask to come to the edge.

Would they be willing to come or would they decide to stay where they feel safe? If

they came, would I find the courage to push?

There were many challenges throughout the project. The first challenges

presented themselves before the project even started. The day before the project was to

begin the secretary from central office told me that the first meeting date needed to be

changed. She was informed that the teachers at Greenfield would be on a field trip.

These challenges made their way into my dreams. I wrote in my journal:

I was packing my car to go to school. I went into the house for another load.

When I went back into the garage, another car was parked directly behind my car.

No one was in it and I didn’t recognize it. I needed to leave, so I pushed the car

down the driveway and into the street. When I turned around to go back into the

garage, the garage door was closed! I was stuck outside since I had no key to get

back into the house. Then I woke up from my dream. (Hartman Journal, March

14, 2002)

This dream seemed to represent the obstacles that I needed to overcome: the

superintendent’s suggestion to change the program’s meeting time to after school,

teachers’ complaints about being out of their room, and now word from the secretary at

central office that this date had to be changed. Since this was a dissertation, there were

university related issues too. Fortunately, I had the Curriculum Director’s support and she

helped resolve many issues related to the district. The superintendent agreed to allow the

39

program to take place during the school day, but for a reduced number of participants.

Complaints were heard, but the program would continue.

Acting on the information from the secretary at Central Office, I went to

Greenfield to speak to the two teachers about their planned field trip and try to

reschedule. All the teachers were meeting in the library that morning but it was not a

staff meeting day. They were listening to Melissa from Forest Hills describe her

experiences with looping - when a teacher keeps her class for two consecutive years.

Some teachers at Greenfield were considering looping with their class the next school

year and wanted more information. I was surprised that this kind of informal meeting

took place and listened with interest and excitement to the sharing within and between

schools. During her presentation Melissa asked for my comments because I worked with

her for the past two years and watched her class make academic and social progress. I

made positive comments about her classroom and her looping experience and commented

that there would be many opportunities for the teachers involved in the upcoming lesson

study program to share ideas about their practice like they were doing that morning.

After the meeting the teachers involved in lesson study told me their field trip was

canceled and there was no need to reschedule the first meeting date. I began to feel more

positive about the program.

There were more obstacles coming and of course, teachers’ negatives attitudes

about participating would not be overcome as easily. Principals would still complain that

the teachers who are not in their rooms created discipline problems for them to handle. I

believed that the teachers I worked with would enjoy the benefits of this collaborative

investigation of practice, but in the back of my mind I knew I would soon be asking these

40

teachers who held traditional beliefs about teaching and learning to try something quite

different – to open their classroom doors, to give feedback about their lessons to each

other, and to try a different approach to teaching. Problems like the ones I already

experienced could become barriers that would end this program. It was time to start and I

was less than confident. I wondered who I was to be asking these teachers to do

something so difficult.

This chapter is divided into five sections. The first section describes the teachers

and their ideas about teaching and working collaboratively as they describe them to me

during their first interview. The second section describes the two sessions when the long

and short term goals for the lesson were discussed. The third section describes the lesson

planning sessions; the fourth section describes the enactments of the mathematics and

science lessons. The fifth section describes the feedback sessions. In these chapters I

mix literature with description and interpretation. Further analysis and interpretation of

the themes are found in chapters four. Chapter five discusses my interpretations of why

some teachers left the program while other teachers stayed.

To mask the identity of the teachers in this study, the names I use are

pseudonyms. Teachers from Forest Hills are identified by first names; teachers from

Greenfield are identified by last names. Teachers involved in planning the mathematics

lesson have names that begin with “M”; teachers involved in planning the science lesson

have names that begin with “S”. One of these teachers is male, but to protect his identity,

he is referred to in the feminine gender. Refer to the chart of how I organize the teachers

in this study in Appendix A, if needed, while reading this chapter.

41

Ideas about Teaching Mathematics and Science

Most elementary teachers have insufficient understanding of mathematics and

science for teaching these subjects for the depth of understanding as recommended by

national standards (Ball, 2003; Ball, Lubienski, & Mewborn, 2001; Ma, 1999; National

Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 2000; National Research Council, 1996, 2000).

These teachers were not an exception. Although three of these teachers specialized in

mathematics or science during their undergraduate education, they were beginning

teachers: Megan, who was in her first full year of teaching, had a minor in elementary

mathematics; Sylvia, who was in her second year of teaching, had minors in mathematics

and science; Sharon, who taught five years, had a minor in science. Although she had

special preparation for teaching mathematics and science, Sylvia said she did not feel

well prepared for teaching these subjects. Two other teachers had preferences for

teaching mathematics or science, although they received only the required undergraduate

preparation: Ms. McHugh preferred teaching mathematics and Ms. Seymour preferred

teaching science. They taught their preferred subject to each other’s students in a team

teaching arrangement.

Four of the teachers shared, during their interviews, that they were not

comfortable teaching mathematics or science. One of the teachers from the math group

said, “I hate math, always have, and to this day I will tell you I am not the best math

teacher, although I try very, very hard to do my best.” Another teacher from the math

group said, “It's OK. It's not one of my favorite subjects, but it's OK…I'm not real strong

in math. I work really hard when I teach math.” A third teacher from the math group

described her feelings about teaching math like this: “I think it's just because I haven't

42

done it. I always team-taught and that was the subject I didn't teach. So I think it is more

the level of comfort with it rather than not actually liking math.” When I asked one of

the teachers from the science group if she enjoyed teaching science, she admitted, “I

enjoy it, but my discomfort is high…I always steered away from it. I didn't even have a

strong high school background in it.”

When the teachers in my study were asked how children best learn science, all the

science teachers mentioned hands-on instruction, but one teacher thought it was

important to incorporate vocabulary too. She described herself as a “spur of the moment

teacher” although she tries not to be. “In my head I know what I want but because I am

such a spur of the moment teacher, I haven’t thought out the best way to present it.” She

said she is so busy that she doesn’t have time to do a lot of things justice but she does like

having conversations with the students. Another teacher describes her science classes as

“small groups working together cooperatively to try to come up with an answer for a

question that’s given.” She tries not to give them too much information because she

wants them to figure it out. “I’ll go through the procedure of what they are going to be

doing so they understand the process, but I try not to lead them to any answers. I want

them to find the answers when they are doing the experiment.” A third science teacher

thinks her students learn best in small groups and in direct contact with whatever concept

is taught. When students work in groups, she explains, they feed off of ideas, suggestions

and insights that other people have. She relies on the science kit and the suggestions in

them for her science lessons.

The teachers in the mathematics group varied in their ideas about when and how

often manipulatives should be used. One of Greenfield teachers said practicing skills was

43

more important than using the manipulatives. When asked why she thought this, she said

she found success among her students when they practice although having the visuals

helped them “catch on quicker”. One of the Forest Hills teachers thought there should be

an equal combination of manipulatives and practice because some students have a

problem making the jump from hands-on to doing it in their head. Another teacher

noticed that the students who liked using manipulatives were bored with the lecture, and

the students who liked the lecture got distracted with the manipulatives. Her students are

not afraid to say they don’t understand a mathematics concept; they are eager to raise

their hand when they’re confused. Another Forest Hills teacher said it was important to

have teacher instruction before using manipulatives; in a typical mathematics lesson in

her class, she will give instructions with the manipulatives first. She thought it is

important to understand what it is they are learning. Another important part of her lesson

is to make sure that “we share with each other our own ideas or different ways of getting

to the same answer” but she also thought her kids would say that her mathematics lessons

are kind of boring or dry. A Greenfield teacher said it is really frustrating for her when

her students don’t get it.

In general, these teachers describe that their mathematics and science lessons

involve going through steps in the process of acquiring some knowledge. This is done by

explanations, carefully delivered. One teacher said, “When I explained something in a

certain way and you could see the kids weren’t getting it, they would be pulled in a group

and have it explained in maybe another way to see if they could catch on.” These

teachers classrooms were typical of most classrooms in the United States where new

concepts are presented by the teacher, examples are shown, and students are given time to

44

practice the new skills individually. If the teacher believes in cooperative learning,

students might sit together in small groups and practice the problems individually.

Their comments about learning revealed that they held more traditional

perspectives of learning. They used words like absorb or expressions like ramming down

the middle and cramming down their throats to describe their students’ learning or their

own teaching. Teachers talked about covering things to be learned. Most characterize

learning as an acquisition of vocabulary, facts or knowledge.

Reform documents for mathematics and science education (American Association

for the Advancement of Science, 1990; National Council of Teachers of Mathematics,

1989, 1991, 2000; National Research Council, 1996) emphasize that all students should

have access to high quality mathematics and science instruction. Lessons are considered

high quality if they actively engage students in meaningful and important work.

Meaningful work includes students doing the work of mathematicians and scientists; all

students are engaged in the content and asking questions, developing hypothesis or

conjectures, proving or disproving their ideas and communicating their ideas. Multiple

students’ perspectives are present. Teachers are flexible and responsive to students’

needs and interests. They use questions to monitor and promote understanding while

helping students make sense of the mathematics or science content. There is a climate of

intellectual rigor that includes constructive criticism and the challenging of ideas.

Although the reform documents have been around for several years, the

implementation in the classroom of these recommendations still is not widespread

(Stigler & Hiebert, 1999). Weiss, Pasley, Smith, Banilower, and Heck (2003) report a

study of classroom observations at 31 sites across the United States during the period

45

November 2000 –April 2002. They rated lessons on lesson design, lesson

implementation, content addressed, and classroom culture. They looked for lessons that

are strong in intellectual rigor and conducted within an environment of respect. They

argue that if the culture of the classroom is respectful as well as rigorous, students will

have a better opportunity to learn. An example of a lesson rated low in rigor and respect

is the following:

The teacher’s main classroom management strategy was to chastise the class

repeatedly, ‘pockets on your seat, eyes up, lips zipped.’ She allocated ‘points’ for

each table behaving as she had requested, and recorded these table points on the

board….To ensure that the students were able to follow the instructions, she

called on individual students to repeat each instruction as it was given. For

example, ‘While I am handing out the construction paper, please finish writing.

When you get the construction paper, write your name on one side; that will be

the back… Where do you need to write your name?’ She would then call on

individual students, and each one would parrot, ‘on the back.’ (Weiss, et al. 2003,

p.5)

This studied found only 13% of the lessons they observed were rated highly respectful

and rigorous. Fifty-five percent of the lessons observed lacked intellectual rigor. Sixty-

six percent of the lessons lacked inadequate questioning; sixty-six percent showed

inadequate sense-making. The TIMMS video study shows a similar pattern (National

Center for Education Statistics, 2003).

Similar to the teachers from Five Towns in Lortie’s (1975) study, these teachers

were interested in their colleagues for sources of help and as mirrors for their

46

performance. Their desire to see what was going on in other classrooms was strong.

They had chances to talk to other teachers, but they wanted to see too. A teacher from

Greenfield wanted an opportunity to observe other teachers at work. She said, “The one

thing about teaching that I don’t like is that I don’t get to watch my peers work as much.”

Teachers used the words creeping, sneaking, peeking and stealing to describe how

they made opportunities to see what was going on in other classrooms. One of the

teachers talked about her experience years ago as a beginning teacher:

I would observe if I could creep out of my room for a few minutes across the hall.

When I first started [teaching], I watched a teacher teach lessons and I watched

her behavior system and that really inspired me in both areas. I did get to observe

but I did talk mostly, you know, talk was the biggest way of getting to know new

strategies for teaching. But I did observe, you know, a little bit, here and there

when I could.

Things did not change much in this district over the years for this beginning

teacher. She described her peeking, spying and breaks from isolation in this conversation

with me:

Teacher: I’m in my own little world and I think that we don’t have enough

development in this district for me to learn from other teachers. I

gather different things from different teachers when I can catch a

glimpse of what they are doing.

Monica: How do you go about doing that?

Teacher: Sometimes it’s as simple as walking down the hallway and just

peeking in rooms as I walk and see what they do. Sometimes it’s

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just when they are making copies and I see an activity that they are

preparing to do and I say, “Oh, what’s that about?” And they tell

me, and you know what? I could adapt that for my class. It’s

mostly me just spying and stealing.

Monica: Do you get a chance to talk to other teachers about how they

teach?

Teacher: Not very often. I think everyone has to learn their own style but I

think that taking from other people is a good thing.

One teacher at Forest Hills arranged a visit on her own during her scheduled

preparation time to observe a colleague’s lesson. Two other teachers talked about doing

this, but found it difficult to arrange time. One teacher thought it was a futile endeavor to

try to arrange time to observe another teacher on her own time. She said:

If we did that, it would have to be on our prep, and then we are taking time from

our prep to get ready for the next thing to go do it. Yeah, I could take my half

hour prep and sit in someone else’s classroom and not get the full gist of

everything because that’s what it would be. A half hour is not long enough.

In this district, teachers get a one hour art preparation period, two 30 minute music and

two 30 minute gym preps per week.

It was interesting to me that only one teacher made a reference to their

opportunities to observe me teach their children in their classrooms. I worked with eight

of these teachers in their classrooms. Perhaps they interpreted my question to mean - do

any other teachers besides me influence the way you teach? Maybe I am not an

48

influence. Perhaps they want to see how a teacher manages the children throughout the

day, not just for one class.

Although they do not have opportunities to observe teachers, I asked them if they

felt talking to other teachers was worthwhile. Their overwhelming positive responses to

this question were: “Absolutely, absolutely!” “I only see it as a plus.” “Definitely!” “I

can’t fathom it not be.” These teachers seemed to have a strong desire to talk and learn

from each other.

Setting the Goals

Setting long term and short term goals was the primary focus of the first two

planning sessions. These meetings took place in the board room at Central Office. The

teachers in the mathematics group met in the morning and ate lunch together afterwards.

They got back to school in time for the return of their students to the classroom after their

lunch. The science teachers met in the afternoon. They left school after they took their

students to the lunchroom and ate together in the board room. There was no time in-

between the sessions for the teachers from either group to meet or talk.

The First Mathematics Session

The planning and the events leading up to the start of these meetings were still

fresh in my mind. There I was with the participants before me. The teachers in the

morning group seemed supportive and ready to start; my initial fears distanced

themselves. To introduce them to project, we watched the video, Can You Lift 100

Kilograms? (2000). This video was filmed in a fifth grade classroom in a public school

in Tokyo and demonstrates the three parts of lesson study: the planning of the research

lesson, the teaching of the research lesson to fifth grade students, and the faculty

49

colloquium or feedback session following the research lesson. The morning group of

teachers expressed concern that students would focus on the observing teachers and not

on the lesson, but they decided if the lesson was a good one, students would eventually

ignore the visitors. Since teachers in this group were interested in getting started, instead

of watching the other planned video, Three Perspectives on Lesson Study (2001), they

started to brainstorm the long term goals for the lesson.

To foster more collaboration during this process, a web page (see Appendix D)

was designed using CoWeb (Guzdial, 1999), a collaborative web authoring tool. The

intent of using this tool was to allow teachers to share ideas across schools and grades.

This asynchronous form of communication would allow teachers to interact when and

where it was convenient for them and to reflect in between sessions.

Four questions were placed on the web site for discussion on setting goals. These

questions are suggested from the Lesson Study Research Group3 (Chokshi et al., 2001):

(a) What qualities would you like these students to have five years from now? (b) What

qualities do they have now? (c) What aspects of the ideal would you most like to work

toward? (d) State positively the ideal student qualities you choose to work on.

One teacher from each school in the morning group brought their new computers

they recently received from the state’s technology initiative to the meeting and logged

onto the CoWeb site. After a short introduction to CoWeb, the teachers engaged in

conversation about long term goals and recorded their ideas on the web page. The four

teachers from Forest Hills gathered around Marilyn’s computer while they worked on

their school-wide long term goal. I noticed that the two teachers from Greenfield worked

3 Current version of the goal selection worksheet can be found at http://www.tc.columbia.edu/lessonstudy/doc/Goal_Selection_Worksheet.pdf

50

independently on their school goals and I made a note of that in my journal. At the end

of the session ideas were shared among all participants using a data projector.

The First Science Session

The afternoon group started differently. The teachers gathered in the boardroom

for lunch before the sessions started. The lunchtime conversation extended into the

meeting time. I let it continue because I thought it could be productive and it would be

difficult to stop. They were discussing their children’s cooperative learning skills. I

started the tape recorder with Sylvia’s comment, “Maybe I don’t do it [cooperative

learning] well enough. I need to go back to school.” I took note that Sylvia, a second

year teacher, was comfortable enough in this group to mention a problem that she was

having with her students. Ms. Seymour shared what she learned about cooperative

learning during her collaborative action research project in a master’s degree program at

a local university:

It was chaos [at first]. Kids were fighting; this and that. I mean you are going to

have that no matter what, but there are ways to alleviate it and one thing I found

really useful was to keep the groups small. Make sure they have a role that they

know they are doing and are accountable for…I notice just from experience with

my class…Today, I did a cooperative learning and it was just groups of two

today…and I mean it went like clockwork. They were on task. It wasn’t really

loud in there. They had a great time with it. I really honestly feel like they

learned a lot with that lesson.

The teachers listened and asked Ms. Seymour more questions about how she

groups her students, the roles she assigns, how she assigns them, and how she handles

51

transitions. Sharon joined in and described the success she has with her students who,

she explained, work in cooperative groups all the time.

After giving what I thought was an adequate amount of time for teachers to

engage in this conversation about cooperative learning, I told them why we were meeting

and showed the same lesson study video I showed to the morning group. Immediately

after the video Sylvia directed another question to Ms. Seymour and the conversation

reverted back to the cooperative learning discussion. During this discussion, I asked Ms.

Seymour if she was interested in being the first to teach the lesson so we all could see her

children working in groups. She said, “Yes. When are we going to do that, because

there’s a lesson I haven’t taught to Ms. McHugh’s class yet, that I did today? I could do

that one.”

Ms. Seymour must have missed the first part in the video where it shows how the

teachers collaboratively planned the lesson, because she thought she could teach the same

lesson she taught yesterday. I responded saying that we needed time to decide what the

lesson would be and then design a lesson together. Ms. Snyder added, “Because, like in

the video, we all have to get together and decide what the lesson will be.”

The conversation continued a bit longer with Ms. Seymour’s sharing some more

of her expertise before I was able to redirect them to discuss the video. I gave each

teacher their copy of the inquiry book (National Research Council, 2000) and directed

them to page 29 where the essential features of classroom inquiry could be found. I

asked them if they recognized any features of inquiry in the video. The conversation

almost came to a complete halt. After struggling to engage them in discourse about

inquiry skills, we began the process of goal setting.

52

These teachers differed from the morning group in the way they approached the

process of goal setting. No one from the afternoon group brought their lap top; instead of

working in individual school groups, we worked in one large group. One teacher typed

ideas onto the web site. Using the data projector, all teachers could see as well as hear

immediately the ideas presented. These circumstances - the whole group working and

seeing their thoughts on the screen - may have contributed to the difference in the

discussions.

For the first question on the website, the fifth grade teachers from Forest Hills

thought the qualities they would like their children to have in five years were caring and

responsibility for self and others, healthy communication, and empathy to others. They

also wanted their students to acknowledge and accept the consequences for their

inappropriate behavior. The fifth grade teachers from Greenfield who worked separately

had similar ideas and added “working well in collaborative groups” and “each child to

participate and voice their opinion and ideas.” When the afternoon group saw the

morning group’s goals, Ms. Snyder made a comment and recorded her response as

feedback on CoWeb: “These are wonderful goals! Just think how wonderful our jobs

would be and how much fun we would have if we achieve these goals.” The fourth grade

teachers agreed with the goals from the morning group and added a few more:

“preparation for civic responsibility” and “more parental involvement” They were

reminded that we were looking at qualities of students, not their parents, but the parent

involvement goal was left recorded because we were brainstorming.

The second question invited teachers to reflect on the qualities their children

already have. There were notable differences between the fifth grade groups. Forest

53

Hills teachers said their fifth grade students worked well in groups; Greenfield teachers

said their fifth grade students did not. Forest Hills teachers said their students shared

ideas orally and were eager to resolve problems; at Greenfield, certain students would

voice their opinions but others would shut down and refuse to participate. Differences

were accepted without debate.

In the afternoon group, the “qualities” mentioned first were that of students’ fights

and disagreements. They complained that their students are argumentative, egocentric,

and self-focused. After Ms. Snyder suggested they should “put a positive spin on there”,

teachers’ alternative perspectives started to surface. Sharon was first to defend the

students’ egotism. She thought “it’s not necessarily a negative trait. It’s just who they are

at that age.” Sarah said she would like to see effort addressed, but maybe it needs to go

with the qualities they would like to see their students have in five years. She said, “I

would like to see students trying their best, putting forth their best effort, putting pride in

their work.” When they scrolled up the web page to see how the fifth grade teachers

responded to the first question again, Sharon saw “responsibility for self and others” in a

different way and offered this perspective: “Responsible for self and others usually

indicates behavior as opposed to an academic. How about calling it academic

responsibility?” After more discussion, it was agreed that “putting forth best effort and

taking pride in their work to achieve academic responsibility” should be a quality they

would like their students to have and they added that to the CoWeb page.

There were bigger differences between the two schools in the fifth grade group

for the third question: what aspects of the ideal would you most like to work toward?

The Forest Hills group wanted to work toward the ideal of having students acknowledge

54

their inappropriate behavior and accept consequences for it. The Greenfield teachers

wanted to work toward the ideal of students cooperating with others in their group and

being able to express their ideas. Ms. Miller wanted students who could learn to give and

take and realize no one idea is right or wrong but just different. Perhaps all the teachers

agreed with Ms. Miller, that no one idea is right or wrong but just different. They may

have accepted the different goals because they were at different schools and felt no need

to debate.

The fourth grade teachers did not agree with the fifth grade Forest Hills teachers’

statement – students’ acknowledgement of inappropriate behavior and acceptance of its

consequences. The first big challenging comment in this discussion was directed to those

fifth grade teachers who were not present. They responded to them with a statement on

CoWeb: “Behaviors change throughout life and it would be impossible to achieve this.”

Included in the critical comment was a more positive one, “This is a good learning tool

and a needed constant reminder.” The teachers argued among themselves that some

behaviors are accepted at home and on the playground but not at school. It would be

confusing for kids to have different sets of behaviors to turn off and on at will.

The first signs of the disposition of inquiry were appearing. They started to

question and probe each others’ ideas. Sarah said “discipline towards others” didn’t make

sense to her. At first, I thought Sarah’s challenge was directed to Sharon. Sharon and

Sarah are long time friends outside of school and often kid with each other, but a

comment made by Ms. Seymour brought me to a closer look at this dialogue. The word

“others” was added first by Ms. Snyder and Ms. Seymour agreed that word should be

added. After Sarah’s challenge, Sharon made a joke; Sarah responded with sarcasm.

55

Sylvia typed ideas as they discussed what aspects of the ideal student they wanted to

work towards. The following is part of that dialogue.

Sharon: How about respect, discipline between self and learning?

Ms. Snyder: Self, others [emphasis added] and learning?

Ms. Seymour: Yeah, I was going to say it needs to have one more.

Sarah: Discipline towards others doesn’t make sense.

This was where Sharon quickly diverted the first signs of challenging discourse and said:

Sharon: Well it depends on if you are talking about good discipline or bad

discipline. [Laughing]

Sarah: [Laughing] OK.

Sara’s response seemed sarcastic because she didn’t think Sharon’s response clarified the

issue. I brought them back to the task at hand.

Monica: Or self-discipline and respect towards self and

Sharon: How about if we just say self-discipline?

Sylvia: That’s what they were just saying.

Sharon: Oh.

Ms. Snyder: And respect towards others and learning

Ms. Seymour: They have respect for themselves though too.

Sylvia: Well, yeah, and it works both ways. They have to have

[interrupted]

Sharon: That would work. Self discipline and respect towards self, others,

and group. Yep, that makes sense. Doesn’t it? Do you agree

now?

56

Sylvia: Help us out. But no, doesn’t [hesitating], because you have self,

others and learning doesn’t [interrupted]

Sharon: She’s [Sarah] the language person.

Sylvia: We want self discipline. We want discipline with others, and we

want discipline with our learning. We want self respect. We want

respect for others and we want respect for learning.

Sharon seemed to be satisfied and hoped the others could agree and resolve this

issue while Sylvia was trying to record the ideas on the CoWeb and keep up with the

discussion. Ms. Seymour made a suggestion to Sylvia about the formatting:

Ms. Seymour: Why don’t you go on two separate lines instead of putting them

together? Respect and discipline for others and learning and put

self discipline underneath it, or something like that?

Ms. Snyder: Does it have to be one sentence?

Ms. Seymour: It doesn’t have to be one sentence, does it?

Sylvia: I don’t know.

Ms. Seymour: I don’t know. It’s your [emphasis added] thing.

Ms. Seymour’s comment came as a surprise. With her comment, “It’s your thing”

she seemed to distance herself from the rest of the group. Earlier she was the center of

attention when she shared her advice at length in the extended conversation about

cooperative learning; the others asked her many questions and it seemed they thought of

her as the expert on cooperative learning. I thought she was feeling more of a part of the

group, but apparently she did not.

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Perhaps since Sarah felt she was the one who started the challenge, she may have

felt responsible for the direction the conversation was taking. Perhaps this is another

defense mechanism people take to avoid confronting the important issues, but Sarah did

what comes quite naturally to her and she set up a diversion that served as comic relief.

In the middle of this discussion, she told the story about her recent visit to the doctor for

her cold and how embarrassing it was when she was told by the nurse to pull down her

pants to receive her injection.

Everyone laughed, but Ms. Snyder brought the group back to the bigger

discussion. She said: “Well, here’s a thought. If you respect yourself and your respect

others and you respect learning, wouldn’t the discipline come easily; if you have all this

respect ingrained in you?”

Sarah responded:

Actually, respect encompasses all of that. I think you are right. I think having

discipline in that sense as written sounds very awkward. I think if you delete it,

then it is implied. And you know what? You guys got in the little effort, that’s

my… I couldn’t decide if I wanted effort as the prime goal.

Hearing other thoughts about the topic helped Sarah think about her own and

made her thoughts visible to herself and others. After listening to the conversation she

said:

I think effort is huge too, but it sounds like we are trying to find one goal that we

hope these children have and then maybe being a good person is even more

important than all of their trying and their effort at something.

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The discussion turned again toward the wording of their statement as they

continued to revise the wording of their goals as a response to the question on CoWeb

and the debate continued. Sylvia said she didn’t like the word ‘show’. When Ms.

Seymour suggested the word ‘demonstrate’, Sylvia argued that it didn’t sound permanent.

Sarah suggested ‘have’. They agreed that the aspect of having respect for self, others and

learning would be worth working toward achieving with their students and was recorded

on CoWeb.

Although these were not major issues, the fact that Sarah brought up the challenge

when something did not make sense to her showed that she was using the kind of talk

teachers need for professional discourse. But not all teachers present seemed comfortable

with a discourse that challenges the ideas of another and this may have limited the extent

Sarah wished to probe this idea.

We spent quite a bit of time on deciding a long term goal during the first two

sessions. In Japanese Lesson Study, long term goals are very important. The Japanese

teachers in the Fernandez study (2003) spent a lot of time with the U.S. teachers at

Paterson School to help them develop their goals. After spending quite a bit of time on

this discussion, I tried to explain the importance of having a school-wide long term goal.

I mentioned that all the teachers from both schools would have participated in this

program originally and all the teachers could have input into these goals, but that idea

was changed because there were so many complaints about teachers being out of the

classroom.

This was when two teachers decided to be openly honest with their feelings about

this program. Sharon admitted she was the one who complained to the principal, but Ms.

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Seymour said she complained too, “I’ve been out a lot. When I got this email I’m like,

not again! Honestly I did.” Sharon complained that she did not have a choice, that she

didn’t think this would benefit her. She said she already knew the things we would

discuss, but she didn’t have time to be cooperative and teaching the way I was suggesting

was not doable. She argued:

Well, the times that I’ve been out were times that I chose. Things that I really

wanted, that I knew were going to benefit me. I didn’t know anything about this.

I don’t know who it’s helping in the long run, or how it’s helping immediately… I

have time to do what I know I need to do and this wasn’t one of those things, so I

was very frustrated by that and I feel that my kids are starting to get very angry

and I’ve had parent comments about the fact that I haven’t been there…. Here’s

the thing. I think all of us educators know that these are the things that we need to

do to intrinsically motivate our students, but we don’t have time to sit down and

plan lessons like this on a daily basis or a weekly or monthly even….It’s really,

really hard to sit down and plan out a lesson like this on your own and I know that

you are talking about doing it cooperatively, but we don’t have the time to be

cooperative and for me it’s very frustrating because what you’re telling us is stuff

that we do know. We do know that working hands-on, motivating our children to

do these things is important. We know that, but we also have to be realistic and

know that we have all this to do before here and all this to do before here and we

have to meet those goals, otherwise we wouldn’t be here…But to teach things in

the detail that we should be teaching them, you know, that, you’re suggesting is

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going to give them a really deep and thorough understanding of something, may

not be a doable thing for us.

Ms. Seymour didn’t think teaching for understanding was impossible. Her

complaint was that there just wasn’t enough time because there was too much to teach:

We don’t have a lot of time. We have too much to teach. I mean I’ve always said

this. We focus more on the quantity we teach rather than the quality. If there

were certain things that we focused on, then we could accomplish this. I don’t

think it’s something that’s insurmountable. It could be accomplished. I just think

that everything, all the demands, it is difficult to do, you know, I guess you have

to pick and choose what you really want to come across and definitely, you

couldn’t do it with everything…there’s so many things that we’re cramming

down their throats, that in order to get it all in, you can’t teach for mastery, you

know what I mean. You just have to teach it and hope that they get it. I haven’t

done research on other countries and why they are doing better than us and why

Japan does better. I’m willing to bet that if you look at the curriculum, they don’t

teach as much.

To give them the Japanese perspective on Lesson Study, I showed Catherine

Lewis’s portion of the video, Three Perspectives on Lesson Study (2001). Afterwards,

Sharon said, “we can all give up and go teach in Japan.” She complained that there was

not a curriculum in the district and feared we would be wasting our time planning a

lesson that might not later be a part of the fourth grade curriculum. She said,

It’s not like I’m tired of learning. That’s not it at all. I love learning, that’s why I

am a teacher and I want to absorb everything you have, all that information you

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have, I would love to absorb it into my being. But my problem is, I have this

other responsibility [to cover the curriculum] and that to me is real, very real.

Ms. Seymour spoke of her frustrations she felt for getting her students ready to

take the state assessments in mathematics and language arts and how many times she was

pulled out of her classroom that year. She complained about not having the time to

process the new information she received during those times.

I wondered if the other teachers felt the same as these two, or if they would also

begin to feel that way after listening to their arguments. Then Ms. Snyder said to Ms.

Seymour and Sharon. “Think about what I think I first heard. Is there something you

guys are frustrated with in your classroom that you are trying to teach that maybe if all of

us put our heads together, maybe we might feel better about?” Sharon responded that

there were some things that could help her, which is why she was not saying the sessions

would be a waste of time, but Ms. Seymour said she was not going to teach forces and

motion yet. If you recall, I asked her early during the session if she would like to teach

the first lesson. Perhaps she was feeling pressured; I told her that she didn’t need to feel

that she had to teach the first lesson. The short term goal would determine the topic for

the lesson and that was not yet decided.

We looked at the calendar to see when the next group sessions were scheduled. I

asked what science unit the fourth grade teachers teach in May when realistically, we

would be ready to teach our first lesson. Everyone seemed to have a different topic

scheduled in May – another obstacle resulting from not having a firm district curriculum,

but most thought a force and motion lesson would be good candidate for our study.

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Looking at the calendar, Ms. Seymour said she just rescheduled her field trip and it

would take place on one of the next meeting days.

I asked them to think about ideas for teaching the concepts of force and motion.

The session closed with teachers preparing the forms needed for continuing education

units that were offered as part of this professional development experience.

Reflections after the First Session

In preparing this study, I became more aware of teachers’ needs to develop skills

for the disposition of inquiry (Ball & Cohen, 1999) and to have opportunities to ask

questions, search for meaning, take risks by exposing their thinking, and being exposed to

perspectives other than their own. These ideas guided my interactions with the group. I

was a part of the group. I wanted to guide, but not control it. Positive and negative ideas

were allowed to become visible to all.

Comparing the morning group to the afternoon group, I found discussing goals

together in the afternoon group facilitated a more productive discourse among these

teachers. The use of the data projector enabled everyone to hear and see ideas; this

helped both the auditory and visual learners and made it easier for teachers to question

and probe ideas. Completing the task of establishing long term goals gave the teachers a

framework to discuss their ideas.

The literature tells us that teachers need to find out what their students’

conceptions are so that you can build on them and help them in the construction of more

productive ones (Bruer, 1994; Duckworth, 1996; Gallas, 1995). As a teacher of these

teachers, I discovered some of their ideas about learning from my conversations with

them during their interviews and from conversations during that first day. One teacher

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talked of her learning as a process of absorbing information and needing time “to go

home…put it down and collect dust because you have to process and you have to think

about it”. Another talked of cramming information into her students but not having time

herself to work with new information and to process it. These teachers were being asked

to participate in a new learning experience, but felt there was no need, no time, or they

were already overwhelmed with other experiences. Sometimes our children feel the same

way, but we persist. Duckworth (1996) guided my thinking about how these teachers

were feeling. I could be upset about their complaints or believe these were hopeless

teachers who would not change their ways. She says the knowledge of teaching is

complex but for complex knowledge, she argues:

Teachers are often, and understandably, impatient for their students to develop

clear and adequate ideas. But putting ideas in relation to each other is not a

simple job. It is confusing; and that confusion does take time. All of us need time

for our confusion if we are to build the breadth and depth that give significance to

our knowledge. (Duckworth, 1996)

Just as good teachers understand their children’s confusion and allow some time

for it, I could not get impatient with these teachers. These teachers said they needed time

to learn new things; they recognized their need for taking time in their own learning, to

make sense of their confusion. I did not have answers – only more questions; I had the

professional standards, but no “silver bullet”.

Learning new practices would be a process that would take time, but it looked like

some did not realize they needed to learn anything new. Two teachers said they knew the

standards which they should use in their teaching, but they did not have time to teach that

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way. Before you can learn something, you need to realize that you have a need to learn

it. Sharon admitted lessons would be better if they planned collaboratively, but again she

said there wasn’t time. Attitudes about attending the meeting were different - two

teachers made it clear that they did not want to be there.

I was interested in watching these teachers to see if they would say what they

were thinking and give critical feedback to each other. It was easy on CoWeb to argue

their point with teachers who were not present, but when Sarah first ventured out by

saying something did not make sense to her, one teacher made light of it and another

teacher withdrew from the conversation. By the end of the session, two teachers were not

afraid to say what they were thinking and criticized spending time with this program.

What could I learn from their feedback they gave me? Was it just a venting of

frustrations? Many factors existed within the district that made things difficult for

teachers. The curriculum changed many times in recent years and they knew it was still

in a state of revision. Newer teachers were unsure about what they were responsible for

teaching their students because they got different answers from different sources. There

were too many concepts which they were responsible for teaching. Teachers want to have

choices in their learning. They should have been notified earlier in the semester that they

would be participating in these days of professional development. This would be a

process that would take time. Would they want to continue?

The Second Mathematics Session

Another obstacle surfaced on the day the second sessions were to meet. While

getting ready in the board room that morning, the principal from Greenfield called to say

that Ms. Seymour was absent and he needed another substitute. He would only be able to

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send one of the two teachers to the meeting. He wondered which one he should send.

The Curriculum Director offered to substitute at his school so both teachers could come.

Instead, because Ms. Snyder did not have her own class, she occasionally substituted for

the teachers in her building when needed. If she subbed for the teacher attending the

other all day workshop, the second substitute assigned to that building would be able to

go to the other two lesson study teachers’ classes. Then the two classroom teachers could

attend the session. Since both of the other two teachers were in the mathematics group,

one of these teachers would attend the science session instead. Since Ms. Miller taught

science and Ms. McHugh did not, Ms. Miller was asked to come that afternoon instead.

Responding to feedback on CoWeb. The second session started by reviewing the

feedback received from the fourth grade teachers to finalize the long term goals. During

the first session the fourth grade teachers responded to the fifth grade teachers’ ideas

about students’ acknowledgement of inappropriate behavior and acceptance of its

consequences on CoWeb. The fourth grade teachers thought it would be impossible to

achieve that because behaviors change throughout life. The fifth grade teachers’ initial

response was to give the fourth grade teachers “a few words back.” Fifth grade teachers

still felt it was not impossible for them to expect their children to be able to acknowledge

their inappropriate behavior. Marilyn argued that part of being a well adjusted adult is

knowing which behaviors are required in different situations. She gave an example of

her niece who frequently used inappropriate language with her friend but knew she

shouldn’t when she was visiting her mother’s house. Ms. McHugh reminded everyone

that teachers used different behaviors in the staff room and the classroom. All agreed.

Different perspectives on this issue were brought up and discussed with enthusiasm in

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defense of their original position. Since the fourth grade teachers were not there, I

presented their point of view for them. The fourth grade teachers meant certain behaviors

are expected no matter where they are and that these behaviors had to do with having

respect to self, others, and learning.

Melissa brought up the second part of their long term goal – accepting

consequences for their behavior. A discussion followed with examples of students who

blame others for their behavior and behaviors at home. It was agreed that if students had

respect for self, others, and learning, they would not blame others for what they did

wrong. It was decided that they could partially agree with the fourth grade teachers and

this became the long term goal.

The whole group discussion allowed for the exposure of more ideas. The task of

defining long term goals kept the discussion in a more positive direction and less a

complaint session, which is often the direction conversations are headed in the staff

room.

Short term goals. Once the long term goals were decided, they needed to choose

the short term goals which would decide the topic of the lesson. The curriculum in the

district was loosely structured. Most teachers said they did not use the mathematics

textbook. Some said they used it as a resource. The fifteen year old science textbook

was replaced by science kits, but the teachers still had those old textbooks on their

shelves and used them anyway. Many of the science kits sat unopened in the storage

closet. Although we would not plan a unit, the teachers were asked to think about how the

lesson they would plan would fit into a larger unit. The fifth grader teachers discussed

the idea of multiplying fractions for the study lesson.

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Teachers seemed to become more comfortable with each other and some were

willing to take risks. For example, one of the teachers was not afraid to admit that she

didn’t know how to teach the multiplication of fractions. She said she learned things with

her students. She commented, “I was not a very good math student ever and this is my

first year ever teaching math. This is all new to me.” She told the story of one of the

things she learned from her students.

A few days previously, I worked with her class exploring patterns with equivalent

fractions using the plastic fraction circles. When we recorded the fractions equivalent to

one-half on the board in the order of increasing numerators, students noticed many

patterns; among them was the discovery that the denominators were the multiples of two.

Her students continued to practice finding equivalent fractions this way; they counted by

ones to find the new numerators and used the multiples of the denominator to find the

new denominator. She was curious about what her students would do to find equivalent

fractions for a number that did not have a numerator of one, so she asked them to find

equivalent fractions for two-thirds. She was ready to teach the algorithm she learned as a

student. One of her students told her, “Well the top number instead of going by ones is

going to go by 2's because you start with a 2.” She said how she went home that night

and tried several examples to see if it always worked and then said, “I went, Wow! I

didn't know that!”

We talked about the multiplication concepts students would need before learning

how to multiply fractions. Then I suggested that we start the lesson with a real world

problem to solve. I asked them to think of problems that we might use. All the examples

they mentioned were examples of multiplying a whole number and a fraction. Then I

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asked if they could think of an example using two fractions as factors. These teachers

could not think of one. One teacher asked,

Teacher One: Why do they have to know it if we don't ever use it?

Teacher Two: They are going to do it in Junior High and High School.

Teacher Three: But why are they doing it in Junior High and High School?

Teacher One: Right. That's my question. Why do we, if we are adults and we

are teachers and we don't even need to use it and we can't honestly,

five of us here with college education can't think of one legitimate

way that we can use it in real life?

A vote was suggested and every teacher voted deferring this concept to the sixth

grade teachers. Then I gave them examples. For example, if you had a recipe that called

for one-fourth of a cup of sugar and you wanted to make only half of the recipe, or if the

recipe called for one-half of a cup and you needed one-half of that. Some of the teachers

thought that was dividing. Some could not understand how when you multiply, the

answer gets smaller. I demonstrated this concept by folding a piece of paper in half and

then taking one-half of that, resulting in one-fourth. Marilyn was still confused and said:

I think saying that you are cutting a recipe down, you are going to have a hard

time convincing kids they are multiplying…I understand that it works, but in my

mind that doesn't make sense. If you are making it smaller, you are not

multiplying.

AIMS Education Foundation has a lesson that uses the area model to help

students understand the multiplication of fractions, Fair Squares and Cross Products

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(Hillen, 2000). I left the room to copy a lesson we were discussing as a possible research

lesson.

While I was gone, Marilyn asked Ms. McHugh, who volunteered to teach the

lesson, if they were going to get to watch her teach. She responded: “You get to slam

dunk me!” Marilyn said she would like to teach a lesson too. The conversation

continued as they talked about previous experiences being observed teaching a lesson.

One teacher said when the principal came in for her evaluation once she threatened her

kids and told them they would get locked in the closet if they were bad. Another teacher

said that she told her kids that the principal’s evaluation would be like her test. The kids

asked with surprise, “You have to take tests?” This was the conversation that took place

when I was out of the room; I only learned of it when listening to the tape recording of

the session. Although they did not admit this in front of me, their conversations seemed

to show some concern about teaching the lesson while their peers watched.

The teachers liked the lesson I copied and thought it might be a good one to teach.

More ideas were discussed. We discussed using pattern blocks or fraction circles to help

students better understand the concept. Marilyn said that some of her children did not

like using manipulatives. She said:

I have kids that do not like the fraction pieces. They did them with you because

you were in there and they were told to do it, but when I gave them the choice

yesterday, they all went and put them back on the back table. I handed them out

and said you could use the sticks, you could use scrap paper, you can use, here are

all your choices.

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I responded, “Did they get them right?” She said, “Um, yeah, I checked through them.” I

said it didn’t matter if they used manipulatives or not, as long as they were getting the

answers right. She said, “Almost, nobody got below a ‘C’.”

There was more discussion about using manipulatives and what kind they use in

their classrooms and what kind we should use in the lesson. Mary Ellen thought

manipulatives helped students visualize the fraction and that helps them retain their

understanding. Marilyn reminded the group that it is also important to keep the auditory

learners in mind as we plan the lesson.

Melissa suggested using cooperative groups in the lesson, so they would be able

to work on the long term goal of respecting themselves, others and their learning. She

said, “What if we had, if they are having responsibility for the project and the learning,

what about cooperative groups? They could each have a job and they would be

responsible for that job during the lesson.” We discussed if multiplying a fraction times

another fraction would be conceptually appropriate, if this was an introduction to the

multiplication of fractions. We discussed if they should be responsible for simplifying

their answers to lowest terms.

The morning session ended Ms. McHugh announced that she would not be there

for the next session because she would be on a field trip with the other fourth grade

teacher, Ms. Seymour. Would she still teach the lesson of she was not there the next

week to plan it?

The Second Science Session

The teachers in the afternoon group were talkative when they arrived for their

sessions. On this day, Sarah shared a story about one of her students who made an

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interesting comment while he helped her sort classroom library books by genre. He told

her that he read mostly informational text. Sarah said she was amazed by this student’s

articulate comment because it did not match his other classroom abilities; she said he was

one of those students who “can barely write his name!”

Ms. Miller was then introduced to the group. I found out that Sylvia started

teaching the forces and motion unit already to her students and asked if that meant there

was interest in designing a lesson in a topic other than force and motion. Sharon

exclaimed, “Oh, Sylvia” in a tome to show disappointment that she went ahead with that

unit knowing that was what they were considering as a topic for the group. Sylvia

responded to Sharon’s comment by saying: “I would just prefer not to teach it with my

kids. Is that a possibility?” Sarah kidded Sylvia and said, “We need bad kids to test pilot

with anyway.” Concern about being the one to teach the lesson showed up again in a

different way with Sylvia’s actions. There was still interest in designing a lesson on

forces and motion though, so we kept that topic.

There was a problem with the data projector, so we first watched the Annenberg

video, Drag Races (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 2001) instead of

looking at the CoWeb page and finishing the long term goals. In this video fifth-grade

students explore the physics of motion using plastic cars with strings and washers

attached to provide a pulling force. This video was shown to give the teachers a good

example of inquiry teaching along with increasing their content knowledge. In between

segments where you see the teacher interact with students and students interact with each

other, a physicist from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, explains the

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science concepts taught in the lesson. After watching the lesson we talked about the video

and the features of inquiry teaching we observed in it.

I gave the teachers copies of the state science curriculum framework. We looked

at the objectives, vocabulary and the contexts suggested by this document. I explained

that our students would not be responsible for vocabulary words like acceleration and

velocity, but the force and motion book would help us understand the concepts better.

I distributed copies of selected lessons from the AIMS Education Foundation and

the copies of lessons Ms. Snyder downloaded from the Internet and sent through inter-

school mail since she was not able to attend this session. The discussion turned toward

the lack of materials the district provides for this topic. Sylvia said she started the unit

with Science Court: Inertia4. This program explores the effect of gravity on a moving

object; it allows a student to observe the relationship between mass and inertia and

observe the effects of inertia on an object inside a moving vehicle. The district has the

interactive software and some materials. She did this lesson as a demonstration but said

she would prefer to do it with students in small groups, if the resources to do that were

available. She didn’t feel the students who were not close to her during the

demonstration understood the concepts she was trying to teach.

Another teacher entered the conversation and commented about how frustrating it

was for her doing a hands-on activity with the whole group. In a previous experience, she

had children squirting each other with vinegar. She now prefers teacher-led small group

activities so she knows that the children are learning the concepts.

4 Information on this Tom Snyder’s Productions program can be found at

http://www.tomsnyder.com/products/product.asp?SKU=SCIINR

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A discussion about behavior management, including the choice of intrinsic and

extrinsic reward systems was initiated and teachers shared their ideas. Ms. Miller was

new to Greenfield that year, but the fourth grade teachers there used a system of cards.

She said she adopted this system for her fifth grade class: “I got it because the fourth

grade teachers were doing it and I thought ‘good grief, it is easier for me to change than

to change 31 kids’. So I said I’ll change and learn how to do this.” I reflected on her

statement and on how teachers are influenced by other teachers; they easily adopt the

culture within the school.

They started to discuss ideas for the lesson and the short term goals, but we

needed to get back to the long term goals. After moving the cords on the data projector,

it was ready and we went to the CoWeb page to finalize those long term goals.

The fourth grade teachers were interested in how the fifth grade teachers

responded to their comments on the CoWeb page. They must have expected critical

feedback because they asked if I could repeat the fifth grade teachers’ responses. Once

again, I think they were kidding, but they were interested in what comments were made.

Monica: Today the fifth grade group looked at [the CoWeb page].

Sylvia: Did they look at ours?

Sharon: Did they have lots to say about that? (Laughing)

Sarah: Can you repeat any of it?

Monica: They picked out, they said, this must have been Sharon saying this,

or Sylvia saying this, or Sarah saying this.

Sharon: You're kidding. Were they right?

Monica: Yes.

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Sharon: That's scary.

Sylvia: But I didn't really input into any of this because I was typing, so if

they said Sylvia said any of this, I didn't say any of it.

Sharon: Uh huh, yeah.

Sylvia got defensive and denied having anything to do with the comments, other

than being the one who typed them.

Sylvia: So they really characterized us and picked us apart?

Monica: They didn't pick you apart. They said, oh, this is Sarah. Sarah said

this

Sylvia: We didn't do that to [them]

Monica: No they did it in a nice way…

Sharon: They knew us that well?

Monica: Yeah. They knew you that well that they could…

Sharon: Well our staff works together and plays together so we know each

other…

Monica: That might be it. That could be it.

The teachers from Forest Hills did know each other well. The fourth grade

teachers, Sarah, Sharon and Sylvia, were in their second year of working together.

Although this was the first year teaching fifth grade for Marilyn, she and Melissa worked

in the same school for several years. This was Megan’s first full year of teaching. Mary

Ellen worked with all the Forest Hills teachers whose students were assigned to her

resource class.

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Short term goals. After the long term goals were decided, we moved back to the

discussion of short term goals for the lesson. We thought about what were the most

important ideas that we wanted the children to know as a result of this lesson and within

the unit. Taking ideas from the state framework and discussing them, they decided the

short term content goals for the unit will be: (a) mass directly affects motion; (b) friction

is a force that slows things down, and (c) a force is a push or a pull that can speed up,

slow down, stop or change the direction of an object. During this discussion, they

referred to the Annenberg video several times. They noticed that the children in the video

were not using the word friction, but they observed its effects on the cars.

We turned to the process goals by looking at the constructing and reflecting

objectives in the state framework. According to our state standards, students should:

Generate reasonable questions about the world based on observation; develop solutions to

unfamiliar problems through reasoning, observation and/or experiment; manipulate

simple mechanical devices and explain how they work; use simple measurement devices

to make metric measurements; develop strategies and skills for information gathering and

problem solving; construct graphs and charts and prepare summaries of observations; and

develop an awareness of the need for evidence in making decisions scientifically. We

discussed which of these standards they observed in the Annenberg video; they thought

all of them were present.

We needed an inquiry question to give students purpose in the lesson. Sylvia

noticed there were two inquiry questions in the video and they were written on the

blackboard. The teacher in the video asked these questions at the beginning of the lesson

and then at the end during the whole group discussion. They brainstormed possibilities

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for a lesson and even discussed teaching the same lesson as in the video. Sylvia thought

that she wanted to try a different lesson. She said, “For me, once I see a lesson I can

pretty much do it almost verbatim.” I asked her if she would like to teach the lesson we

observed on the video then and she responded. “No. I just feel that how is that going to

make me grow?” Two other teachers agreed and it was decided that we would design a

different lesson. I would look for more lessons and send them so they could review them

more carefully before the next lesson. Parent conferences were coming the following

week and the afternoon session ended with conversations about them.

Affordances of talking about long term goals. At first I was concerned about the

length of time it took to determine the long term goals. It was the end of the second

session and we still didn’t have a lesson to teach in either group. As I reflect on what

happened, I realize now we needed this time to think about and discuss the characteristics

of learners in the school. This helped to establish a common purpose for our work.

Although I thought this was time consuming, I found out that it was not in comparison to

the amount of time spent preparing for the lesson study cycle in Japan. Prior to the start

of their lesson study cycle, nearly a year is spent investigating students’ abilities and

skills and the interests of teachers (Yoshida, 1999a). In his research Yoshida discovered

the average length of the full Konaikenshu, the in-school teacher education process that

includes lesson study, is four years and my timeline was just six sessions.

Deciding on a long term goal first for the lesson may seem strange to many

American teachers. Lewis (2002a) argues that one of the reasons why lesson study

improves instruction in Japan is because it allows teachers to focus on long term goals.

She describes how the long term goals help Japanese teachers:

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Building lesson study around long-term goals may also enable Japanese teachers

to keep in mind the qualities such as love of learning and capacity to get along

with others that may underlie student learning but can be forgotten in the daily

grind of school. Lesson study’s long-term goals recognize that student learning is

greatly shaped by their motivation, sense of support from classmates, and other

habits of heart and mind. (Lewis, 2002, p.14)

In the United States, the pendulum swings from one reform movement to another.

Sometimes we focus on academic domains, and then the pendulum swings to the

affective domain with concerns about efficacy or self-esteem (Lewis, Schaps, & Watson,

1995). Working on long term goals along with short term goals can provide a balance in

instruction and allow us to consider simultaneously children’s intellectual, social and

ethical development during instruction. Lewis describes another benefit, which may

deserve consideration during this time of meeting requirements for the No Child Left

Behind Act of 2001. She argues: “Long-term goals that emphasize both social and

academic development may help guard against the ‘quick fixes’ that focus on test

performance at the expense of students’ motivation, commitment to schooling, and

experience of school as a supportive environment” (Lewis, 2002, pp. 14-15).

The Planning Sessions

Spring vacation and parent teacher conferences came between the second and the

third sessions. The third and fourth sessions were planning sessions to develop the lesson

they would teach. In the next session I combine these two sessions and describe what

happened.

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The Multiplication Lesson

I started the session by sharing the book, Making Sense of Fractions, Rations, and

Proportions (2002) which I purchased at the NCTM conference I attended between

sessions. Taber’s chapter deals with the multiplication of fractions and describes the

difficulties students have with this concept. These are similar to the difficulties teachers

in this study had in the previous session, which was finding a fractional part of a given

quantity and thinking they are division problems. Taber categorizes and illustrates four

types of multiplicative situations: combine equal groups, multiplicative compare,

multiplicative change, and partitioning. She designed an instructional unit for the

multiplication of fractions based on this framework.

Teachers discussed the fraction concepts they taught up to this point in the school

year and what concepts they still thought they needed to teach. Teachers said they still

had to teach multiplication of fractions, decimal concepts, percentages and ratios. The

teachers who were new to the grade or new to teaching complained that they did not

know what was expected of them and weren’t sure what they should teach. As I

mentioned previously, the curriculum was being revised and teachers did not use the

mathematics text. This was a problem as the elementary students advanced to the middle

school and Megan experienced this first hand. She was a substitute for several months

for a sixth grade math teacher who was on maternity leave. She heard the complaints

from those teachers and saw for herself the weaknesses in the students’ abilities and

shared these concerns.

Curious about what The Principles and Standards for School Mathematics (2000)

had to say about this, I asked them to look at page 148 in that book where the

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expectations for grades three through five are listed. Addition and subtraction of

commonly used fractions was listed, along with “develop and use strategies to estimate

computations involving fractions and decimals relevant to students’ experiences.”

Multiplication of fractions was not specifically named.

The teachers then talked about what they were doing, how they were teaching

fractions and how their students responded to the lessons. Megan gave examples of her

students’ ideas during a discussion of how to write one tenth, how to represent it, and

what it means. She wanted to see if her students could recognize one tenth as a fraction

and a decimal. The discussion continued for awhile and I commented its value but I

asked them to turn their attention to decide on the content of the lesson we needed to

prepare. Should we design a lesson on the multiplication of fractions? Megan said yes,

but Marilyn said she was still hesitant. She said:

We are putting a lot of work into this lesson and a lot of work into doing this and I

hate to do it for something that, when we do get a curriculum, we can never use

again because it is not our responsibility and we are not to teach it…maybe it is

not fifth grade.

After a long silence, Melissa responded, “Part of me says yes, part of me says no.” She

thought yes, because she already taught multiplication of fractions when she taught fifth

grade in previous years. She felt students should be exposed to this. I asked Mary Ellen

and Ms. Miller what they thought. Mary Ellen never taught multiplication of fractions,

but thought students should have mastered all the readiness skills they need before it is

introduced in fifth grade. Ms. Miller said she didn’t know because she never taught fifth

grade before. Since she was a paraprofessional at another school for many years, I asked

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her if this concept was taught at that school and she said that it was. Megan said she

would play devil’s advocate. She asked: “Are these children at the place where we can

do that? Whether or not we should and whether or not they are ready for that are two

totally different things.”

Ms. Miller talked about the difficulties her students experienced when she taught

the multiplication of decimals. She said, “I’m afraid their knowledge of fractions isn’t

solid enough for them to really grasp the understanding of what to do when, if I start

throwing multiplication at them.” Ms. Miller apparently did not see connections between

the multiplication of tenths as decimals and as fractions. Indeed, the algorithms are

completely different, but the concept is identical.

A discussion of what should be taught first, decimals or fractions, began. Megan

explained how she decided to teach them at the same time. Marilyn said she disagreed

with that philosophy and explained her own ideas of teaching fractions first, but added

that she didn’t think there was one right or wrong way. Ms. Miller agreed there was no

right or wrong way and said you needed to use the way that is comfortable for you and

that works for your kids.

These teachers believe that the words you use and the way you explain things is

important. Marilyn said that when your top students don’t get a new concept, then you

really messed up and you need to go back the next day and say, “Forget everything I said

yesterday. Don’t remember a word I said. Let’s start all over again.” Melissa said, “It’s

just wordage, how you present it…Usually the more basic you are, the easier it is for

them to comprehend what you are trying to say.”

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I tried to challenge their ideas about teaching. I took this idea about trying to be

very basic about what you teach and suggested that we design a lesson that would be

basic and would help the students develop the concept of multiplication of fractions. I

told them that I believe difficult concepts can be taught to children if they are given

meaningful experiences. I suggested:

I’m thinking that we could do the same thing with multiplication of fractions but

not even tell them the rule, that you multiply the top numbers and multiply the

bottom numbers because that is meaningless and they are going to forget it

tomorrow or over the summer… If we could give them experiences where they

develop the rules, and it would be building on what you already are doing with

fractions.

I referred to the table in Taber’s article and suggested we start the lesson by doing

problems with a whole number multiplier and a fraction, similar to the kinds of problems

suggested in the previous session.

Marilyn mentioned that she was helping her niece who attended school in another

district and she was doing problems that involved a fraction times a whole number. I

asked her why we were arguing about whether or not we should teach this. Many voices

were heard. Marilyn responded, “I would just like to know where…” Another voice

interrupted, “Where we’re going with it.” Several voices are heard. Marilyn continued,

“It’s not that I’m saying, no, I don’t want to do it. It’s because nobody has said, ‘This is

where we should be.” Melissa said it wasn’t going to hurt them and commented that her

own third grade child already mastered all the multiplication and division facts and

wondered how his teacher did this.

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I continued to refer to Taber’s article and read how she introduced her unit with

whole number multipliers in the context of problem solving. She invited students to

represent and solve the problems before asking them to do this symbolically. She wanted

her students to make arguments to support their suggestions. I compared this

argumentation in mathematics to the process of constructing and evaluating hypothesis in

the science talks (Gallas, 1995) which I lead in Megan’s room earlier that year and also in

a second grade teacher’s room. Gallas argues that “the kinds of talk and thinking that

children engage in when studying science naturally parallel what both practicing

scientists and historians of science report (p.13).” The scientific process of making

hypothesis and supporting with evidence is similar to the process of making conjectures

and supporting them as the students did in Lampert and Ball’s classrooms (1998). This

second grade teacher was a good friend of Marilyn and Marilyn made a comment about

how much the second grade teacher liked the science talks.

The teachers agreed that we would teach the multiplication of fractions. I

suggested we use Taber’s article as a framework for our lesson. Since the discussions

seemed to be more productive when we used the data projector to display ideas in the

science group and since Ms. Miller was the only one present from her school, I suggested

we work altogether and use the data projector. Megan volunteered to be the group

recorder.

Prerequisite skills and many other issues were discussed. Many fraction concepts

were discussed in depth and their importance to the lesson. Did students need to know

the terms numerator and denominator before teaching multiplication of fractions? Does

using the language demonstrate understanding? Did they need to understand improper

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fractions? Did they need to know how to simply fractions? What was the difference

between naming and identifying a fraction? Teachers anticipated what their students

might do or say. It was decided that we needed to find out what students knew before we

could plan the lesson, so a pre-test was designed (see Appendix E). Then they discussed

whether the post test should be the same as the pretest.

Teachers agreed and disagreed with each other. They questioned and they probed

each others ideas. They talked in detail about the problems they would ask, what fraction

to use, what whole number would be best. Teachers’ talk was developing into the

discourse of inquiry. Their thoughts became visible and when they did, they sometimes

had to question them. Marilyn and Melissa knew children younger than our fifth graders

who were learning more rigorous mathematical concepts than the children at Forest Hills

and Greenfield. When those ideas became visible, they had to question their own ideas

about letting the sixth grade teachers teach the multiplication of fractions.

After the pre-test was designed, I suggested they let their students discuss the

problems if they wanted to. Marilyn argued:

Once you start the discussion and they start discussing with each other, they start

learning…If we are going to teach the lesson…wouldn’t that be better a part of

the lesson rather than a separate thing, because I mean I can tell you right now

some of those that are going to get it right away are going to quickly explain. I

mean my class is getting really good at helping the ones that are not getting it as

quickly and they turn to them and [say] “This is what” you know. If I give my

class a chance to discuss, then I might get too much from them.

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Marilyn seemed to say that she wanted a fair test of the lesson we would design.

At the same time, her words seem to imply that she knew children can learn from each

other. This shows a social constructivist perspective of learning. But was she concerned

that her role of teacher, the dispenser or gatekeeper of knowledge, was also challenged if

the children started learning these things before she taught them? She seemed to want to

attribute student learning to something a teacher does during the process of instruction

rather than something students do. Was she looking for the right words and actions to

say as the teacher of the lesson that would impart the knowledge as were education

researchers in the 60’s and 70’s who thought teachers’ behaviors made a difference.

Some teachers feel that allowing students to learn from each other involves a loss of

control, as if the student should not be allowed to open the gate too soon. Did she

consider this lesson study a good way to design the perfect lesson? Does she believe that

a teacher can control the learning to facilitate the learning.

Megan and Melissa were not going to be able to attend the next meeting. Melissa

was going to be out of town and Megan had eye surgery scheduled for the day before our

scheduled meeting day. We still needed to plan a lesson. Should we start with the

multiplication of a fraction and a fraction or should we start with a whole number and a

fraction? We needed the results of the pre-test to inform the design of the lesson. With

only three sessions left, one of the sessions would be needed to teach the lesson and

another session for the feedback session and revision, it looked like there would be time

for us to observe only one lesson.

Marilyn and Mary Ellen were the only teachers present for the fourth session,

besides me, because the Greenfield teachers dropped out, Megan had eye surgery and

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Melissa had another engagement. We checked the pre-tests; results indicated that 86% of

their students could figure out one-half of 24, but 38% or fewer were able to answer the

other problems correctly.

This informed our decision for the lesson. Marilyn would start off with an easy

problem, one-half of 12. For the next problem, she would keep the numerator of one and

the whole number 12; they would then solve one-fourth of 12. The children’s chorus was

preparing for an evening concert, so that event set up the context for the problems.

Students would use journals which we would make for the lesson to show their work.

Two other problems were chosen for them to practice in the journal: one-sixth of 18 and

three-fourths of 12. Pretzels and cups were chosen for them as the manipulative to help

them solve the problems, if needed.

Then she would give the students a problem to solve that had a numerator greater

than one. The context for these problems was the number of teachers at the school who

attended a meeting. The problems we decided on were: two-thirds of 12 and three-

fourths of 12. Two similar problems were chosen for more practice and an evaluation

question for the end of the lesson. Marilyn wrote these problems on chart paper so she

would have the space on the board for children to use to share their work (see Appendix

F for the mathematics lesson plan).

The Science Lesson

All were present for the third session except Ms. Seymour who was on a field trip.

Between sessions I gave the teachers copies of lessons to consider for our research

lesson. I also copied the first two chapters of Force & Motion: Stop Faking It!

(Robertson, 2002) and sent them to the teachers. I prepared materials needed to try some

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of these activities to help the teachers in choosing a lesson that would best help us teach

our lesson goals. Sharon brought a large binder that she saved from her undergraduate

science methods class. She said she still used it as a source of science lessons.

After the sharing and the small talk, we reviewed the major understandings that

we decided were goals for the unit. Although we were not going to plan the whole unit,

we needed to see how the lesson fits within a larger unit of study for forces and motion.

For the unit, we wanted children to understand how forces can stop things, move things,

speed up, slow down or change directions of moving objects. We discussed each of the

lessons with these goals in mind.

One teacher said she looked at the lessons briefly before this session, but admitted

she did not remember much. This made me think about the Chinese proverb in the front

pages of every AIMS book: “I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I

understand.” Just giving teachers lessons for their students, even good ones, does not

mean they will understand the content or the pedagogy or that they will implement them

as intended. Of course what teachers do with lessons they are given depends on the

teacher. Although Sharon did not have time to do much with them, Sarah said she chose

one of the lessons to give to her substitute that day because her substitute is very strong in

science and asked her for a hands-on science lessons to do with the children. It was

interesting to me that Sarah, like Sylvia who started the force and motion unit early so her

students would not be involved in the lesson, also had no intention of teaching the

research lesson with her class. This was very disappointing. Although the research lesson

would not be taught in their classrooms as part of this project, did they not anticipate that

the lesson would be something they would consider teaching themselves?

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We discussed the advantages and disadvantages of each of the lessons. Sharon

showed us two from her binder. One was called Power Pinwheels and another one was a

balloon rocket. She said they addressed Newton’s Third Law. I asked her what the

specific objectives were for those lessons. She responded, “The specific objective is to

be able to bend a straw at right angles (chuckling) which I think when I did this, I had no

clue what I was doing.” I thought about the binder of activities she saved from her

science methods class and I thought about the science methods class I taught during that

fall term. What would be my students’ level of understanding when they became

teachers of science?

We continued to consider some of the other lessons. We liked a lesson where

students roll balls down a ramp. I noticed that Sylvia was developing the ability to look

at a lesson from the perspective of the children. She recognized a disadvantage with this

activity and said, “It would need to be an awfully long ramp because I don’t think their

eyes could catch it fast enough with such a short ramp.” It was suggested that we use the

playground slide for a ramp. That opened up ideas about designing a lesson where they

would kick a ball to see how far it could go, but the problem they discussed about that

activity was how to measure how hard the ball is kicked. We continued to brainstorm

more ideas for a lesson or ways to make the lessons in hand more suitable. Ideas

bounced back and forth; new ideas were sparked by this rapid exchange of ideas. Sharon

thought if we did the ball on a roll activity, we could look at the effects of friction, but

she said she was curious about the brick slide activity. This was the first time the idea

about friction was mentioned.

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Brick Slide (Wiebe, 1997) is an AIMS activity in which students slide a brick

across different surfaces and measure the force as it is pulled. Students conclude that

there is more friction with rough surfaces. A short introduction connects the context of

the lesson with the problems Egyptians faced building the pyramids. In this lesson, it is

suggested that the force needed to pull the brick is measured with a home-made device

using a rubber-band and cardboard marked with a non-standard scale instead of grams or

newtons. I taught this lesson to fourth grade students previously and found the suggested

device to be a bit of a problem because the stretchiness of the rubber bands changes with

use. I suggested using spring scales, if we were to choose this activity. I showed the

teachers the spring scales and Sylvia recognized that there was something similar in the

fifth grade science kits at school.

The teachers seemed to like this lesson as a possible research lesson. They talked

about different surfaces they could try. Sarah said this was similar to the lesson she

prepared for her substitute. She used her daughter’s science fair board for a ramp, her

son’s matchbox cars, and foil, wax paper, and a towel. She said she didn’t know the

name for the reason why she used the different surfaces; she asked if it was “control”.

Although she was able to set up the experiment as suggested in the teachers’ pages of the

activity, she was uncertain about the term used to identify what she was doing. It is

interesting to note that all fourth and fifth grade students are assigned to do a science fair

project during which they are expected to “control variables”.

I also brought an activity with force cubes (Wilson, 2000) to show the teachers.

To make a force cube, paper strips are folded back and forth to make a spring. The force

cube is placed next to two or three wooden cubes that are glued together. When released,

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the paper spring exerts a force on the wooden cubes, moving the cubes. The distance the

cubes moved is recorded. When more cubes are glued together, the mass of the

combined blocks increases and the distance they move decreases, demonstrating

Newton’s Second Law. Although this law state force equals mass times acceleration, it

demonstrates that unbalanced forces acting on an object will cause that object to move.

This was also demonstrated in the video we watched last week. We played with these

force cubes for awhile, and talked about balanced and unbalanced forces, but decided that

some children would not fold the paper carefully enough to get good results since we

were experiencing difficulties ourselves.

During this investigation, Sarah mentioned the article from the Robertson book.

The teachers liked that book and found it informative. They read about Newton’s Laws

and Robertson’s easy-to-understand explanations. They asked if this book was available

for all the topics they needed to teach. Ms. Snyder remarked, “I’m just so fascinated by

this.” Sharon commented that she was having difficulty remembering these concepts

from her physics class in college. She said, “It just really bugs me that I don’t have these

in my head.”

We set up two groups to try the brick slide activity. One group would use the

cardboard scale as described by the activity and the other group would use the spring

scales. The teachers never used spring scales before. Sharon thought you needed to put a

measured weight on the hook. She may have been confusing it with the device the

children used in the video. The children placed a number of washers on a hook that was

attached to the car by a string. They measured the force needed to pull the car across the

length of the table by counting the number of washers. Sharon asked many questions

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about this spring scale. She was trying to understand how it would work and was getting

frustrated because what I was explaining didn’t make sense to her. We finally got the

experiment set up and when she saw how the spring scale was used she finally

understood. Ms. Snyder also was having difficulty understanding how to use the spring

scale, but was not asking questions. After seeing how the spring scale is used in the

activity, Ms. Snyder said, “Now I am understanding how you are measuring the force and

[to Sharon] do you see now why we don’t need the weight? Eureka!”

They tried the experiment with the cardboard device, but had difficulties with the

string and the brick seemed to be too heavy to move with the rubber band. It was decided

that the spring scale would be the better tool to use.

The teachers liked this lesson and thought it would be good for the research

lesson. The computer and data projector were used once again to record the thoughts and

ideas as the lesson was developed. They discussed the kind of brick to use, since the one

we were practicing with seemed too heavy. They discussed alternatives to the brick, but

decided if they wanted to keep it in context of the Egyptian pyramids, it would need to be

a brick. I asked them what question we should ask for this lesson. Sylvia asked, “What

are those questions called?” Sharon responded, “Anticipatory set”.

The teachers talked about videos, magazine articles and books about Egyptians

and pyramids. They talked about the Social Studies aspects of the lesson like issues of

slavery and how they didn’t care if the workers died while working on the pyramids. I

reminded them that we needed to keep in mind the science concepts that were our short

term goals and include long term goals in the lesson design. Sylvia looked for the long

term goal on the CoWeb page and included that in the lesson plan. The short term goals

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were added next. They could not decide on a question. Did they want to ask: “How did

they move the large bricks?” or “How did they make the bricks?” or “How do different

surfaces affect how the brick is moved?” They were concerned that the questions were

not worded in a clever way that would spark the children’s interest. They did not yet

notice that most of the questions they thought about did not relate well to the short term

goals: “A force is a push or a pull that can speed up, slow down, stop or change the

direction of an object. Friction is a force that slows things down.”

It was time to end the third session. The inquiry question was not decided until the

next session. The lesson is described in more detail in the next section.

The fourth session. During the fourth session, the two Greenfield teachers were

not there because their principal wanted them excused. The three teachers from Forest

Hills finished planning the lesson.

A smaller brick was brought to the session to see how it would work. The

teachers experimented some more with measuring the force with the spring scales. One

of the things they noticed was the way the number on the spring scale changed as the

brick was pulled. When the brick first started to move, the number recorded was higher.

In our trial, it started at four and then changed to one or two. Because of Newton’s first

law, it takes more force to get the brick to move. Objects tend to keep doing what they

are doing. Sarah thought this would be a problem with the children because they would

not know what number to record and if it were her class, all the children would get out of

their seats to ask her what they should write. I suggested we tell the children to record

the largest number they observe. We decided to have a place on the recording sheet

where they could describe any problems they might have during the lesson. Discussing

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why the numbers changed would be beyond the scope of the lesson, but the children

should describe it if they observe it. We were also concerned with the students reading

the numbers on the spring scale; the students would need to read decimals.

Between sessions, Sylvia designed a worksheet to use during the lesson. This

worksheet did not have a place to record the conclusion. Sylvia asked the group, “Have

you ever asked your kids to draw a conclusion?” I reminded them of the conclusions the

children make in their science fair projects. It was evident that the teachers did not

connect the science fair projects to the kind of science they could do in their classes

throughout the year. Sarah asked what the conclusion might be for this lesson. We

discussed the conclusion.

We also discussed how the data needed to be gathered from the groups and

recorded so the children would be able to draw a conclusion. Sylvia sketched a graph

that she thought would be good for displaying the data. Her graph displayed the data in

horizontal bar graphs. The newtons were placed on the x-axis. With that type of graph,

the students could visualize the surface with the least amount of frication with a longer

horizontal bar. At the same time, Sarah was drawing another example of a graph. Her

graph was a double bar graph. It would show each group’s results for the smooth and

rough surface. Sharon asked, “Are they making the graph as a group or a whole class

graph…We need to figure out how we are going to record the data” She said, “I’m so

lost, but that’s OK.” I did not realize at the time that Sharon was so uncomfortable with

the graph. We could have used more time planning this part of the lesson as you will see

when you read about the lesson implantation.

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Sylvia brought books about the Egyptians building pyramids. We decided to

introduce the lesson with a short story about this. Instead of reading any of the books, we

would make a short Power Point story that showed highlights. Sarah said she would write

the text and choose the pictures. I volunteered to make the Power Point slides.

A few more things needed to be done after this session to prepare the lesson.

Sylvia was to redesign the lesson worksheet so it included the new questions, recording

areas and conclusion. She would also check the spring scales that were in the science

storage closet. Perhaps they had a different scale.

At the end of the fourth planning session Sarah said, “I have so enjoyed being

here with these people. It has really been insightful. Thank you.” I also enjoyed this

opportunity to work with these teachers planning the lesson as we did over that last few

sessions. This kind of activity is what I felt was missing from my work as Learning

Specialist. We had the time to talk about the content and pedagogy and connect those

ideas to the standards. The teachers needed this time to. During the first lesson, the

teacher who said she knew how she was supposed to teach said about my own research

study, “You are going to learn a lot from me!” I looked forward to the lesson enactment.

Implementing the Lessons

The lessons were taught during the fifth session. Because the Greenfield teachers

dropped out, the two groups were combined; all the teachers were now able to observe

both lessons. One teacher from Greenfield, Ms. Snyder, came back to observe the

science lesson. The science lesson was taught first from about 9:30 a.m. until 10:30 a.m.

It was followed by a short break to set up the camera and give teachers time to write their

reflections. The mathematics lesson was taught from 11:00 a.m. until just after noon. All

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the teachers met at the board room at central office for lunch. The feedback sessions

were held that afternoon. In this section, I describe the science and mathematics lessons.

The Science Lesson

The long term goal for the science lesson was that students will have respect for

self, others and learning. The short term goals were from the Michigan Curriculum

Framework. Students will learn that: (a) a force is a push or a pull that can speed up,

slow down, stop or change the direction of an object; and (b) friction is a force that slows

things down. This lesson was intended to be an introduction to the unit. It was adapted

from an AIMS lesson, Brick Slide (Wiebe, 1997) (see Appendix G for the science

lesson). In the lesson, as adapted by these teachers, students would observe, measure,

and record the force as they pull a brick across smooth and rough surfaces. Four 12’ x 6’

strips of sandpaper were glued along the lengths of 4’ x 1’ particle boards to create the

rough surface. String was tied around small patio pavers. The pavers were pulled with

the spring scales along the length of the boards on the rough and smooth sides. While

they pulled the bricks students would use spring scales to measure the force in newtons.

Students will observe that it takes less force to move the brick across a smooth surface

than a rough surface and explain that there is less friction for a smooth surface and more

friction for the rough surface.

During the lesson, students sat in groups of five and six. Teachers were assigned

to observe a group and sat in a chair nearby. The remaining teachers stood in the back of

the room, but moved to the groups while the students worked.

To begin the lesson, Sharon asked the students what they remembered from their

conversation the day before. The children called out words; force, newtons, Laws of

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Newton, apples, gravity, the ‘I’ word we don’t have to remember – inertia. She responded

with good for these words, but said that they were not hitting on what she was expecting.

Then someone said push and pull. That was what she was looking for she said, but then

asked for one more. Someone called out turning. She told the children they were doing a

good job.

She then showed them a short Power Point story that introduced the challenges

ancient Egyptians had building the pyramids (see Appendix H). In the story, limestone

was mentioned as the kind of rock the Egyptians used to build the pyramids. She

connected this kind of rock to a previous lesson by asking them if they remembered

limestone from their rocks and minerals unit. Some of the students responded that they

did. The last slide of the Power Point introduced the questions for the investigation. The

investigation questions were: (a) Over what kind of surface is it easiest to pull a heavy

brick? (b) How much force is needed to pull the brick? After she read the first

investigation question, some children called out water and another said ice. Without

acknowledging their response, she went on to the second question. She then asked them

to number themselves in their groups from one to five and fold their arms on their desk

when finished.

When they were ready she called the students up by number to get the materials

which were distributed quickly. She asked the students to raise their hand to describe the

board. When a student responded that one side had sandpaper and the other side was

smooth, she asked why they thought it was like that. One of the students suggested it was

so something could stay on better. Another student said it would have something to do

with force. She said that was a good answer. She asked Robbie why one side had sand

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paper and he responded that his worksheet (see Appendix I) referred to measuring both

surfaces. Robbie was a third grade student who came to Sharon’s science classes because

he needed more challenging work. Sharon said it was good that he knew how to use his

resources to answer questions. A fourth student said he thought they were going to find

out which one was faster and she said, “Oh!”

She spent a little time more asking students what was different about the spring

scales, compared to the ones they saw the other day. One student mentioned the color

was different. Another student said it was harder to pull. She asked them to notice

something about the numbers. By this time, many students were calling out answers.

She acknowledged Nick who raised his hand and told the students she would wait to hear

from him until she had a better audience. When it was quiet, Nick said that it didn’t have

“halves”. Sharon responded that was true, but it “also didn’t have those other little tiny

partial numbers that we call something very special; what are they?” She called on David

who responded, tenths. That was the correct answer she wanted and explained that they

would be measuring their bricks with whole numbers, not tenths.

The spring scales we originally planned to use for the lesson were scaled in tenths

of a newton. We were concerned that students would have a difficult time measuring

with decimals and if they rounded to the nearest whole number, there would be too big a

margin for error; we might not get the kind of differences in measurements we needed.

The teachers found these other spring scales in the closet where science materials are kept

and a last minute switch was made. Sharon wanted the students to recognize the

difference in the scale before they started to measure.

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She explained how they were to pull the brick and use the spring scale to measure

the force. She asked them to first predict how many newtons it would take to move the

brick across the smooth and the rough surfaces and to record their predictions on their

worksheets. She went around the room assisting groups and reminding them that their

predictions did not have to be the same as other members of their group. Robbie had his

hand over his predictions. Sharon told him that it was all right to compare predictions at

the group. She gave the students about four minutes for this part of the lesson before she

called their attention to the whole group. She told them they were going to do their

investigation, but first wanted to know why they were asked to do it three times. She

referred to how they needed to repeat investigations three times for their science fair

projects and for other investigations they did in their classroom. A student responded

that they needed to repeat the investigation three times to be sure they get the right

answer. She responded that scientists repeat experiments at least three times to be sure

they have it right, because anything could go wrong.

She then asked the students if they remembered what she told them about fact and

theory. Trent explained how the people thought it was a fact that the Earth was flat and

that Christopher Columbus discovered the world was round and then that became the

fact. Sharon said, “That’s right. Awesome.” David said a “Theory means it’s not a fact,

they think it’s a fact, but it’s not a fact.” Sharon continued that after several trials, they

proved it to be a fact, and until somebody proves them wrong, they call it a fact and

compared this to the case of Christopher Columbus. Going back to the lesson, she told

the students how they were going to hook the spring scale to the string that was tied

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around the brick and reminded them that they needed to observe the spring scales

carefully. She asked them to take turns with the different jobs.

It was now time for the lesson exploration to begin, although by this time, some

students already measured and recorded the force. She visited the groups as they worked.

One of the groups noticed they were getting three different numbers. She asked them

why that was happening. They said that they thought some of them were pulling harder

than others. She responded to their statement by repeating it and then moved to another

group. At the next group, she asked them what they thought of the investigation and if

they liked it.

After five minutes of working on this investigation, she called the groups’

attention back to the center of the room. She said, “Some of you are still finishing up

your numbers, but the majority of you can listen.” She asked the question that was on the

worksheet, “What surface needed the greatest amount of force?” A student responded

that it was the sandpaper, because it needed the greatest amount of force. Sharon said

that was the right answer and she liked how he gave a reason too. She asked all the

students to write this answer on their worksheets.

While they were answering this question on their worksheets, she walked around

the room and announced that many of the students did not write the word Newton as a

unit in their answer and that she was very picky about that. Then she said, “We’ll go on

to the next question together. Let’s talk about it before you write the answer.” Children

worked quietly for about two more minutes writing their answers. Then she asked the

second question from the worksheets, “If you were to pick another surface to test that

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needed very little force what would it be? Why?” She asked them to write their answers

on their worksheet first and then they would discuss them.

After one minute, she asked students to share what they wrote. The first student

said “the desktop because it was smoother than wood”. Sharon talked about the special

surface on the desk that made it smoother then the wooden board they used. The second

student said, “Ice, because you can slide on it.” The next student said, “A slanted smooth

piece of wood going down, because you wouldn’t have to push on it.” Sharon found that

response “insightful”, but said that would be another lesson they would try later that

week. Another student said the marble floor. At first she said she never saw a marble

floor. She asked if the student meant a floor with the round marbles spread across it, but

the student explained that it was the other kind of marble, the rock. She laughed when

she realized what kind of marble floor the student referred to. The next student said,

“Pass it by hand.” Sharon said, but “What if the brick was too heavy for one person to

lift?” She went back to the Power Point story that showed the rocks that were dragged by

several men. She told this student that she was glad she wanted to share her ideas, but

she wanted her to think some more about this. Another student said the floor would be a

surface that would be easier to pull the brick across. Sharon replied that it would be

easier because it was waxed.

She asked the students to answer the next question, “What problem did you

encounter during this investigation?” She asked the class to write this answer down on

their worksheet. Although her intent was to respond individually to this question as they

did in the last question, the students began to discuss this in their small groups. She

walked over to group three’s table and asked them what problems they had, but the

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students did not know what problem she was referring to. One student replied that his

group had a problem working together. Another student said there was a problem with

the spring scale. Sharon reminded them how difficult it was for them to measure the

force.

As an explanation to the reader, the amount of force needed to move the brick

changes after it starts to move. According to Newton’s first law, or the law of inertia,

things tend to keep on doing whatever they are doing. An object that is at rest remains at

rest until a force moves it; a moving object continues moving until a force stops it. The

children were reading different numbers on the spring scale as a result and they suspected

something was wrong with either the way they pulled the brick or with the spring scale.

More force was needed to get the brick to move because they had to overcome the brick’s

inertia and the force of friction. Once the brick started to move it had only to overcome

the friction force.

A student from group three responded to Sharon’s question by saying that they

weren’t pulling smoothly enough. She said that they should write that down. The

response from the next group was that they didn’t always pull it the same way. Sharon

did not respond in words, but she smiled. The next group’s idea was that the people kept

stopping as they were pulling.

The small groups discussed the answers to this question for about five minutes

before their attention was redirected to the whole group. She said that she found all the

groups were having the same problem – they were all trying to figure out why the number

didn’t stay the same as they pulled the brick across the surfaces. She wanted to share

group five’s explanation. Jenny thought somebody was holding it when she was trying to

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pull it. Sharon told her that nobody was holding it and asked the whole class if they

could help her explain why it felt like somebody was holding it.

The first person to respond said it was the sandpaper slowing it down, but he

couldn’t explain it. The next student said it wasn’t the sandpaper and that it was similar

to what happens when your foot is on the pedal going about one mile an hour. Sharon

rephrased it and asked him if he meant that sometimes you push harder on the pedal so in

this case you are pulling differently? Steve nodded. Another student demonstrated with

the brick how he pulled it, but it kept stopping. Sharon asked if he could explain; he

thought it was the weight of the brick slowing it down. Brianne thought it was because

some people’s muscles could not keep pulling it the same. David raised his hand and

asked to be called on. He said:

Maybe it’s like when you ride on something, the rubber, like if you ride on the

sidewalk then go on the road, it can be smoother. If you ride on something

rougher, it kind of slows you down. It takes more force just to go the same speed.

Some of the students agreed with David and expressed agreement. Sharon said,

“Wow, David, why do you think that is?” He said, “It was something, like rougher, like

water, something is stopping it.” David was having trouble explaining, although he was

able to relate the phenomena to his experience riding a bike.

Sharon asked what kind of word could be used to call that stopping motion. She

gave a hint. She said that they have been talking about pushes and pulls and forces.

Bobbie hollered out gravity, but Sharon was still talking with David. She asked David if

something was pulling back when he pulled on the brick, but David said he didn’t know.

She asked the class what they thought of Bobbie’s idea about gravity. No one was sure

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about that. She reminded the students again that they were talking about forces. Then

David wanted to add his new ideas. Once again, he compared the phenomena to what it is

like when you ride a bike in the wind. The wind is a force that pushes you and that force

is stronger.

Sharon asked all the students what was stronger. Now James said it was gravity.

Trent thought it was the weight of the brick. David asked if it is the same force like when

you pull the tablecloth and all the dishes stay there. Sharon said no, that was inertia; that

was what they were talking about the day before. She was waiting for someone to say

friction.

She decided to go to the Power Point slide and direct their attention to the focus

question, “How much force is needed to pull the brick?” She said to the students that

“Some of you are so close to understanding what was going on here and you’re giving

really good examples, so I know you know what’s going on…Why does it keep

stopping?” James said, “The sandpaper is slowing it down and the wood is not slowing

it down.” Robbie said it had something to do with the way the brick might be lifted up

off the board as people pull on it.

Sharon directed the students to look at their recorded measurements. She then

asked the first question again - What kind of surface is easiest to pull a heavy brick? The

students responded that it was the board with the smooth surface. Then she called on the

groups to call out their measurements. For the smooth surface, their measurements

ranged from 7 to 10 newtons and for the rough surface, their measurements ranged from

18 to 23 newtons. This answered the second question, “How much force is needed to

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pull the brick? Sharon still did not get the word friction, but she concluded the lesson

with the students returning the materials.

The Mathematics Lesson

There were two long term goals for this lesson: (a) students will have respect for

self, others and learning and (b) students will take personal responsibility for their

behavior. The short term goal was for students to find a fraction of a whole number.

The problems planned for the lesson were printed on chart paper before the lesson began

(see Appendix F for the lesson plan including the problems the students would solve).

Thin pretzel sticks and portion cups were chosen as manipulatives to represent the groups

of students in the problems. A journal was designed for students to show their work and

record their explanations. This journal consisted of three sheets of paper folded in half,

inserted into a fourth sheet of paper, which was the cover. All the pages were stapled

together inside the fold. During the lesson implementation, students sat in groups of four.

Four of the observing teachers sat in desks next to a group of students and two of the

teachers sat in chairs in the back of the room.

At the beginning of the lesson Marilyn explained to the students that they would

work in groups. She reminded them that they should only make positive comments to

each other when discussing their work with their teammates. By doing this, children were

made aware of the long term goal of the lesson. Then the students were told that the

topic of the lesson was fractions and they would be doing something new. Marilyn

introduced the journal to the class and explained how they would read a problem from the

chart and work it out by themselves first. They could use the journal pages to figure out

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the answer and then they should talk about the problem with their partner. Later there

would be a whole group discussion about the problem.

The first problem was: “Twelve students from Ms. Marilyn’s class are in chorus.

Only one-half of the students in chorus will attend the spring concert. How many of Ms.

Marilyn’s students will attend the spring concert?” After a short time working alone,

students began to collaborate. After a few more minutes, students were asked to come to

the board to share their answers and explain. Craig was the first student called to come to

the board. He wrote twelve divided by six as shown in Figure 1, and said, “I thought half

of twelve was six.”

Figure 1 . Craig’s response to 1/2 of 12

Marilyn responded, “So you thought one-half of twelve was six? OK. So how

many students are actually going to go to the concert then?” Craig responded, “Six.”

She did not comment on Craig’s answer, his strategy for finding his answer, or ask for

comments or questions from the class. She asked if any student did it another way.

Mark raised his hand and went up to the board next. As shown in Figure 2, he

wrote twelve-twelfths minus one-half equals six-twelfths. When asked to explain his

work, in a very quiet voice that was difficult to hear, he said, “I know that twelve-

twelfths is one and that if you take half of that, it’s six-twelfths.” Marilyn responded,

“OK, good, excellent, excellent.”

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Figure 2 . Mark’s response to 1/2 of 12

Without asking Mark what the answer to the problem was, that is, was it six or six-

twelfths, she proceeded to ask if someone else solved the problem another way.

The next student to describe a strategy was Rick. Rick was one of her brightest

students and she admitted during the planning sessions that sometimes Rick taught her

things about fractions. Rick wrote six times two equals twelve. (see Figure 3).

Figure 3 . Rick’s response to 1/2 of 12

When asked to explain, he said, “I multiplied six two times and got twelve.” Marilyn

asked him how many students were going to the concert and he replied, “Six.” To this,

Marilyn replied, “OK”.

Nancy’s raised hand caught Marilyn’s eye next; Nancy came up to the board and

wrote six plus six equals twelve. She explained her answer but her comments were not

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audible. Marilyn did not comment on her response. She summarized the first problem

by saying: “So half was an easy one. We all pretty much figured out what half of twelve

was.” She did not say that half of twelve was six.

She then told the students the next problem was going to be a little more difficult

and it wasn’t going to be as easy. They were not to write anything in their journal yet, but

were to talk to their partners about what they might do to solve it. The second problem

was: Twelve students from Ms. Marilyn’s class are in chorus. Only one-fourth of the

students in chorus will attend the spring concert. How many of Ms. Marilyn’s students

will attend the spring concert?

After two minutes of small group discussions, she called on James to explain how

he would figure it out. He said, “You would have two and you would go up by four; you

go two, four, six, eight.” Marilyn asked him why he would go up by two. He paused for

awhile as he thought of a response. Marilyn repeated the question, “Why would you go

up by two?” But she may not have been aware that in her response to him, she changed

his response of “go up by four” to “go up by two.” Although he said he would go up by

four, he counted by two’s starting with four. He did say anything about either error and

finally said he could not remember. Marilyn went on to another student who said the

answer was six because she “added two onto the two and then added two more.” Marilyn

responded with an OK and called on still another child who thought the answer was six.

She then asked all the students if someone could perhaps make a drawing to help them

figure this problem out. Angel raised her hand and came to the board. She drew three

circles and divided each circle into four parts (see Figure 4).

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Figure 4 . Angel’s response to 1/4 of 12

Angel shaded in one of the parts in the first circle, but could not explain how that would

answer the question. Marilyn did not ask why she chose to draw three circles or any

further probing questions. Since one-fourth of twelve is three asking some probing

questions might have revealed some further understanding. She said to Angel, “That was

a good start. We have some pictures up there.”

Then she called on Rick again. He came up to the board and wrote one-fourth

equals two-eighths equals three-twelfths (see Figure 5).

Figure 5 . Rick’s response to 1/4 of 12

Marilyn asked him how many students would go to the concert. He put a box around the

three-twelfths and then circled the three. He explained: “I could go up by one, you could

go up by the numerator and up by the denominator.” Pointing to the denominator of four,

he explained, “four plus four is eight; eight plus four is twelve.” Pointing to the

numerator he said, “One plus one is two; two plus one is three.” Marilyn asked the other

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students what the process was called by which he wrote these fractions; she was looking

for them to tell her that they were finding equivalent fractions.

I recognized what the students were doing here. A few weeks before this lesson, I

did a lesson with her students where we used fraction circles to find equivalent names for

one-half, one-third and one-fourth. By writing an ordered list of these equivalent

fractions, starting with a unit fraction, patterns of increasing multiples for both the

numerator and denominator are discovered. During the planning sessions, Marilyn

described an aha moment when she asked her students to find equivalent fractions for a

fraction whose numerator was greater than one. Rick told her it was easy; just list the

multiples of the numerator. Perhaps Marilyn did not see the sequence of numerators

increasing by one as a pattern of multiples of one. During the planning session she told

us how she went home that evening after he said that and tried this with several examples

before she was convinced that this would work for all fractions. Proud of her new

understanding, she must have practiced this with her students and was pleased that Rick

found this pattern useful in solving the problem. But as you will see, this process caused

problems for many students who thought the resulting answer was a fraction, not a whole

number.

Eileen was next to come up to the board to show her work for finding one-fourth

of twelve. She went to the board and started to draw circles with twelve lines in each

circle. Eileen received mathematics instruction from the resource teacher and was not

usually present for Marilyn’s mathematics lessons. She used rubber rings and little

blocks to help her solve multiplication problems when she was in Mary Ellen’s resource

room. Eileen transferred this strategy to the problem and said “six times twelve” would

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solve it. Marilyn did not give Eileen time to multiply six by twelve. She told her she was

on the right track and Eileen went back to her seat.

Marilyn recognized that the students were experiencing some difficulty so she

decided it was time to pass out the pretzels and cups to help students solve this problem.

She asked the students if they could show with the materials a way to come up with the

answer. She asked, “How could I use these [pretzels and cups] to figure out the answer

[to one-fourth of twelve]?” She went around the room assisting groups and asking them

how many cups they should use.

After almost five minutes of working time, Claude’s group was first to share their

ideas. Claude said, “First you use all four cups because it is one divided by four. Then

you put three pretzels, and the pretzels represent people, and you put three pretzels in

each cup.” Marilyn repeated Claude’s explanation to the class, making a point to remind

students they needed twelve pretzels since the pretzels represented the people and four

cups since they were looking for one-fourth of the twelve.

After this repeated explanation, she asked what the answer was and Mark

responded with three-fourths. Marilyn, with a questioning voice, asked, “Three-fourths

will go?” She then called on Anthony who said eight would go. Without acknowledging

the incorrectness of either answer, she asked everybody to take four of their cups and

twelve of their pretzels and put the pretzels equally into the cups. Then she asked how

many were in one cup. Students could see that there were three pretzels in one cup. She

asked them how much was one-fourth of twelve. Some responded with three.

Two similar problems were prepared for students to practice: one-sixth of

eighteen and one-third of twenty-four. She asked students to work together and use the

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pretzels and cups to solve the next problem, one-sixth of eighteen, and record their work

in their journals. She reminded students if they were finished that they were to work

together and help each other because that was part of cooperating with each other.

She gave the children about five minutes to work on this before calling them

together again. She acknowledged that she did not give some of the students enough

time to find an answer, but told them they could listen to the children that did finish.

Anthony was first to respond. He said he took six from eighteen and got twelve; twelve

is one-sixth of eighteen. Marilyn said he was close to the right thinking, but not exactly.

Ronnie said:

You have one-sixth and the six stands for the cups. You go around and put one

pretzel in each cup until you get to the right number. That added up to three, so

you go three in six cups, and three times six is eighteen.

Marilyn summarized Ronnie’s response and repeated that the number of cups

needed is the number of groups you have and that is determined by the denominator. The

number of pretzels is the number of students in the whole group. She asked the class

what the answer was and they responded with three-eighteenths. Marilyn corrected this

and said it was three, but did not explain why it was not three-eighteenths. She asked all

the students to model the problem with six cups and eighteen pretzels and asked again

how many are in each cup. Claude responded with three.

The students were asked to do one-third of twenty-four next. As she walked

around the room, she asked a girl what she got for an answer. This student responded

with “eight and you write that over the denominator, which was twenty-four.” This child

may have thought the answer was eight twenty-fourths, but Marilyn moved on to the next

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student without commenting on that answer. After a few more minutes, she announced to

the class that she saw three different ways to get the same answer. This time, she was

going to choose students to come to the board. Before this, children were chosen if they

raised their hand. The students she chose were students she identified while she walked

around the room as having the correct answer.

Claudia was first to come to the board. She drew three circles and started to make

marks in the circle to represent the pretzels or people. She miscounted and started to

erase. She was ready to go back to her seat, but Marilyn knew she had the right answer

on her paper, so she encouraged her to keep trying. She started over and then said nine.

Marilyn asked her to count again and when she did, she responded with the correct

answer eight.

Bobbie was next to come to the board. He also had the correct answer for

Marilyn when she visited him during the small group working time. But when he got to

the board, he said “three times one equals three” and wrote 3/1, as shown in Figure 6.

Figure 6 . Bobbie’s response to 1/3 of 24

As he wrote in fractional notation he said: “Three times two equals six, three times three

equals nine, three time four equals twelve…” He continued up to three time eight equals

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twenty-four. Marilyn asked him, “How did you know to use three?” He responded: “I

divided by three because the denominator was three.” Marilyn replied “Good job”, and

the students clapped.

Tori was next to come to the board; she solved the problem by using the list of

equivalent fractions starting with one-third and going up to eight-twenty-fourths, as

shown in Figure 7. Marilyn did not ask Tori what the answer was, but explained for her

that you could use the equivalent fraction strategy to solve the problem, but you would

say the answer was eight.

Figure 7 . Tori’s response to 1/3 of 24

She summarized the problem of finding one-third of twenty-four by reviewing

how the problem could be solved with a list of equivalent fractions or with the

manipulatives.

It was forty-five minutes into the lesson. There were more problems planned for

the lesson; next, students were to work with fractions that had numerators greater than

one. She introduced this next set of problems by asking the students if all fractions have

a numerator of one. She told them that they did not and they would use that kind of

fraction to solve the next problem. The next problem written on the chart was: “There

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are twelve teachers at Forest Hills. Two-thirds of the teachers will be at a meeting

Wednesday morning. How many teachers are going to be at the meeting?”

After less than five minutes of working together, she visited Rick’s group and saw

that he had the answer. Time for the lesson was running out, so she had Rick come to the

board to show how he did that problem. She asked him to draw the pictures and explain

it the same way he explained it to her a short while ago (see Figure 8).

Figure 8 . Rick’s response to 2/3 of 12

Rick said:

I took out three cups because that was the denominator and I took out twelve

pretzels because that’s how many teachers are at Forest Hills. I put twelve

pretzels in all three cups and since two is the numerator, I took out two of them

and put one aside.

While he said this he erased one of cups and counted the lines representing the people.

He then said. “There were eight pretzels in the cup, so eight teachers are at the meeting.”

Marilyn explained that it was possible to use the manipulatives to solve a problem

when the fraction has a numerator greater than one. Rick showed this on the board. She

asked them if it was possible to use the equivalent fraction method too. The children’s

responses were mixed. Some said yes, some said no. Donald came up to the board to

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demonstrate how he could solve the problem by making a list of equivalent fractions. He

explained how he started with two-thirds and added two to the numerator to get four and

added three to the denominator and got six. He continued until he got to twelve in the

denominator and eight in the numerator. He said then he got the answer, but Marilyn did

not ask him what the answer was. Was it eight people? Did he know it was eight-

twelfths of a group or did he think it was eight-twelfths of a teacher?

Up to this point, the lesson was fifty-four minutes long, but there were three more

similar problems on the chart, plus a final problem which would have been a final

assessment of the lesson. The band teacher came for his students. She told him that she

needed five more minutes with the students. She asked the class to work on the next

three problems. As time was running out, she told the students they could finish the last

problem when they came back from band.

The teachers left the room and went to Central Office to have lunch together. The

students were getting ready to go to lunch too.

The Feedback Sessions

The Science Feedback Session

I looked at conversations during the feedback sessions to see what comments

were made about the lessons and about the nature of those comments to see how these

teachers participated in the discourse. The feedback sessions were back-to-back the

afternoon after the lessons were taught. It would have been better to observe one lesson

and then have a feedback session, but the circumstances of the group of teachers

dropping out and the problem of scheduling substitutes required that both lessons and

feedback sessions take place on the same day.

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Before the first feedback session started, two of the less experienced teachers

made the observation that for them it was easier to make comments on the lesson they

planned. The teacher with the most experience noticed that she did not have trouble for

either lesson. The ability to analyze and give feedback for a lesson may be influenced by

one’s experience with the content or pedagogy of the lesson.

The science lesson was taught first so the feedback session for that lesson took

place first. The short term goals of the science lesson were for students to understand: (a)

a force is a push or a pull that can speed up, slow down, stop or change the direction of an

object and (b) friction is a force that slows things down. The long term goal was:

Students will have respect for self, others, and learning. The science lesson involved

students pulling a paver brick, the kind used in backyard patios, across a smooth board

that had sandpaper glued to one side to create a rough surface. As they pulled the brick

across the smooth and rough surfaces, the students measured the force in newtons using a

spring scale. These measurements would show that more force is needed to move the

same mass across the rough surface because of friction.

These teachers used a classroom observation protocol (see Appendix J) and a

feedback protocol (see Appendix K) adapted from protocols recommended by the Lesson

Study Research Group at Columbia University (Chokshi et al., 2001). In the Japanese

Lesson Study model, the teacher who teaches the lesson starts the feedback session with

her thoughts about the lesson. Sharon started with a description of some of the ideas that

went into the design of the lesson, and then she made comments about the lesson

implementation. She spoke of her concern that her students were not using the scientific

vocabulary during this lesson. The second question on the worksheet designed for the

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lesson was: “If you were to pick another surface to test that needed very little force, what

would it be? Why?” She said, “I was trying to get them to talk about why and nobody

was really putting it into words...I think they had an understanding but they weren’t

giving me the language I was looking for.” Sharon was referring to the fact that during

the discussion part of her lesson, none of her children used the word friction.

The feedback Sharon received from the teachers was positive. Marilyn was the

first teacher to offer feedback and she responded to Sharon’s comment about the

scientific vocabulary. She said she was impressed that the students were able to make

connections to phenomena outside the classroom. She was referring to David who said

during the lesson that it, the phenomena they observed with the brick, was like riding a

bicycle on rough pavement and smooth; you needed to pedal harder on the rough

pavement to go the same speed. Her comments were:

They might not have been using the exact verbs and nouns that we wanted but

they were explaining what they were talking about. They were, and the fact that

they were then taking something from class and changing it into something from

real life with bikes; I sat there going "Wow! They just applied that to everyday

life!" You know two of your kids did that and I just, even though they weren't

getting the exact terms that you might have been hoping for, I think they really

got the concept, so I thought that was really neat.

Ms. Snyder agreed that the children seem to understand the concept, although

they were not using the words. She added:

David said, “I don't know how to explain why there's more force needed for a

sandpaper surface.” The fact that he observed that about himself, that he made

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that statement, showed that he understood what was going on... I kept waiting for

the word friction, but I never heard it, but that's what they were talking about.

They knew they were talking about it. They just never used the word.

Other teachers made several positive comments about student behavior as it

related to the long term goal for the lesson. Ms. Snyder commented about the students’

respect for themselves, others and their learning. She said: “They wanted to work

cooperatively, they really did…I mean, you can tell you must do a lot of cooperative

learning, which they were really, really good.” Marilyn added:

One of the neat things that I saw, I mean this is how much they were working as a

group and as a unit, is in this one group I was watching. One boy who was very,

very shy child and doesn't like to say his answers out loud, so he whispered it to

the kid next to him and the kid next to him said it out loud. And I was just like,

you know they were taking on the different roles that are required when you are

working as a group and who needs to do what and how that's working so I thought

that was really neat.

Still another teacher was complimentary. She said, “I thought it was a

wonderfully productive level of noise in there. I know everyone has their own, um, thing

of acceptance level, but I thought that it was so on task and so, so everybody involved in

the project.” She continued:

The level of cooperation that I witnessed at the tables I chanced upon was

remarkable. I saw children who I've observed in the hallway and I would think

that have very small levels of patience, involvement, cooperation; I saw children

just avidly watching the other person operating the spring scale and then listening

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to what the child read out as the reading and then recording it; just incredibly on

task and incredibly interested and patient about being able to actually manipulate

and touch the materials themselves.

The feedback session continued with positive comments about the cooperative

nature of her children. After hearing these things about her children, Sharon commented:

One thing I find really cool about this is hearing the things the kids said. You

guys are telling me stuff I would have never, I never would have observed

myself…and some of the insights that you guys saw I didn't get to see, um, some

of the fun stuff that they discovered… Oh, I have the best kids in the world!

My critical feedback. There were many positive things about this lesson and the

way the children responded. Sharon admitted that this lesson was not like her usual

science lessons and was surprised how her students who usually do not respond in lessons

were actively involved and led the discussions. But no one was giving constructive

feedback about the lesson, about the teaching of the lesson, although by some standards

for evaluating inquiry based lessons such as the ones offered in the SAMPI5 program

from Western Michigan University, (Jenness & Barley, 1995), there was room for

improvement, so it was time to offer mine. I wondered why she seemed to change the

way the questions were asked from what was planned; the discussion was different from

what I thought was discussed during the planning sessions and different from the way the

teacher in the Annenberg video handled her whole group discussion after her

investigation. I also wondered why she did not make a table, chart, or graph to visually

represent these data.

5 Science and Mathematics Program Improvement, http://www.wmich.edu/sampi/

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The students only had about five minutes to gather the data for the investigation

before they were called together for a whole group discussion. The whole group

discussion was handled in a very traditional manner. She asked the students the first

question on the worksheet, received a correct response, and then told all the students to

write that answer on their worksheets. For the second and third questions, she asked them

to answer them independently first and then they would discuss their answers together.

Although it is not unusual for implementation of a lesson to be different from the

way it is written, my comment to her was:

I wonder about the questions that were at the bottom of the worksheet and why

you would have waited for the whole group to talk about and respond to the

answers instead of letting the kids figure out those answers themselves and then

talk about what they think happened.

She responded to my comment. She said she did lead the discussion in the way it was

planned, but not at first. She said:

I did do that both ways. And the reason I did it both ways was because the first

[question] one, I didn't wait for them to figure it out on their own and we

discussed it as they were filling it out. And then I thought, wait a minute, that's

not what I had intended so when I went to the second question, I said, OK just

write it on your own and then we'll talk about what you decided. So I switched

gears right after I did the first one because I'm thinking, that's not what I meant to

do. And in my head, had anybody asked me, “How are you going to do it?” I

would have never said the first way I did it.

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It is difficult to teach in front of your colleagues; especially the first time and this

would make it easy to forget the plan. She commented that, “I think I just got caught up

in what I was doing and trying to remember everything.” It is interesting to see the

thinking that was involved in the teaching of the lesson. But perhaps this is what Sharon

meant when she said. “I was able to add enough of my personality and my style into the

lesson that made it mine.” The traditional method of students answering questions

independently to be later checked by the teacher or for students to wait for a correct

answer before filling in the worksheet is difficult to change, even when the instruction

include hands-on, group work. No one seemed to recognize that the discussion after the

hands-on activity was not substantive. It seemed to be a fishing expedition for the right

answer and when that answer came, the search was over. Children with alternative ideas

were not encouraged to offer them. The discussion looked a little different when there

was more than one right answer, as was the case for the second question – “Which other

surface would not require much force to slide the brick?” Several students were able to

share their responses for that question, but she had difficulty with the second part of the

question that asks students to explain why. She waited for the word friction that never

came, even though the children seemed to have the concept and offered some amazing

ideas.

These teachers were still developing their knowledge of inquiry teaching and

would need more practice. The change Sharon said she made after the first question,

although better than the way the first question was addressed, still did not allow for

students to compare data from across the groups; there was no sharing of data, strategies,

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or curiosities. She said she knew what the groups were doing and didn’t see the point in

discussing it as a whole group because she felt they got the concept. She said:

Well I knew where each group was and I was talking to each group where they

were, but then as I made my way around the room, every single group was saying

the same thing, so instead of saying, “Well you tell them how you did it,” I

couldn't do that because they were all telling me the exact same thing.

She didn’t seem to realize the importance of asking students if anyone had a

different idea; she would have been able to assess if there were any misunderstandings

among the students who did not respond. Her response to my comments did not seem to

indicate an acknowledgement of a different strategy for teaching. What she did made

sense to her. She would need more experience with this idea.

During the planning session we talked about making a table and a graph with

students’ data to help them draw a conclusion. Sarah and Sylvia both made different

examples of graphs during the fourth session but Sharon did not construct a table or

graph during her lesson. During the feedback session I asked her why. She responded, “I

just thought that when we talked about that, it was going to be a different lesson. I

thought that was a follow up lesson to this lesson and I wasn't going to go there.” I

responded:

By just taking those numbers [from all the groups] and putting them, leaving them

up as a chart, then it would have been a good way to have the discussion or get

the conclusion we were trying to come up with. They would see all the small

numbers for the smooth surface and all the large numbers for the rough surface so

they could see that friction, even though they couldn't say the word friction…

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Sharon turned the conversation back to a discussion about friction. She said:

I purposefully avoided that word because we talked about the fact that we didn't

want them necessarily to use the vocabulary. We wanted them to understand.

When we were doing our lesson study, for those of you in 5th grade, we

purposefully did that, didn't use [the word friction].

In the preceding comment, Sharon addressed the fifth grade teachers who were

not a part of the planning sessions for this lesson. It was discussed in the planning

sessions that there are some words and concepts that are not a part of the state curriculum

framework and we will not hold children responsible for them. For example, fourth

grade students do not need to know Newton’s Laws, although the teachers discussed

them during the planning sessions. The intent of this lesson was to have students observe

and think about what causes more friction or less friction. Since the mass of the brick

stays the same, the students observe the kind of surface on which the sliding occurred as

a variable. According to our state framework, elementary students should be able to

describe how forces, pushes or pulls, are needed to speed up, or change the direction of a

moving object. Common forces to teach this concept include push, pull, friction, gravity;

real world contexts could include playing ball and sliding objects. In constructivist

teaching, there is sometimes a misunderstanding that children have to construct

everything, that teachers cannot tell them important ideas, they have to figure them out

alone. Perhaps Sharon thought she should not use the word friction because that would

be telling them something they should figure out on their own. I continued the

conversation:

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Monica: You could have said the word, and I thought you were going to say

it.

Sharon: Well they said they mentioned it the day before. They mentioned

friction. So I know they know friction, but they didn't connect the

word friction with what was actually happening.

This part of the conversation shows that Sharon worked with her students the day before

the lesson. She also referred to this at the beginning of the feedback session when she

said:

The kids had more information than I thought they would. I was surprised at their

answers…I was surprised…that they were able to take a very short conversation

the day before and turn it into the understanding that they had when we did the

lesson [and this] was amazing to me.

She seemed to attribute the students’ understanding of the concepts in this lesson to the

work she did with them the day before rather than this day’s investigation. Since they

discussed friction the day before, she seemed to be waiting for one of the students to say

the word again, as though knowing the word means students know the concept. Marilyn

added:

Marilyn: But they did understand the concept friction and that was what was

going on. They just never named it.

Monica: So it might have been a good time at that point, and you may want

to do this tomorrow. [You could say,] You know how something

kept pulling back; something was keeping that brick on the

sandpaper. That's friction.

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After this diversion about the students not using the word friction, I still wanted to

address the issue of a table, chart or graph. I felt that by not gathering group data and

representing them in some way, students miss an opportunity to organize data and use

those data as evidence to draw a conclusion. Although Sharon did not do this, she did ask

the groups to share their results. Group by group, students called out their measurements

and they did get a chance to discuss them. Melissa responded to my feedback in support

of what Sharon did by offering this positive comment:

I wanted to add on to what Monica was saying. You know how she was saying

about having graphs? Even though you didn't do the graph though, you did

verbally go through the groups. They heard the numbers and they felt safe,

knowing that their numbers were very similar to other groups, and I think that

helped them.

Sharon admitted than that she was not yet comfortable with making graphs with

her students. She needed more time to develop this skill before teaching it to her

students. She said:

When we were doing our lesson study, we sort of ran out of time in our planning

because we were writing our procedures up to the last minute. And I think with

the graphing and everything, remember Sylvia was making graphs, and I told you

I am horrible at making graphs? So was I going to stand up there and create this

graph in front of all you people who, you know, are probably really good at it and

I'm not? So that's in my mind too, that probably was stopping me from doing like

a culminating thing that you thought would be a good visual for them. That's not

something I do naturally so unless I can go home and think about and how I am

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going to present it, I don't do that. And that wasn't part of our procedures and it

wasn't something I had gone over and if we had put that into our procedures and

somebody had explained to me in detail: "this is the way you make a graph." I

mean, I can make a graph, you know what I mean? That's not something that

comes naturally to me, and so if it had been part of our procedures, and if we had

had more time to complete everything that we had talked about doing, that

probably would have provided the lesson with what you were looking for.

Recording the data was a part of the procedure, although it was not clear what

form that recording would take: Step 9 - In a whole group discussion, ask individual

groups to share and record their data; Step 10 - Discuss differences in data if needed and

individual groups’ conclusions; what conclusion can we make as a whole class? The

procedures as written did not specifically include make a graph. If we had time to reteach

this lesson, a revision could be made to include the construction of a graph and this

would be an inquiry for the teachers. The teachers could see how a visual representation

of data collected from the individual groups works with students.

It was toward the end of the feedback session and we started to talk about possible

revisions to make, if we were to teach this lesson again. Marilyn offered a suggestion that

more time be allowed for students to play with the brick and the spring scales prior to

starting the lesson. Megan followed that suggestion with another one – that maybe some

of the questions should be saved for the next day because she felt the discussions were

just getting started and they would have to move on to their next thing. She would like to

see “how far they could take that on their own without ever having to answer any

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questions.” Sharon responded to these suggestions with her concern about the students’

behavior. She replied,

If you give them too much time then they have time to argue with each other and

they have time to think and well not stay focused, "Well give me that, I had that

first", you know, and that kind of thing. Which I understand, you're not saying

give them that much time.

Sharon had an opportunity to hear from her peers a perspective about teaching that was

different from her own. They seemed to be telling her to slow down the lesson, but she

had an individual philosophy of teaching and her concerns about time and covering the

curriculum surfaced again. She continued:

I also truly believe that if you, if you, you leave them wanting more. OK, so like,

it's sort of applies to what you are saying and it sort of doesn't because we're

talking about a learning atmosphere where you're wanting them to explore as

much as possible and everything, but it's sort of that old adage if you leave them

wanting more they are going to want to come back the next time and play more

and learn more. And so like if I hurry them through the lesson to a certain extent,

they are going to say "Hey that was fun! I want to go back and do that again!"

Where as if, and I understand you are not saying give them that much time but

when you keep things at a quick pace, you’re doing, you are accomplishing

several things. You're leaving them wanting more; you are presenting enough

time to do the other multiple things you need to do in the day. And I mean, for

this lesson it would be wonderful to say oh let's give them all this time and

everything because that would give us a really better picture of how much they

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are going to explore and everything, but in our true academic daily lives with our

students, that's not a possibility, you know, and for us to cover the curriculum

across the board the way we have to, and cover all the different benchmarks that

we need to covered in a year, we know we don't have time to do that, you know.

So I mean this is addressing what you've said earlier too and I'm not saying that

either of you are wrong, I'm just saying, I guess in my mind and knowing my

students and knowing how they interact when there is no camera and no bunch of

adults standing around observing, I think the quicker pace the lesson goes, the

high achievers are kept busy constantly and challenged constantly and the others

are maybe skating, and there may be a time for skating and a time for not skating,

but at the same time, I don't think they didn't understand what was going on.

Marilyn responded to Sharon. The theme of individualism crept back:

That's why I started out my comment with, "I'm not sure this would be a change."

I think it does depend on whether how your kids are and, you know, your own

personal teaching style. Me, personally, I would have, especially with the class I

have this year, they would have had ten minutes just to look at the stuff.

This issue was resolved with decision that each teacher’s class was different and the

teacher has to make that decision for her class; individualism prevailed.

Marilyn: My group would not tolerate me telling them to do something

before they had a chance to explore it. They wouldn't listen to me.

Sharon: And my group would have to argue and play and maybe break

something or you know.

Marilyn: That's why I think you do have to know your group.

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The Mathematics Feedback Session.

The feedback session for the mathematics lesson followed the feedback session

for the science lesson with a ten minute break in-between. The short term goal for the

lesson was to find a fractional part of a whole number. Marilyn started the feedback

session by stating that she thought the lesson went well, but it took longer than expected

because, “I tend to want to wait until everybody gets it and not move on, so I end up

taking longer or I talk more or let them talk in groups more.” She gave some background

about the development of the lesson for the science teachers who were not a part of the

mathematics lesson planning.

Melissa was first to offer feedback and said she thought it flowed very well. She

liked how it was “organized where there was – you read the problem, you wrote your

notes, you shared, you solved your problems in your journal and then you shared. It was

almost methodical. I just thought it was really, really good.”

There was a silence. Marilyn asked if she could make a comment on Melissa’s

remark. Rather than follow the protocol of having each teacher respond to the lesson, I

allowed the break in protocol and Marilyn made another comment. She said:

Now looking back on it, there are places that I normally, and I don't know

whether it's because people were in there, this was, you know, a different type of

lesson, you know, because you guys were watching, but things that I normally

would have done, I did not do, like writing on the board, because I am a visual

person. I do a lot of things visually and I felt like that was a deficit, that … it

seemed to me to be more auditory and I feel that I failed some of the visual

learners.

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Although Melissa’s feedback was positive, Marilyn didn’t seem to agree and was

concerned about some of the students’ work. She had a chance to look through the

journals and saw that some of her children did not understand the concept she was

teaching. She blamed this on not being able to do what she usually does, that is, tell the

students how to do the problem.

I had one group that was not getting it and it shows from, you know I glanced

through the journals. They didn't get the concept at all. And it seemed a lot of

what the kids weren't getting was when we got to a numerator greater than one.

They weren't getting how to take two of the thirds. So what I am visualizing what

I would have done on the board is draw the cups, the way that Derrick had drawn

them but then circled two of them, OK, and because it would have been

something related to what I talked to: Here are your three [groups] and this is your

denominator; here's the numerator, so it's two out of your three. That's your

fraction. You know, and I would have done that visually for those kids who

weren't getting why did I take two cups.

Megan was sitting by a group that had this problem. She responded to Marilyn

and described their struggles:

So if you want to know where the problem came in, it was when they found the

answer but then they looked back at the question and the question had a fraction

in it and so they thought their answer needed to be a fraction. They most often

would take the answer and put it over, if you were trying to find fourths and the

answer became, um, was a three that you were looking for, they would say, oh the

answer is three-fourths, instead of saying the answer was three and leaving it at

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that. They weren't comfortable with the whole number idea because they didn't

understand. So what I wrote down was that as a revision, we may want to ask

them to explain.

We just finished the feedback session for Sharon and Marilyn started with a

criticism of her own teaching, so these teachers didn’t need much time to warm up to

making suggestions. But not all the teachers felt there was a problem. Sharon said the

students she observed understood the concepts and she described how well those students

interacted with each other, helping each other. But Sylvia said the students in the group

she observed had the same problems as the students in Megan’s group. Sarah thought the

pretzels messed them up and Marilyn reminded us how she kept saying during the

planning sessions that her students did not like to use manipulatives. Melissa thought

that the pretzels helped the students she observed. Sarah agreed with Megan, Sylvia and

Marilyn and said that the students she observed didn’t connect the manipulatives to the

action on the problem. She noticed:

As I'm looking at all of that, I was thinking in my own head, they don't understand

what the cup is, that the cup seemed like another entity…and so they were

confused by that and I kept thinking the cup is confusing, muddying the issue.

Maybe if they just had pretzels and they said, OK, you have twelve pretzels and

now we are going to divide them into groups, but the cups were like this whole

other thing. What are the cups, why are we doing this?

After thinking about this some more, later in the feedback session, Sarah offered another

way to help the students understand the concept of a fractional part of a set. She said:

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I was thinking to myself that the pretzels and the cups were confusing to them

because they didn't seem to understand that the pretzels represented people

initially and that they themselves were a group and the cups were indicating

groups. So then I thought, what if you just had a manipulative of some, like a

cardboard circle cut into twelve wedges and you said each wedge is a teacher, and

together they make this one group and then, um, OK, first problem: half the

teachers can go to this meeting, so that means we've got two groups going. Put a

wedge in each group until you run out of wedges. This is half the group. How

many wedges are there? There's six. And what does each wedge mean? A

teacher. How many teachers are there? Six teachers. That seems very concrete.

The problems where students needed to find a fractional part of a set, other than

one-half, were difficult for the students. It was even more difficult when they needed to

find a fractional part of a set when the numerator of that fraction was more than one.

Most of the teachers talked about how they involved themselves helping students in their

work, although they knew from the classroom observation protocol that they should not

do this. There were phrases, “So I said to them…”; “I had to break it apart for her”; “I

know we weren't supposed to intervene in this lesson, I kept trying to rephrase it to him.”

The feedback session continued with a discussion about what the students did or

did not understand about the concept, the use of the chosen manipulatives, ideas for

improving the lesson for the next time, and what they learned from observing this lesson

for the next year when they had to teach fractions. This discussion was more like the

discussion during the planning sessions, with agreements and disagreements. The talk

seemed to be moving toward the big talk. Most teachers seemed comfortable in saying

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what they were thinking, but the teachers who had the stronger mathematics background

seemed to be more critical.

Teachers were critical of the lesson, but not with the things Marilyn did or did not

do that would have improved the lesson. A review of the video tape of this lesson shows

that a possible problem with this lesson included the way children explained their

thinking and how Marilyn responded, or not, to the students, especially during the whole

group instruction. For example, students were sometimes giving answers as fractions

when they should have been whole numbers; this was not noticed and corrected. Like

Sharon, Marilyn was hesitant about when to say something and when to remain silent.

Like Sharon and other teachers who try to teach to the standards, she needs to learn when

it was alright to give children information and when to let them struggle. Although there

were many opportunities to learn, there were many opportunities missed. There would

have been a chance to discover those opportunities if there were more sessions.

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CHAPTER IV

THE THEMES

Three themes developed as I analyzed the data – individualism, time and talk.

These themes represent the challenges the teachers faced. Teachers had to cope with the

rearrangement of their relationships between the individual and the group. They had to

rethink how they deal with time. They had to learn a new kind of talk and become

comfortable with it. These themes do not represent new challenges. Other researchers

write about them too. In this chapter I will describe the challenges they faced. I will also

describe how having an opportunity to participate in this collaborative experience helped

some of these teachers begin to realize benefits of moving beyond these challenges.

Individualism

In American culture, there has always been tension between the pursuit of

individualism and concern for the community. American society seems to glorify the

individual in sports, politics, business, education and other sectors of society while at the

same time diverse groups struggle in the pursuit of their rights and interests. Recognizing

individual identities and group identities simultaneously is a challenge. In my study more

than half of the teachers expressed concern for losing their individualism by participating

in a collaborative activity with their colleagues.

Lortie (1975) found individualism to be a typical working preference for teachers

in the United States. In his description of teachers’ preferences in day-to-day

interactions, 45% reported that they had no contact with other teachers in their work, 32%

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had some contact, and only 25% had much contact (Lortie, 1975, p. 193). The activities

of the teachers in the category much contact, include: planning classes, reviewing student

work, and sometimes switching classes, but the teachers who had much contact were

usually pairs of teachers who mutually agreed to work together and they held some bond

of friendship. Teachers did not try to influence each other for, or against, this

cooperation. Although it seems laudable that teachers work together, there could be a

problem with this normative permissiveness. Sympathy and assurances are found, rather

than opportunities for growth. Lortie warns:

Normative permissiveness has a self evident function; it encourages individuals

with different needs to satisfy themselves along lines they find most rewarding.

The summative effect is to augment the gratification of the aggregate of group

members; the permissive norms of these teachers foster individual responses to

the question of proximity to or distance from colleagues (Lortie, 1975, p. 194).

Although Lortie’s study is almost 30 years old, the situation in my school was

similar. Three of the eleven teachers in my study, or 27%, might be considered as having

much contact with each other: Two of the teachers paired for mathematics and science

instruction and, in previous years, a third teacher paired with a friend. But also like the

teachers in Lortie’s study, the degree of mutual cooperation among these teachers was a

matter of individual choice, made without normative pressure.

Grossman, Wineburg and Woolworth (2001) argue that pseudocommunities are

prevalent in most schools today. These consist of individuals working with other

individuals. They seem to operate under the premise that everyone is to behave as if they

all agree; challenges to others are against the rules. Their definition of a real teacher

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community draws from Bellah’s definition: “a group of people who are socially

interdependent, who participate together in discussion and decision making, and who

share certain practices that both define the community and are nurtured by it” (Bellah,

1985, p. 333).

In their study in which they worked to build a professional community among 22

high school English and Social Studies teachers, they discovered the challenges of

individualism. Some of the challenges, they argue, arise because education does not have

a shared language of norms and values like the professions of medicine and law.

Teachers vary in their understanding of just about everything that has to do with teaching

– goals of teaching, purpose of education, role of testing. Ironically, they discovered

dangers in bringing teachers out of their isolation. When they formed their community of

teachers from the two departments, conflicts that were contained by teachers’ isolation

were released. These researchers were worried that their program for which they received

a multi-million dollar grant would be over shortly after it began. They persisted however,

worked through the challenges, and their group was able to move toward a community

whose purpose is to improve student learning and teacher learning.

Buchmann (1993) describes teachers’ individualism with respect to role or

personal orientations to teaching. Teachers who exhibit a role orientation place

themselves within a larger picture of colleagues, the curriculum, and accountability.

Teachers who exhibit a personal orientation explain their classroom practices by

references to themselves. Her observation and concern about individualism present in the

teaching culture of the United States is similar to Lortie’s. She argues that an emphasis

on the self –‘this is the kind of person I am’ – is problematic because it can put an end to

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debate and close the door to change or improvement. The dangers of individualized

teaching practice may result in minimal effort. She argues:

The teacher educator slogans of “finding the technique that works for you,”

“discovering your own beliefs,” “no one right way to teach,” and “being creative

and unique” are seductive half-truths. They are seductive because anyone likes

being told that being oneself and doing one’s own thing is all right, even laudable.

Conduct sanctioned in this fashion, while consistent with professional discipline

for those who already have the necessary disposition and competencies, allows for

both minimal effort and idiosyncrasy in other cases. These slogans are half-truths

because, although identifying teachers’ personal and commonsense beliefs is

important, once identified, these beliefs must be appraised as bases and guides for

professional conduct and, where necessary, challenged. (Buchmann, 1993, p. 148)

The teacher’s role carries with it obligations toward students to help them learn

worthwhile things. It entails a shift in concern from self to others. Teachers are

obligated to conform their actions and dispositions to the accepted goals and standards of

their profession. Justification for choices teachers make about what happens in their

classrooms should come from external standards provided by a professional community

rather than teachers’ personal habits, opinions, or interests. One would find it

unacceptable for a doctor or nurse to change standard procedures on the operating table

based on personal whim or choice. Stigler and Hiebert (1999) quote Albert Shanker’s

testimony before the U.S. House of Representative’s Committee on Economic and

Educational Opportunities:

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Doctors don’t try to figure out a new technique or procedure for every patient that

comes into their office; they begin by using the standard techniques and

procedures based on the experiences of many doctors over the years…they do

have a name for failure to use standard practices – it’s malpractice. (p. 176)

Although it is unacceptable for other professions, making personal choices based on

individual standards, standards that developed from their own years in school, seems to

be acceptable for the teaching profession. A role orientation would be preferred because

it is based on professional standards and can guide teachers in their actions, helping them

remember what their work is about and who is to benefit from it.

When the theme of individualism emerged, I analyzed the interviews again using

the lenses of Buchmann’s personal or role orientations. I discovered that during the

initial interviews, these teachers did not place themselves in the larger picture of

colleagues, curriculum or accountability but explained their classroom practices with

references to their personal opinions, habits, or interests. No one mentioned national,

state or local standards and benchmarks or how their actions relate to them. They did not

mention what should have been their more familiar North Central Association (NCA)

school improvement goals. Decisions about what content should be taught were made by

referring to their own standards, a standard which was different from the standard used to

determine academic content for their own children or young relatives. This opportunity

for a collaborative examination of practice exposed a double standard, made them aware

of it and available for discussion.

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Another example of these teachers’ personal orientation is that of one of the more

experienced teachers who didn’t think her ideas fit the norm of the other teachers in the

school so she kept them to herself. She said:

Sometimes there are things that you do, when you're planning your lesson alone,

because you know why you're doing that, and when you're doing it…but, to…

share that and say, well, this would be a good idea; I think sometimes other

people might not see it the way you do.

This teacher said she was always looking for new ideas for her practice. She had many

good ideas to share, but normally does not have an opportunity to share them and she did

not take that opportunity during this program. Still another teacher commented:

“Everyone has their own style and I could never copy someone else because I'm who I

am.”

Although there are dangers in a personal orientation to practice, these teachers’

lack of situating their teaching with other colleagues seemed to be more from a lack of

opportunity than choice. One teacher said she felt she was in her own little world. They

talked about their limited contacts with other teachers and wished they had more. Every

teacher said emphatically they would find conversations with other teachers valuable.

They described creeping out of the room for a few minutes, peeking in rooms, spying and

stealing with respect to observing and sharing ideas with colleagues. This is also

consistent with Lortie’s study. He writes: “Yet although teachers center on their

classroom affairs, they do have an interest in those who work alongside them – they are

at least sources of help and, sometimes, mirrors for assessing one’s performance” (Lortie,

1975, p. 193).

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Moving away from individualism. The teachers who participated in this

collaborative program to the end found working together to be a benefit. They claimed

that this collaboration enhanced the lesson that they planned and increased their

collegiality. They talked about how this collaborative activity could fit in with their

individual ideas. Megan said during her final interview, “We are all very different. There

is not one of us that is alike in the strategies that we, or the way that we teach a lesson.”

Then she added:

So, having said that, we all came together, came up with some kind of a lesson

that we were comfortable with, each in our own way, and you could see that when

you were looking at how incredibly diverse this lesson was; I mean from start to

finish there was a little bit of each one of us in there. So, it was neat to see then

one of us just present all of our ideas.

Melissa was apprehensive about this program at first and claimed that it was

because of her individualism, but she was curious enough to stay to the end. She said:

“What was challenging to me at the beginning was, I wanted to do this to see what it was

like, but I had my apprehensions because for twelve years, I had done everything by

myself, pretty much.” She added:

But the more I did it, the more I liked it… You're getting input from all these

different types of thinking people. You're getting feedback on what they think is

good and what's bad and you can disagree or agree and work things out...It

worked out…because everybody was patient with one another. We listened to

everything until it was completely said, and then we helped each other to

restructure.

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Melissa seemed to grow from a personal orientation of practice to a role

orientation. Others seem to develop a role orientation too. During her final interview,

Sarah acknowledged the complacency that can develop in individualistic thinking. She

said, “I think when you plan independently you could…just get in a rut. You continue to

do things in a comfortable way, a predictable way, a safe way.”

Sharon, who taught one of the lessons, often expressed concern about losing her

individuality, but she was pleased to see that she found a way to include a bit of herself in

the lesson. She explained during the feedback session that:

This morning I was thinking as educational as this whole process has been I had

to think about how doing this lesson study would really benefit me because I

really feel like my teaching is very individual and that I really take ownership in

what I do and how could I possibly take ownership in something that I didn't

really create on my own?… I was concerned that it wasn't my lesson, but as I was

teaching it, I think I was able to add enough of my personality and my style into

the lesson that made it mine.

Restructuring one’s ideas about teaching takes time. These teachers continued to

talk about their individuality. Sharon’s teaching orientation seemed to remain personal

but her willingness to stay until the end gave her new insights into her teaching and into

her students. During the feedback session, Sharon was sharing her thoughts about the

lesson:

I was very, very surprised at their insights about what they were doing…I had

Kyler wrapped. I had Trent wrapped. I had Kevin wrapped. I had James, who

never seems to be in the ball game; I mean they were really into it! All of those

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guys that normally are just the follower of whatever the leader in their group

thinks were all of a sudden leaders, not just into the lesson, but they were leading

the discussion with their questions and answers.

I asked her what she thought made a difference in this lesson compared to other

science lessons she taught. She attributed some of this to the collaboration with her

colleagues. She responded:

I must have gotten some awfully good direction from my cohorts because this was

way different from anything I've ever taught to them on my own, so maybe they

made, maybe their input into the lesson put enough of themselves or somebody

else in something that I usually neglect, that I'm not aware of… I do not ever

spend that much time putting together a lesson unless it is my evaluation lesson or

something like that. I mean I have to be frankly honest. That's the truth of it, so,

because I don't have time…This wasn't just a lesson. It was something the kids

really understood and with all of our collaborative efforts, and Sarah kept getting

us on track that day, and Sylvia with her worksheet and everything helped me stay

focused.

Participating in this program gave Sharon an opportunity to share her ideas about

curriculum with her colleagues as well as design and teach a lesson that involved more of

the national science standards than her usual science lessons. She had an opportunity to

experience and reflect on a teaching experience that was more aligned to a role

orientation than a personal one.

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Her growth was evident several weeks later when I asked during her final

interview about her ideas concerning her individuality in teaching. I asked her to

comment about the statements she made during the feedback session:

Monica: You felt like your teaching is very individual, and you really take

ownership in what you do and you wondered how you could

possibly take ownership in something that you didn't really create

on your own...

Sharon: I can't believe I ever thought that initially.

Monica: That's interesting.

Sharon: That's pretty stupid, now, looking back at it. But I think that may

have been one of those times when I was really frustrated about my

time, you know, time away from my students.

These teachers had an opportunity to channel their efforts toward their common

goals. Teachers talked about how they needed to find their own way to teach but they

also wanted to see what others were doing. Some were apprehensive about the

collaboration. Some could not see how they would benefit from a collaborative effort.

Working together was a challenge for most and allowing others into their physical

classroom space to observe a lesson was a challenge for all, but for the teachers who

stayed, the experience was beneficial. These first steps and the continuation of a process

like this may lead to their development as teachers with a role oriented disposition which

can contribute to the improvement of their practice and change in their school.

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Time

There were five ways in which time showed up as an important factor in the way

teachers were experiencing this professional development as it related to their work and

opportunities to learn. First, these teachers complained they had too much to teach and

too little time. As a result of this perception, most admitted that not having enough time

influences their decisions about what and how they teach. A few felt this also has an

impact on the amount of time they have to be collaborative. Second, these teachers

expressed a need or desire to control their time and choose the way they use it, both in

and out of the classroom. Third, time is needed to construct meaning and process what is

learned. Teachers discussed how this is true for their students but some teachers felt this

was important for their own learning. Fourth, the cultural and traditional perspectives of

teaching and learning influence their outlook on what activities define teacher practice

and their decisions about what they choose to do with their time as it relates to their

practice. Last, despite their concerns about the time it would take to participate in these

activities and the time spent away from their classrooms, the teachers who completed this

professional development program reported that taking the time to collaborate was a

major benefit.

Too Much to Teach, Too Little Time

The teachers in this study complained they had too much to teach and too little

time. They had good reason to say this. The broad curriculum is suggested as one of the

reasons why American students do not perform as well as many of their international

counterparts. In this district, the mathematics and science curricula were undergoing a

lengthy revision process. There were many reasons for this. There was the change in

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curriculum leadership. Two years ago, three different people held the position of district

curriculum director during one single school year. The state department of education was

working on a project to define grade level expectations for the core subjects as required

by federal requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. The district needed to

update its mathematics and science curricula and resources, but did not want to invest in

new materials without knowing the outcome of the state’s decisions on expectations.

An attempt to align the district curriculum to the state benchmarks through

curriculum mapping was started by another curriculum director but was not complete.

This contributed to confusion and frustration of the teachers. Recommendations for

curriculum changes were made but were interpreted by the teachers differently.

Recommendations were accepted at will. One of the teachers expressed her frustration at

the first meeting:

The only time we're going to get lessons like this is if we spend our entire summer

taking subject by subject, knowing what we are going to be teaching the next

year, which in this district right now we don't know because all of our curriculum

is not set, so that's assuming that we even know what's going to be taught and we

spend our whole summer doing subject by subject maybe we can get far enough

into our curriculum that we will be able to do units like this in our classrooms.

Do I think that will happen? No, because it's really, really hard to sit down and

plan out a lesson like this on your own.

An unclear, broad and shallow curriculum impacts student learning because it

affects the teachers’ ability to provide meaningful and coherent instruction. With so

much to teach and only so much time in the school year, teachers individually determined

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what, when and how to teach it. Contributing to these teachers’ problem was the

availability of resources provided by the district. There were mathematics texts, but few

teachers used them. Not all the elementary schools in the district had the same science

kits and you could find old science books from the previous science curriculum adoption

in some classrooms because a text was not purchased with the science kits. Teachers said

they needed a textbook.

Not all teachers had the expertise in the subject nor had knowledge of curriculum

reform, although they thought they did. This is consistent with Stigler and Hiebert’s

(1999) findings, that 95% of the U.S. teachers surveyed in the TIMSS video study said

that they were aware of reforms advocated by NCTM and most of them claimed to be

implementing them. When teachers in that study pointed out examples of implementing

reform in their video, and the videos were analyzed, the reform ideas – emphasis on

student thinking and problem solving, multiple solution methods, and meaningful student

discourse – were not present. In fact, “reform teaching, as interpreted by some teachers,

might actually be worse than what they were doing previously in their classrooms”

(Stigler & Hiebert, 1999, p. 106).

The Need to Control What to Do With Their Time

These teachers expressed a need or desire to control their time and choose the way

they use it. Teachers’ time is divided among many activities and responsibilities both

during and after school. This can become overwhelming. One teacher described how she

needs to pick and choose what to teach because she can’t do everything. Teachers in this

district, like most teachers in the United States, are able to exercise control over how they

use their time in the classroom. Their choices are influenced by their individually

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perceived value of an activity and the benefits it may hold for their children or for

themselves. Convenience and time constraints in their school day as well as their

personal life are also factors that influence what they choose to teach or not. One teacher

admitted during her first interview: “I’m so busy in my personal life, I don’t have time to

really do a lot of things justice.” Another teacher explained during her final interview

that she thinks teachers do many things in their practice because of time constraints and

this leads to making choices about fitting it all in. She said:

I mean so many things in teaching you do out of convenience or constraints on

your own school day or your own personal life… Right now, it's taking a whole

lot of effort and time, figuring out where each piece fits, and how to get it in the

day, and where the run-off is, and where to slide everything.

Besides controlling their time with respect to teaching, these teachers also desire

to control the time they spend in professional development and they express frustration

when not given the power to choose. Early in the program most teachers wondered if the

time spent away from their classrooms in this professional development activity would be

worth it; some did not believe it would. One teacher said she needed to see how

participating in a professional development activity was going to benefit her and her

students:

I haven’t been here for my students a lot this year because I have chosen to further

my own education so it’s frustrating to me because I don’t have the power to

choose that… the times that I've been out I, were times that I chose. Things that I

really wanted, that I knew were going to benefit me…I didn't know anything

about this. I don't know who it's helping in the long run, or how it's helping

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immediately... I have time to do what I know I need to do and this wasn't one of

those things, so I was very frustrated by that… We're not trying to complain about

you wanting to share information with us. I know that sounds like the way it is

coming off. That's not my intention at all, just to say that. It's just that I'm trying

to say I need to choose what and when I need to get for my classroom and for my

students this year.

A second teacher also did not see the value in this professional development

activity. She didn’t know why it would be important for her or where it would lead to in

the future.

How do we have time to do these lesson studies and meet like this? Half days and

things like that. I mean it seems like this is something we are experimenting with,

but where’s it going to go? I guess my question was where’s it going?

She found a way to gain control of her own professional development despite

what she was asked to do by the district. This teacher attended only that first session.

She planned a field trip for the second session, was absent from school for the third, and

asked her principal to get her out of the rest.

Still another teacher expressed a need to take control over her time. Although she

taught for only three years before this school year, she came to accept the many demands

on teachers’ time as “how education is.” She chose not to complete the program because

she thought the timing was bad and she did not want to take more time away from her

students. She chose to use her time for professional learning by enrolling in graduate

school. Although she thought going back to school and writing papers was awful,

graduate work in education is required by the state.

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But some teachers liked the choice that was made for them and said they would

have chosen this type of professional development. They felt the benefits they received

out weighed the problems they experienced with substitutes or being away from their

classrooms. Marilyn appreciated that during the sessions teachers would collaborate on a

lesson that they were going to use soon with their students and said if given the choice,

she would choose to participate:

I don't know that I had a choice, to be honest. But I think I would have, even if I

had had the choice. Because, as frustrated as my students got, I knew that I was

learning something that was going to benefit them. Especially seeing as how we

were doing something curriculum related and it was going to help me with that

particular lesson in the long run.

Although Melissa was in the mathematics sessions where the teachers were more

positive about the program, she said she was aware of the negative comments made by

the teachers attending the science sessions. She admitted being worried too about the

time she would be spending outside the classroom, but thought it would be worthwhile.

I know there were some remarks, maybe at the beginning of, you know, "I'm out

of my room too much" or "We're working so hard on this. We hope it's going to

be worth our time." I heard comments like that and I was even worried myself

that I hope this is worthy of the time we are taking because we were out of the

classroom…But I really do think that it was beneficial because we did get to

actually go back into our classroom and do the lesson and watch the kids and the

teacher and the lesson unfold, with all those things happening, and then feedback

time. I think that really, it worked.

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The Need for Time to Construct Meaning and Process New Learning

Time is needed to construct meaning and process what is learned. Teachers

discussed how this is true for their students as well as for themselves. During the

feedback session for the science lesson, Megan, a first year teacher, talked about how she

was concerned with the dilemma of finding the balance in allowing enough time for

students’ learning and fitting it in the time frame allowed by the structure of the school

day. During the feedback session, she made this observation about this balance:

I think that I know I'm guilty of this, trying to squeeze too much into one time

frame and not give them enough time to talk about it… but there were some really

great conversations and if you would have given them more time then your lesson

would have been an hour and a half to two hours long. So you're kind of in that

situation where you don't want to spend too much time on one topic, however,

you do need more time to investigate and talk about it. And I don't think that we

need to feel guilty about wasting school time when they are doing that because I

know a lot of times I fell like, gosh, we spent so much time talking about this one

problem and I feel bad about spending that time. But today I realized that I can't

do that anymore, because I saw so many groups that were so close to coming up

with the terminology that you wanted in their discussions, but then we stop them

because it's time to end the lesson, instead of allowing them to just continue with

their conversation.

In this program Megan had an opportunity to observe the lesson from a

perspective other than that of a teacher. From this new perspective, she realized the

importance of giving students time to construct meaning through discourse during the

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inquiry lesson. Sylvia also recognized the importance of giving her students time to

learn. She described what she was planning to change in her practice for the new school

year:

And you know what? This year…I'm going to take my time. I'm going to make

sure they understand it. If we need to go and do another activity on the same

thing, instead of moving on to another unit, then we're going to do it. Because,

it's the deeper understanding that will bring the things that you do later to a more

"aha" moment.

Some teachers felt more time was needed in their learning too. Teachers said they

were overwhelmed with other professional development programs that year. The

elementary schools received a technology grant and part of that grant was required

professional development in project based learning and technology. Teachers were

pulled from their classrooms several times earlier that year to learn to use the software

their students would use for their projects. In addition to that, at the beginning of the

school year, teachers were informed of the state’s professional development requirements

and were encouraged to seek out their own professional development opportunities.

Perhaps this is what is meant when Ball and Cohen (1999) describe current traditional

methods of professional development as being decontextualized and a patchwork of

opportunities stitched together into a fragmented and incoherent curriculum. Ideas and

information from these professional development activities created a cognitive overload

for some. They needed time to figure out what to do with the information.

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Sharon felt her own learning in this upcoming professional development

experience would not benefit her present group of students. She described her need to

process new learning:

Whenever you learn something, you have to go home; you have to think about it.

You have to put it down and collect dust, because you have to process and you

have to think about it and then when something comes up that says, "Oh yeah,

that conference taught me that! Then you dig through there and you say. "That's

exactly what I need!"

Without time to process and practice new ideas, those new ideas may be lost, like

seeds that do not have time to take root but are blown away in the wind. Ms. Seymour

expressed her frustrations:

That's another thing. We don't have time to process it. We have so many

demands placed on us this year, pulling us out of the classroom, train us for this

and train us for that, yet they have given us no time to apply it whatsoever. None,

and then it's gone. Mr. Williams [pseudonym], perfect example, coming in and

taking me out of my classroom for an hour to train me on project based learning

and this or that or that and sending me back to my classroom on my merry way

and I feel like I don't even remember anything he said, I have no time to

implement, I have no time to work with it, no time to process the information and

it's gone…I liked going for my master's program. I learned a lot from that, but we

have no time to process it or apply what we've learned and that's frustrating

because it's gone.

The Influence of the Cultural Perspective on Teachers’ Time

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Some teachers in this study were faced with another dilemma. On one hand, they

felt they would learn a lot by attending the sessions. On the other hand, they felt they

would neglect their students. The cultural perspective on teaching and learning defines

what teachers are expected to do with their time. “As a profession, teaching is primarily

defined by what teachers do when they are not with other teachers” (Cochran-Smith &

Lytle, 1993, p. 86). Yet the work of other professionals includes interacting with

colleagues. Lawyers work inside and outside the courtroom; researching or preparing for

a case with other lawyers is viewed as acceptable professional behavior that provides the

best case for their clients. Doctors do their work in or out of the hospital or office. They

consult with other doctors and work in teams for the benefit of their patients. It is

expected that members of these professions work as teams and keep current with the

knowledge and practices of their profession.

The perception for the teaching profession seems to be different. For some,

teachers are not doing the work of teaching if they are not in the classroom. This

paradigm of teaching leaves little or no time for teachers to interact with colleagues

unless it is on their own time. This Forest Hills teacher’s comments during the first

session seem to illustrate this existing perception of teaching. She felt she should be in

her classroom with her children covering the material she needed to teach. Her

comments include the notion that the parents of her children have this perception too.

My students are very, very behind, not to mention that they feel neglected, that

they feel frustrated that I'm not there. Parents are starting to feel frustrated and

when we add all the stresses we have about behavior and getting this task done

and meeting the school, whatever pops up at the school, like pictures today, or

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whatever, when we have all of that stuff and then we also have to be responsible

to get these things taught in our classroom, it's frustrating to us. And that's a real

frustration for us and something that nobody is willing to admit or discuss, I think.

This Greenfield teacher’s comments reflect her dilemma choosing between

spending time learning to improve her practice and her responsibility for the learning of

her students.

Well how are we supposed to get them prepared for MEAP when we are out of

our classrooms half of the time? [It’s] not a wasted day for me, because I've

learned a lot but for my kids and to me my prime responsibility is those kids and

their learning.

The issue of time and cultural perspective of teaching seems to have affected the

principal who was in his first year in that position after being a teacher at Greenfield for

more than thirty years. Teachers’ days are filled with activities other than instruction and

the number of these activities increase as the year draws to a close. After the third

session, he sent me an e-mail asking to excuse all of his teachers from the next meeting.

His e-mail read:

Good afternoon Monica,

I don't want to be a "pain in the ???" however, I would really like to have the

teachers stay in the building that day ... it is school picture day and the last full

day of testing ... our "plates are full!" Thank you! (Personal communication,

April 26, 2002)

After receiving this e-mail, I went to visit him. He told me that all of his teachers

were asking him to “get them out of it [attending the next session]”. He said his teachers

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didn’t have the time for the upcoming session and they would be busy during the

following session as well. End of the year programs were coming up and there was so

much to prepare. He asked me to excuse them for the next two sessions. He added how

much he appreciated the work I was doing in his school, but the coming month was just

too busy to have his teachers away from their classes. Since there were three sessions

left, attending the last session, the feedback session, would be meaningless if they did not

observe the lesson scheduled for the fifth session; this meant the teachers from Greenfield

dropped out of the program.

The Benefits of Taking the Time

Finding the time was a challenge, but having the time was an affordance. Despite

all the concerns about time, the time spent planning the lesson with their colleagues was

most often mentioned by these teachers as a benefit of the program. One teacher wished

they could have spent more time planning together. Some teachers said their day would

go so much more smoothly, their teaching would improve, and the curriculum would be

better if they could do more collaborative planning like they did in this program. When

asked which particular feature of the process was most beneficial, Sylvia replied,

“Probably the time putting together the lesson and the cooperation between us.” Melissa

also found the time during this professional development opportunity well spent. She

said:

I liked the planning sessions a lot…The planning time I thought was so important

because all the ideas came out. Any questions were answered. Anything we

thought wouldn't work we just got rid of, and we could really think about what we

wanted, because sometimes we added stuff that wasn't necessary. When we do it

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here [alone in school] we don't have the time to think that much. You know, we'll

do it maybe five to ten minutes before school starts and that's just not enough. So

I liked that time. I liked having the time to discuss it…I think if we could do that,

like I said, like a month ahead and get that whole unit planned out and ready to

go, I think everybody would have such a nice day because you are organized. You

would know exactly what you are going to do and when you know what you are

going to do, your day goes smoother because there's no wait time. There's no dull

time. There's no down time to get reorganized of what you are doing next.

When Megan was asked if there were any features of the program that were less

useful she responded, “I can't really think of anything. Maybe just that we could have

used more time, but you know, that would have been my only complaint.” She felt the

time spent in collaborative lesson planning and reflection was beneficial to her and that

the curriculum would improve if there were more time for this type of collaboration.

We were just a great group of teachers, altogether and I had respected everything

they would, all of the information they'd give me in passing. But it was nice to

actually sit down at the table and say this is what we think and this is where we

should go with this lesson, and have some time to just reflect on what we did.

Also I think it was just really important. And it's too bad we don't have that kind

of time to do that for every lesson, which I'm sure the curriculum would look a lot

different then.

Even Sharon who complained during the first session, “We don't have time to sit

down and plan lessons like this on a daily basis, or weekly, or monthly, even” found it

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beneficial to spend time planning a lesson collaboratively. During the feedback session

after she taught the science lesson she remarked:

I do not ever spend that much time putting together a lesson unless it is my

evaluation lesson or something like that. I mean I have to be frankly honest.

That’s the truth of it, so, because I don’t have time. And I think that's what we are

all clamoring for here is, we do not have enough time to put into a lesson to make

it such a successful, understanding, you know.

In her final interview, she admitted there still wasn’t time to plan lessons in detail,

but she said she experienced a real eye-opener by doing so.

The thing that I thought was really eye-opening to me was that when three or four

people sit down together… When you pick something apart, the way that we did,

and put it back together, and we knew it inside and out, and spent that much time

on that one lesson, that becomes a joy to come in and teach. Because you do

know it like the back of your hand, and you're not questioning, ok, "what was I

supposed to do next” you know?

These teachers recognized that this process was time consuming. Sharon said, “I

still have to question how in the world you would have time to do everything that you

have to teach all day long, five days a week, you know, thirty days a month.” Others

thought it might not take so long after it becomes more a part of one’s practice. Sarah

said, “It seemed like an unfathomable amount of time in it, but I imagine with practice it

becomes really quite speedy, quite second nature.” She thought there was a need for the

district to support a program in which teachers are given time to work together to plan a

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lesson and try them out with their children, but also expressed frustration because she

didn’t think the district was going to do that. She remarked:

For me to independently, outside of the school day, be able to go and put in the

thought and the planning, there was a lot of thought and reflection on this - it

wasn't just yank, yank, write it down, present - and that’s what I think our day is.

So without support from the district and all of us having lives beyond our school

day I don't see us being able to do that.

Sarah thought the amount of time away from her students so much was difficult. She

often expressed frustration about the poor behavior of her students when they had

substitutes while she was gone, but to her, the benefits overcame the difficulties. She

offered another perspective on why she chose to participate in this study.

Sometimes it was difficult, being away that frequently. But I enjoyed it so from

the beginning…And once we actually began to meet, I enjoyed it more and more,

got involved in it more and more, and saw more and more benefit in it…. As I

became more knowledgeable about it, I began to see even more merit in it.

Breaking away from traditional expectations of what teachers should do with their

time was a challenge for these teachers. They complained that it was a challenge for

them to leave their children in their classrooms with guest teachers for the six half day

sessions. They felt they were already pulled away from their classrooms too many times

that year for other professional development activities. The administrators complained

about the teachers being away from the building; parents complained that their children’s

teachers would not be in the classroom. Time was a challenge in other ways. They

complained they had too much to teach and too little time. They felt they should have a

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say in how they spend their professional development time. They needed time to

construct meaning and process their new learning from the professional development.

Other teachers felt they did not have time to be collaborative and they did not have time

to teach in the way they knew they should because there was so much to teach in the

curriculum. Finding time was a challenge and not having enough time was the reason

teachers gave for leaving the program, but for the teachers who took the time, time was

an affordance.

Talk

A third theme that developed was that of talk. In order for teachers to benefit

from a collaborative investigation of practice, they need to develop substantial

professional discourse (Ball & Cohen, 1999; Fernandez et al., 2003; Grossman et al.,

2001). By substantial professional discourse Ball and Cohen (1999) mean that teachers

need to cultivate the ability to frame interpretations as conjectures, avoid definitive

conclusions, and learn how to identify and use appropriate evidence. They will need to

practice argumentation, learn to probe their own and others’ ideas, value critique, and

learn that challenges of ideas and interpretations are not meant to be personal challenges

to individuals. These are the same kinds of skills reform in education requires of our

students. The problem is that these new skills and attitudes are contrary to the present

day culture in schools in the United States. Grossman et al. (2001) argue that if teachers

don’t have the skills to argue productively without hurting feelings and to press for

clarification in a public setting, they will not be able to develop them in their students.

Since I was curious about how these teachers would talk and interact during this

program, especially during the feedback session, I asked them during their initial

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interview about their perceived ability to offer critical feedback to their colleagues.

Although teachers thought they could do this, they knew they would have to be

diplomatic and polite. But when it came time to offer critical feedback, they found this

more difficult than they anticipated. They were able to probe, question, agree and

disagree during the planning sessions, but some said they were not completely honest

during the feedback session. In this section, I look at research about conversations as it

relates to the importance of talk in establishing communities to solve problems. This

section is not meant to be an analysis of the discourse that took place but a description of

the conversations and my interpretation of what they meant over time among the

participants.

Small Talk and Big Talk

Cochran-Smith & Lytle (1993) define small talk as the pleasant exchanges in

professional contexts when teachers swap classroom stories, share specific ideas, seek

one another’s advice, or trade opinions about issues and problems in their own school or

in a larger educational arena. They use the words small talk to imply that it is not as

important as big talk; however, small talk is important too because it creates and sustains

interpersonal relationships necessary for the larger project of joint construction of

knowledge.

Senge (1994) also refers to small talk and argues that the most important factor

for learning organizations to become more effective and accept change is for members to

develop the art of conversation. He argues:

As a society we know the art of small talk…But when we face contentious issues

– when there are feelings about rights, or when two worthwhile principles come in

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contact with one another – we have so many defense mechanisms that impede

communications that we are absolutely terrible. To navigate this enormous

change we’re going through, a corporation must become good at conversation that

isn’t polite. (Senge, 1994, p.14)

Conversations are important for knowledge building within a community. “The

conversations serve as a medium for the reciprocal processes that enable participants in a

school community to construct meanings toward a common purpose about teaching and

learning” (Lambert, 1995, p. 83). Recognizing that the process of meaning-making is

developmental, Lambert warns that it is not easy and many problems will be encountered

along the way. “Conversations in school often cease when conversants encounter

discrepancies, opposition, rough spots – people back away, become silent, divert their

interests elsewhere” (Lambert, 1995, p.92). Defense mechanisms and diversions prevent

groups from moving forward and making progress toward the changes they envision.

Stigler and Hiebert (1999) argue that the reason teaching is hard to change is

because teaching is a cultural activity. The problems we have in engaging in discourse

permeate our society and contribute to why reform is difficult. Members of a learning

community, whether it is a business organization or a school, need to learn the big talk as

they build the knowledge necessary to identify and solve their problems and make

changes based on new information learned from research.

Eating lunch together seemed to facilitate the pleasant exchanges of small talk.

The morning sessions ended with a shared lunch; the afternoon sessions began with one.

Small talk often took the form of kidding or joking and continued beyond lunch time

conversations. Between discussions of Newton’s Laws and the multiplication of

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fractions there were school-related discussions about reading groups, substitutes, parents

and standardized testing. These teachers also engaged in small talk about their own

children, diaper rash, potty training, a remedy for a finger infection, credit card fraud,

food and more. Teachers seemed to have a lot on their mind and were not always focused

on the topic I brought to the table, but they were establishing the community.

Developing Big Talk

Looking more carefully at the conversations, I wanted to see if the talk developed

around bigger issues of teaching and learning and what took place when teachers

disagreed. The teachers in my study encountered rough spots. For some, the rough spots

helped them grow; for others, the rough spots may have contributed to the reasons they

dropped out.

There were three big tasks that made up the problems for teachers to work on in

this program. First, they had to define common long term goals and short term lesson

goals. The first part of the long term goal activity was to make a list, so there was no

need to come to a consensus. In some cases, a teacher said her students did not have a

quality that was listed, but since it didn’t really matter if the qualities their students had

were the same or different, the conversation remained pleasant.

The teachers did exhibit the characteristics of diversion, backing away, and

becoming silent as described by Lambert (1995) when they had to agree on the qualities

they would like to see in their students. Because of the nature of this discussion teachers

revealed their attitudes and beliefs about teaching and learning. Differences in opinions

were presented and argued. Disagreements first took place, not face to face, but in

electronic writing using CoWeb (Guzdial, 1999). It was easier for the teachers to

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disagree with a person who was not present. I hoped that conversations would continue

on this web page. They did not; in this respect, Co Web may not be practical for

sustaining conversations. It was useful for recording ideas and making them visible to

the community.

When one of the teachers distanced herself from the community by saying, “It’s

your thing”, another teacher diverted the conversation with a funny anecdote. This

teacher who made the comment left the group after the first meeting. She gave different

reasons for dropping out and these are discussed in the next chapter. Teachers that

remained found personal value in the evolving community and its purpose. They felt

comfortable with each other and started to ask questions, probe for clarification, and

express uncertainty of their own ideas.

The second problem or task of planning the lesson was considered to be a very

worthwhile activity by these participants. They valued the time spent discussing in depth

the content of the lesson, how the lesson would be taught, and thinking about what the

children might do or say. The teachers asked questions, probed for clarification, and

admitted they did not know. They were open to hearing each other’s ideas. They were

developing the disposition of inquiry (Ball & Cohen, 1999).

The Annenberg video, Drag Races (2001), was useful as a resource in planning

the science lesson. For example, following the features of inquiry from Inquiry and the

National Science Education Standards (NRC, 2000), when I asked what would be a good

question to start the guided inquiry lesson, one of the teachers remembered seeing the

teacher in the video start her lesson with two focus questions. A lengthy discussion

evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of different possible inquiry questions for our

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lesson. When I suggested we include a place on the worksheet for the students to write

their conclusion, they remembered that the students in the video discussed conclusions.

We then discussed what conclusions we might expect from the students in our activity.

After the initial confusion about the multiplication of fractions, Taber’s (2002)

chapter was used as a resource to build a framework for the pre-test. The pre-test then

informed the content of the mathematics lesson. Although there were only two other

teachers besides me present for the last planning session of the mathematics lesson we

agreed that instead of teaching an algorithm for multiplying fractions, we would give the

students experiences to develop the meaning.

The video and Taber chapter were examples of distributed material intelligences

(Pea, 1993). Pea argues that intelligence is not a property in the mind of individuals

because the mind rarely works alone. Intelligences are distributed “across minds,

persons, and the symbolic and physical environments, both natural and artificial” (Pea,

1993, p. 47). Material intelligences are artifacts designed by people engaged in an

activity who then distribute them to others to advance and shape their engagement in

similar activities. The video and print materials were very useful resources in discussing

and planning lessons that are aligned with reform standards and helped advance these

teachers’ participation and discourse in the activity.

Comparing Their Ideas about Critical Feedback

The third big task, feedback after the implementation of the lesson, perhaps was

less successful with respect to the disposition of inquiry as some teachers were cautionary

or silent. In this section I compare what the teachers said about their perceived ability to

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give and receive critical feedback at the beginning of the program to what they said

afterwards.

Before the program. Most teachers did not anticipate a problem giving their

colleagues critical feedback during their initial interviews. In giving critical feedback,

they knew that they would have to be tactful, but they also commented that they desired

such feedback for themselves so they could improve their own teaching. Sharon

responded to my question about her ability to offer critical feedback to her colleagues:

Sharon: I don’t think I’d have a problem because I have to do that on a

daily basis with my students. So it’s not like you choose to be

mean. It’s like you’re kind of explaining where you’re coming

from – ‘Gosh, I looked at it totally different than you’ or ‘I think

that was really cool but I’m wondering why you did it this way?’

You have to be very diplomatic.

Monica: Would it make you feel uncomfortable?

Sharon: It would depend on why or who.

Marilyn’s response was similar.

Marilyn: Well, you see. I think you can give any feedback in a positive

way, even if it is something that needs work on. I mean just like

with kids. You don't say to them, that was bad and you did it

wrong. You find a way to say it so that it is helpful and that they

feel like, good, I gave it a good effort and if I do it this way the

next time it will work even better. And I think you do the same

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thing, you know, when giving feedback to adults or kids, it's done

the same way.

Monica: How do you feel about getting that kind of feedback?

Marilyn: I'd love it. I wish somebody would come in and tell me, you know,

because when you go through school and then you get into the

classroom and then there's nobody to help you again and nobody

sees what you're doing so you just have to assume you are doing it

right and I would love to have somebody come in and say, you

know what, maybe you should try this, or maybe you should try

that.

Megan didn’t see a problem with receiving critical feedback. She responded to

this question in her initial interview: “Oh, it makes me feel good. I like having my

feedback. Especially like on my evaluation, because what I think I may be doing, are

really areas that I could use some strengthening or, I need to know those things.” She

was not as sure about how she would give critical feedback to other teachers because she

was a first year teacher and she said she’s not sure of herself and what she offers may not

be right. Responding to the question about how she would give critical feedback, she

replied:

Delicately, because I'm a first year teacher - I don't have the experience of

somebody who's been in the classroom for a long time. What I think may be

right, might not be the best way. So I think I would, I would probably start out by

saying, "I think I would try to do this", or "I might, I might not have tried it the

way you did. I think I probably would have done this differently.” You know, not

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to say that's right or wrong, because I don't have a lot of experience to really say

what is right and wrong…I know it doesn't bother me when people say that I need

to do things differently or if they suggest, it doesn't bother me because I need that

right now at this point in my career. But to give it out is a lot harder, so I think

that I would just probably, maybe, especially if it is something that I've tried

before, and I know works, I might say "You know what, I tried, and I really find

this to work.

She added that she already shares ideas when she’s at lunch but she thinks it's

really difficult when you sit somebody down and say "You know, I noticed about your

lesson, it wasn't working, and you might want to try something different".

Mary Ellen thought she would be comfortable with voicing her opinion if there

was something she didn’t agree with, but she added that she is not the type of person who

strongly disagrees with things because there are multiple methods of teaching:

Monica: If you're talking with another teacher, and they tell you something

that you don't agree with, then what would you say or what would

you do? Would you have a conversation about it?

Mary Ellen: I would voice my opinion, yes.

Monica: And how do you feel about voicing your opinion when it's

different from what that person believes in? How does that make

you feel?

Mary Ellen: Well it doesn't make me feel bad or anything. I just figure, you

know, there is always other ways of looking at things, and I'm not,

if I give a suggestion, it might not be the right way to do it.

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Monica: Are you comfortable giving somebody feedback that...

Mary Ellen: Yeah, I could. But I'm not a person that strongly disagrees on

anything. I really don't. I mean if somebody says this is what

works for them, then, you know, that's what works for them, and

maybe it does work for some children.

Monica: How do you, how would you feel about receiving feedback from

other teachers?

Mary Ellen: I don't think it would bother me, just, I guess it would depend how

they said it… I'd try to say it in a nice way. Oh, that's not any

good, you don't know what you're doing, you know. No, I think

sharing ideas is very important, and I would be glad to hear what

someone else would have to say, any suggestions to make it easier

and to make it better for the children to learn.

Sylvia also felt critical feedback was necessary at times although she hoped

whoever gave her the feedback would be constructive.

Sylvia: I think it is necessary. I would hope someone would do it for me,

because if there was something that I could have done better, but

yet no one told me that, no one said, you know what, I saw what

you did and yeah it worked, but you know, if you maybe

approached it this way...But it needs to be constructive, not

destructive. I don't want someone biting me down and they need to

make sure that they are saying it in the right frame and not a

condescending sort of way.

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Monica: How would you personally feel then if you had to say something to

another person?

Sylvia: It's two ways. I would try to treat the same person the way I want

to be treated. It goes with how you are raised. You treat others

how you want to be treated and that's what I've always learned. I

try my very hardest and sometimes you know I say things before I

really think about it and I may step on someone's toes, but I always

make sure I go back and say, you know, I really didn't mean it this

way. I was trying to look at it in a different light that you may not

have seen and I just wanted to be helpful.

After the program. Teachers thought they would be able to give critical feedback

at the beginning of this experience, but this changed. To compare their feelings before

and after, I asked the teachers during the final interviews how they felt about giving

critical or constructive feedback to their colleagues. The teachers who thought they could

do this found it more difficult than they anticipated. One teacher admitted it was difficult

because she knew she would be seeing these teachers everyday. Another said she was

reluctant to speak during the feedback session because she already felt intimidated by

existing feelings.

During the final interview, I asked Sharon if she felt she received constructive

feedback. She responded:

I don't know if I was just so wonderful or if they just were kind. No, I think, I

don't know. I think we were pretty honest, but I wouldn't expect anyone to, like,

if they totally didn't agree with the lesson, or didn't think it went well, or

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whatever, I wouldn't expect them to be honest about it. I think they might say

"my concern was..." and then limit what they say with that concern, or something

like that. I think that's a really hard thing for people who practice everyday

supporting each other and saying "oh, that's a good idea" and really enjoying what

each other are doing, but when it comes right down to analyzing what that person,

how that person presents something, I think, we're probably not as, I don't want to

say we're not honest. It's just that maybe we're not adding all of the comments

that we could add, or something, if we think it could have gone better, or we think

something might have added or helped, or whatever. I bet you that that's really

hard to find.

I asked her if there was something that she would have found more useful from

her point of view. She responded, “I think seeing somebody else teach the exact same

lesson might have been useful. I think, see I didn't really get a lot of constructive

criticism. I got a lot of very positive comments.”

I asked Marilyn if she felt her colleagues were honest during the feedback session

for the mathematics lesson. She responded:

I think that people were pretty up front and honest. I really do. I mean, I heard

some criticisms about mine, and I know that I gave at least one about Sharon’s, so

I have to think that people were pretty honest.

I asked her what would make feedback more constructive or useful, from her point of

view. She responded:

Well, I mean it has to be something that, and I don't know exactly how to define

this, but, not petty, like not a petty thing, but something that would actually make

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the lesson better. And in a way that does not demean or make the other person

feel bad…Like, you know, my comment about the play time with the equipment

wasn't so much against Sharon, or the way she did her lesson or chose to do that.

It was probably more aimed at me thinking of a lot of what changes would I make

to that. And this is a change I'd make. Not that my change is better or worse, so I

think that, I guess I see the constructive response as more…of well here's

something maybe you didn't think about that I think I would do. So it's not like,

you're bad, you're wrong". It's more like, "well, maybe you didn't even think

about this, and this is something. Yours worked, but maybe this would work too,

or maybe this would work better.

When I asked one of the teachers who observed the lesson how she felt about

giving feedback, she replied that she gave good criticisms. She explained:

I was giving feedback, since I was the feedback giver, I didn't want to be harsh on

anybody because they're my friends. That was the hardest part. But I was honest,

nicely honest. But most of, I think I did two [comments], and I think I gave them

both very good, you know, criticisms. And I praised them for some of the things

that they did that I probably wouldn't have thought of myself.

This teacher was very concerned about not hurting her colleague’s feelings. She

compared this experience to her experiences giving critical feedback to classmates in her

graduate courses. She found it more difficult to give critical feedback to her colleagues

she sees everyday. She said:

I was wondering if people's feelings were going to get hurt. You know that type

thing. Because before it was with strangers and I really didn't care if I hurt their

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feelings because it was like, it was college. It was different. I wouldn't see them

until the next week…but when you are with your colleagues and your friends, you

can't do that. It's different. You have all that invested with them. And you don't

want to hurt anyone and you don't want to step on anyone's toes. And you don't

want to nix their ideas. And so I wasn't sure how that was going to go, but it

ended up fine, which was great, yeah.

She eventually noted that the reason she did not have to be critical of her colleagues

because she felt they did a great job with teaching the lessons.

Like I said, I gave feedback, but I didn't criticize. And I don't think I didn't

criticize because they were my friends. I think I didn't criticize because I actually

did think they did a great job. They covered all the bases. They were very clear

and concise. Their presentations, their introductions were great. Their conclusions

were great with the kids.

Another colleague did not offer critical feedback although she originally said it

would not be a problem for her. The problem of time was offered as one of the reasons

for her difficulty. She said, “I had a hard time with the feedback sessions. I think we

were feeling a little rushed. I think that if we had more time to donate to each of them…I

still felt very reserved about sharing anything I felt.” She seemed to be disappointed that

there were not more constructive ideas shared.

I don't think anyone said anything negative whatsoever. And I don't think that's

constructive. Because there's, yes there are positives that they did that need to be

shared with them so they can see that they had a very good lesson; but I think that

there's constructive ideas of how to better work the lesson. And that's what we

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were there for, is to look at the lesson, and see how it can be improved and how to

give criticism, constructive, towards them.

She explained what she thought about the science lesson but didn’t share with the group:

I just felt that, in some cases, she wasn't going where I necessarily would have

gone, and, I thought in some cases she was beating it, you know, with a broom,

going on too far on one thing, and not moving it on, but, I thought she did a very

good job.

She said she did not offer constructive criticisms during the feedback session because she

had a hard time finding the words and the way to say it:

I think whatever I would have said would have sounded negative to certain

people…sometimes I have a hard time wording things correctly. And, I think

some of the things I might have said I wouldn't have thought through well

enough, and it may have sounded very nasty.

The feedback session was uncomfortable for still another teacher who shared her

thoughts about it, from both the perspective of the teachers who taught the lesson and

how she would feel if she was on the receiving end:

It was a little uncomfortable because I was the low person on the totem pole and

it's kind of difficult to give feedback to a teacher who has experience already

because it's just, to me, they’re brilliant teachers, everyone of them and I love

working with them, but to give constructive criticism, I wasn't trying to criticize

any body's style of teaching. In fact, we were criticizing our own lesson, but I

know personally, I probably would have taken some of that, I would have taken it

personally if I was presenting a lesson and other people were giving me feedback

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about what I could have changed. That was a little uncomfortable, just because, I,

I didn't feel I had the right to tell them what they should do different or what I

would have done different. So that was just a little uncomfortable, but I did enjoy

the openness.

The next teacher thought everyone was honest during the feedback session,

although they were a bit cautious, and thought that this cautiousness would improve if

there were more opportunities:

We were probably a bit cautious of hurting feelings. Still in that I think it would

come with more exposure to this because I just think your comfort level would

increase. But I think we came close to being totally candid and analytical about

it. We were very analytical.

The last teacher I interviewed thought critical feedback was not the

best term for what she observed during the feedback session. She

thought “sharing insights” would be a better phrase. I asked her if

the teachers in our group shared their insights. She said, “Yeah, I

think we did…I think we were sharing our feeling or what we

thought, or felt about it.”

My reflection. Chokshi et al. (2001) designed a protocol for this feedback

session that I had, but did not follow carefully. Had I followed this protocol, all the

members of the group would have an opportunity to comment on some aspect of the

lesson study before the teacher who taught the lesson responds. The teachers who taught

the lesson have qualities that made them more comfortable in volunteering to teach the

lesson. One of these qualities was evident throughout the session - their ability to speak

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up and have their voices heard. This is a good quality to have, but as the facilitator, I

needed to provide more opportunities to hear the voices of those teachers who are less

outspoken. This same problem occurs in the classroom – teachers need to learn to give

all the students an opportunity to offer their ideas. The protocol would allow for every

person to contribute to the discussion. This is important for all the teachers to know that

their ideas are important and needed. Although near the end I asked teachers who did not

contribute much if they had anything to say, but by that time it was too late. They said

they had nothing to say, but I found out that they did. Having two feedback sessions

back to back was also not a good idea. It was an exciting adventure, but it made a long

day.

There was so much more to learn from the lesson. In her handbook, Lewis

(Lewis, 2002b) describes how the Japanese limit the discussion during the feedback time.

Once a problem is identified, their unwritten rule is that it is not mentioned again, but the

Japanese do not consider the research lesson as over. They continue to have informal

discussions about it.

Summary

Themes of individualism, time and talk appear in my study, but these themes are

not new. Grossman et al. (2001) found individualism in what they describe as

pseudocommunities showing that not much has changed since Lortie’s study of nearly 30

years ago. Teachers still work individually, even though they may be grouped in some

way. This is similar to what you see in classrooms – children working individually as

they sit side by side in groups. Until teachers have successful experiences working in

communities where they are socially interdependent, decide on common goals and work

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together to achieve them, they are not going to be able to give these experiences to the

students in their classrooms.

Compared to other professions, teachers don’t have the time to meet with their

colleagues. Almost every minute of the working day teachers are in contact with their

students. Reform efforts recommend new norms of discourse in the classroom, but

unless the teachers have an opportunity to learn and participate in this new kind of talk, it

is not going to appear in their classrooms.

The fact that these issues keep appearing in the literature is a reflection on their

resiliency. Shifts in the structure of the occupation of teaching in America need to occur.

They are not going to happen by introducing programs like Lesson Study. A collaborative

investigation of practice is a very appealing kind of form of professional development,

but unless these issues are addressed in the design of this program, other groups are going

to encounter the same challenges. Some teachers in my study were able to work around

these problems. This shows that it is possible; however, it is not going to happen in a

reliable way until these issues are addressed.

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CHAPTER V

THE CHALLENGES

Half way through the program, the teachers at Greenfield said their plates were

full. They were too busy to continue the sessions and their principal asked me to excuse

them from the rest of the sessions. But the teachers at Forest Hills had a busy schedule

too; they were involved in the same activities that filled the plates of the Greenfield

teachers. Teachers and students at both schools were piloting a new district assessment;

both schools had picture day; field day and all the various end of term activities were

coming up later that month. The Greenfield teachers dropped out while the teachers at

Forest Hills continued with the program. What made the difference? In this chapter, I

will describe what happened and offer my ideas for why some teachers stayed while

others dropped out.

The Surprise Announcement

Between the third and fourth sessions, I heard that two Forest Hills teachers

would be absent for the next session. Of these two teachers, one signed up in the fall for

a reading conference which was scheduled for the same day as our session, but she was

not going to be able to attend that conference. Since the district already paid her

registration fee, she asked other teachers - among them were lesson study participants - if

they wanted to take her place. The second of these two teachers planning to be absent

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told me she would have eye surgery for the day before our scheduled session so she

would need to be absent the following day for her recovery.

I wondered if another lesson study teacher would decide to attend the reading

conference in place of the first teacher or if any of the other teachers also planned an

absence for that day. Since we experienced substitute problems during the previous two

sessions, I sent an e-mail to the group asking them to let me know ahead of time if they

were going to be absent. Almost immediately, the principal from Greenfield sent an e-

mail back asking me to excuse all of his teachers.

Surprised by this message, I went to see him. He explained there was so much

going on at his school - their plates were full. I told him that I was aware of many of

these activities and, at the end of the last session, I tried to accommodate some of them

by trying to figure out a different meeting day, but the calendar was full for everybody.

During this discussion he mentioned the various activities that were scheduled and said,

in fact, that his teachers would have to miss the fifth session too. I explained that the fifth

session was the implementation of the lesson. If teachers did not observe the lesson, the

feedback session for the last meeting date would not be meaningful; thus, if they were

going to miss the next two sessions, they were dropping out of the program. He found

that acceptable and told me that all his teachers asked him to “get them out of this.” I

was surprised that he said all the teachers but he wouldn’t tell me who specifically was

involved in that conversation. He said they were together in the hall discussing this and

they all felt the same way. I told him I would honor his decision.

At the end of the meeting he thanked me and said he supported my efforts at his

school, but I was curious. It did not really surprise me that two of them would want to

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leave, but I wanted to talk to them myself. I called three of the four teachers that

weekend.

Their Reasons

I talked to Ms. Miller on the phone; she told me she was stressed. I knew she had

substitute problems with her students while she attended the sessions. She already told

me about some of these difficulties. All the teachers had some problems with their

students and substitutes; however, Ms. Miller had a particularly difficult incident in her

class while she was out for the second session. She had to switch groups for this session

because of a coverage problem with the substitute. This may have been a part of the

problem.

As mentioned in the description of the second meeting session, while I was

getting ready that morning at central office, the principal from Greenfield called to say

that Ms. Seymour was absent. Of the two substitutes that were scheduled in his building

for the teachers participating in this program, one was needed in Ms. Seymour’s class for

the whole day; she had been absent for several days already because of a back problem.

The second substitute would be needed for the teacher who was attending another all day

workshop. He would only be able to send one of his teachers. Who should it be?

Since Ms. Snyder did not have her own class, she occasionally substituted for

other teachers. It was decided that she would sub for the teacher who was attending the

other workshop. Then Ms. McHugh and Ms. Miller would be able to attend, but this

created another problem - both of these teachers were in the morning group. I needed to

have one of these teachers come to the afternoon meeting.

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Ms. McHugh did not teach science, so I didn’t see how she would benefit from

attending the science group’s session. I decided to have Ms. Miller move to the science

lesson study group for the afternoon. It was not ideal, of course, to have a teacher leave

her group to join another group, even for one session, but I would rather see two teachers

attend the session than just one. Ms. Miller and I worked together in her science class

during the first semester. She enjoyed the science lessons we planned and taught

together. I knew her contributions would benefit the group and she could benefit from

them. This last minute change was made. Ms. McHugh would meet with the morning

group as scheduled; Ms. Miller would come in the afternoon.

Still, another problem surfaced, perhaps as a result of the way this first problem

was resolved. Ms. Miller mentioned that the lessons she prepared for her substitute were

for her morning activities and now her substitute would be there in the afternoon. For

many teachers and classes, this would not be a problem. Sudden changes in the schedule

occur frequently in the classroom. Perhaps this was hard for Ms. Miller, since she was a

new teacher, but it was also hard for one of her students. He created an unusually

difficult situation for the substitute.

During the final interview, Ms. Miller described what happened that contributed

to this student’s problems that afternoon. Earlier that week, the students were preparing

their speeches for career day. This child said he couldn't work on his because he didn't

have any information on what he wanted to be. He said he wanted to be a serial killer.

Thinking that he was just trying to be difficult, she ignored his statement and encouraged

him to work with another student on the classroom computer. While she attended the

second lesson study session later that week, this child shoved desks and books and yelled

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that he was going to kill everybody. The principal removed him from the room and when

Ms. Miller returned to school she had a telephone conference with his mother. They

decided that this student should write an apology to the other students.

At home that evening, the mother read the apology her son wrote but did not

approve of it. She asked him to write it over but he refused. He dropped to the floor and

threw a tantrum. She sent him to his room but within fifteen minutes, he trashed it. Ms.

Miller said, “He took off his shirt. He painted himself red like an Indian; he toilet

papered everything in his room and himself.” The mother took him to the hospital and

the child was admitted. He spent more than a week in observation and therapy. Upon his

return to school he was placed in the district’s emotionally impaired classroom at Forest

Hills.

After this event Ms. Miller said she was hesitant to leave her class again. She told

me during the final interview, “The last time I was out of the classroom, they had to get

two subs for me. I wasn't allowed out anymore.” When I probed for more details about

this situation and asked her who said she was not allowed out, she replied that nobody

did, but that was how she felt. It was easy to understand why she might ask the principal

to get her out of coming to the rest of the lesson study sessions after that experience. It

was easy to imagine how happy the principal would be to have this teacher stay in her

room instead of dealing with her children’s problems while she was not there.

It did also not a surprise to me that Ms. Seymour wanted to get out of the

program. She sent me an e-mail responding to my inquiry about anticipated absences for

the fourth session on the same day I received the one from her principal. She wrote:

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Monica, I'm sorry I will not be able to attend next week's lesson study. I'm very

intrigued by this and find it to be beneficial, but I've been out so much this year

that I just cannot afford any more time out of my classroom. We also have several

things going on that day in the building. (Personal e-mail communication, April

26, 2001)

I sent an e-mail to the science group, which included Ms. Seymour, the next day

about a web site that had the entire text of the forces and motion book (Robertson, 2002)

published by the NSTA press that we referred to during our last meeting. The first two

chapters of this book were shared with them and they found them helpful in

understanding the science content. In this message I asked Ms. Seymour if she received a

copy of those two chapters since she was not present at that meeting. She again

responded by e-mail: “Thank you Monica and again I'm very sorry about the Lesson

Study. I hope you understand that I see its usefulness. It's just a very bad time to be out.”

She already told me she was not attending the next session in her previous e-mail; in a

very nice way she reinforced the idea that she was no longer participating. She didn’t say

if she received the printed copies of the two chapters and I didn’t see a need to call her

that weekend.

During the first session, Ms. Seymour was one of the two teachers who

complained about leaving her classroom. She said then that she did not have the time

because she was already out of her classroom so many times during the year for personal

absences and other professional development activities, including the technology

activities required by the technology grant. She also said didn’t know where this

program was going. During the end of that first session she said,

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How do we have time to do these lesson studies and meet like this; half days and

things like that? I mean it seems like this is something we are experimenting

with, but where's it going to go? I guess my question was, “Where's it going?”

I reflected on her participation up to this point. During the discussion on long

term goals she made the comment, “I don’t know. It’s your thing.” Perhaps she did not

feel a part of the group, but she seemed to be comfortable sharing her classroom

successes with cooperative learning for a lengthy time earlier during this first session.

She was out for an extended absence with a back problem for the second session and she

knowingly planned a field trip with her teaching partner, Ms. McHugh, for the same day

as the third session. From one perspective, it might seem that Ms. Seymour’s choice to

drop out of the program was made during the first session. Considering her absences

from the second and third sessions, it was not hard for me to imagine that she would ask

the principal to get out of the lesson study group. Of all the teachers in the group, Ms.

Seymour was the only teacher who I did not yet work with in her classroom. I did not

know her very well and she did not know me.

What surprised me the most from the principal’s announcement was that the other

two teachers from Greenfield wanted to stop coming to the sessions too. At the time I

was getting a different message from them. After the first session Ms. Snyder went

online and downloaded several science lessons that taught the concepts of forces and

motion, the topic which we were considering for our study lesson. When she found out

that she could not attend the second session, she sent these lessons to the group through

the school mail system so we would have them for our meeting. On another occasion,

Ms. Snyder told me she tried to encourage Ms. Seymour to come to the sessions because

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she was learning so much and that she thought Ms. Seymour would like it too, if she tried

it. It was hard to imagine that Ms. Snyder would ask the principal to be excused from the

rest of the program. I called her at home that weekend. She told me that it was

uncomfortable for her to be the only one from the school attending the sessions. She was

concerned about other teachers’ complaints; they missed their prep time when she was

not in the building. Ms. Snyder later attended the fifth session, which was the

implementation of the science lesson; she also attended the feedback session for the

science lesson.

It also surprised me somewhat that Ms. McHugh wanted to get out of the

program. She volunteered to teach the lesson during the first session. On several

occasions she said that she was excited about doing this, but these words were mixed

with concern. Although I explained that the observations would be focused on the

students and what they were thinking and doing during the lesson, she still seemed to take

it personally. During her first interview she said,

I would just like to know that, and I hope that everybody will be really subjective

and not be worried about hurting my feelings, because I'm not going to hold any

personal grudges because I have never had this and I really am excited…I think it

is fine. I'm excited to do it. It should be interesting to get some different

viewpoints for sure.

When she asked if another teacher would teach the lesson too, I responded that

that was the plan and hoped there was time. She replied, “I'd like to sit on both sides of

the fence. I need to see, especially with me having done it first and then being able to

look back. I'm cool.” She may have been trying to convince herself, more than me, that

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she was cool with the idea of teaching the lesson. I learned more about Ms. McHugh’s

feelings about teaching the lesson after I listened to the audio tapes of the second session

while I analyzed data. In a discussion while I was out of the room, the group talked about

teaching the lesson and Ms. McHugh said to the other teachers present, “You get to slam-

dunk me.”

I called her too that weekend, but she was not home. I left a message. She didn’t

return my call but sent an e-mail message the next day. It read:

I received your [phone] message yesterday but I did not get in until really late. I

wanted to explain to you how I stand on the Group issue. I am all for it. I think it

is a wonderful idea and would love to participate. However, the timing is bad. We

have testing and a million other things going on and I feel that I need to be in my

room. It wouldn’t be fair to my kids. If there was anyway I could do it and we

could rearrange things I would. I respect you as a colleague and appreciate

everything you have done for me and my students this year. I hope this will not

jeapordize [sic] our friendship. (Personal e-mail communication, April 29, 2002)

In her email, Ms. McHugh didn’t think it was fair to her children to be away from

her room so much and the timing was bad. Her given reasons did not change when I

discussed this with her during the final interview. At that time she said:

I think a lot of it was the timing last year. I think near the end of the year a lot of

teachers didn't want to take the time off of school. It had nothing to do with you.

It had nothing to do with the concept or the idea. I think it was last year we had so

much going on with looping. I know for me personally, I had looping; we had the

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whole prospect of the ITI6. I think it was just a lot of things going on at one time

which is, I have the understanding now, that's just how education is. There's never

a dull moment. There's always so many things going on. I think a lot of it had to

do with the timing…That's for me. That was the main reason. I don't want to

answer for the other teachers, but from my perspective, that had a lot to do with it.

Asking these teachers to leave their classrooms for six half day sessions, even

though they were spread out over a period of three months, was an issue for all of them.

Like Ms. Seymour, Ms. McHugh was absent quite a bit that year. She had a medical

condition that required her absence from school, but during the final interview she also

talked about the change in the district’s incentive policy for attendance. Previously,

teachers were paid a pro-rated incentive at the end of the year for not using all or a part of

their allotted sick days for that year. When there was a shortage of substitutes in the

district, the district found this policy helped keep the classrooms staffed, but when the

number of available substitutes increased, this incentive policy was withdrawn. As a

result, teachers felt they may as well use their sick days because they would eventually

lose them. In addition to the withdrawal of the attendance bonus, there was another

recent policy change concerning the accumulation of sick days. Ms. McHugh said, “I

went to that meeting and they said well you can't use these…and then I said, well I got

these. I might as well use them. I'm glad that I have…27 saved right now and I burned

them all.” In contrast to that, Ms. McHugh said that in her first year, she didn’t take off a

single day and she took off only two days in her second year.

6 This school received a grant to participate in Susan Kovalik’s ITI (Integrated Thematic Instruction) program during the following summer and the next school year. See http://www.kovalik.com/ for information about this program.

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In addition to the personal days Ms. McHugh and Ms. Seymour took, there were

the other professional development days for the technology grant where teachers were

required to leave their classrooms for shorter periods of time. Finding time for

professional development is a problem for American schools. The hodge-podge of

professional development (Ball & Cohen, 1999) was evident in this district.

The reasons these teachers gave for dropping out of the program, on the surface,

were reasonable. Ms. Seymour already missed many days of school and she didn’t see

much worth in spending time with this project since she did not see where it was going in

the district. Ms. Miller was stressed and felt she should not be out of the room. Ms.

Snyder didn’t want to be the only one coming from her school and hear comments from

the other teachers about why she was not giving them their extra prep time. It was bad

timing for Ms. McHugh and she also missed many days of school. Their plates were full.

Their excuses and reasons they gave for leaving the program were issues of timing and

having too much to do; they felt that they were out of the classroom too much. They did

not object to this collaborative lesson planning and teaching experience, in fact, they all

said that it was a good idea.

Given the reasons mentioned, I wondered what kept the teachers from Forest Hills

from dropping out of the program too. The data analysis began to reveal other patterns

that were common among the teachers that stayed and those that left. Participation in

this program required risk-taking. Why were the Forest Hills teachers willing to take that

risk? Certain conditions need to exist for this risk-taking to occur and I will describe and

develop these conditions in the sections that follow.

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Behind the Closed Doors

American teachers teach behind closed doors, but the doors were about to open

for the teachers in this study. The teachers from both groups were similar in that they

were curious about what happens in their colleagues’ classrooms. In their initial

interviews, some of these teachers talked about creeping and peeking into rooms, spying

and stealing ideas whenever they could. They all thought sharing ideas with colleagues

was a valuable activity. Inviting other teachers in for a visit during a lesson was a

different matter and the level of confidence needed for interactions with this type of

activity with their colleagues was challenged.

Sharing ideas. All of these teachers thought talking to other teachers and sharing

ideas was a worthwhile activity for them. During their initial interviews, I was impressed

with the enthusiasm displayed when I asked them if they thought talking with other

teachers was worthwhile. Marilyn said,

If I have something that has just been, wow, the kids got it, they liked it, it worked

well, I'll share it with everybody I talk to and I also will ask anybody how to do

anything, even if it is something that I've already found a successful way to teach,

I'm more than willing to add on.

Sarah responded, “Yes. Absolutely! Wow! Emphatic! Three exclamation

marks!!!” She continued:

Because I think we all have such set personalities and set ways of doing

something that when you care how someone else taught it or reached success, it's

just this, I don't know, epiphany, um, of "Oh, I could do it that way!" So

sometimes we just don't think out of our own box that we are in. So sharing, well,

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as much grief as it sounds like these conferences and meetings have caused across

the district, I'm the person who is like real grateful for it because it's giving me

insight into how other people are working, how other buildings are doing

something and even the process. I mean, I'm not even, I'm still not sure what

MLPP is, you know. It's just everyone throws around terms assuming that you

have some knowledge base and quite often you don't. So when we've had an

opportunity to sit and share, that has been most valuable to me as well as

introducing me to personalities in the district that I didn't even know were there.

Sarah’s comment about the grief across the district referred to the complaints

made by the teachers and principals when they were first informed of their expected

participation in this study. Ms. McHugh had fewer words to say about sharing ideas with

other colleagues, but they were, “Absolutely! Absolutely!” Ms. Miller agreed about the

sharing of ideas with other teachers. She said:

I only see it as a plus. I don't know because you can get different ideas from

different people and it gives you time to vent and get over things that have

happened and different things happen in a different way and, no, I've always just

seen it as a plus.

Given such positive reactions, I wondered what they thought about talking to

teachers who had a different philosophy than theirs. I began to ask some of them if they

could imagine a time that sharing ideas with another teacher would not be useful. I first

asked this question of Ms. Miller: “But what if they offer you something that you don't

think is very worthwhile or you don't agree with?” She responded:

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You don't have to use it. You can just take it with a grain of salt or for what it is

worth. There is always good and a suggestion is just a suggestion. It's not the

right way or the wrong way, it's just a suggestion and not everything works for

every person either.

When I asked Mary Ellen if she could think of an example when sharing ideas with

another teacher was not useful, she responded:

I don't think I really can, because if it's something you don't agree with or you

don't, you just don't have to use it, I guess, you know… I just figure, you know,

there is always other ways of looking at things.

Marilyn didn’t think there could there be any time when sharing with another isn't

worthwhile. She replied,

Not that I've found. It’s just, insanity… There are times when you just feel like

you beat your head against the wall with a specific concept and you know you are

not getting it to your kids and I think you've got to be not afraid to go to the other

teachers and say, look, I don't know what else to do. Give me some ideas if you

have them.

At first, Ms. McHugh also could not think of any times when it might not be

worthwhile, but then suggested that she would not bother to have a conversation about

teaching with certain teachers. She revealed her thoughts:

I can think of some teachers that I probably wouldn't ask…I think some teachers

are set in their ways of teaching things and they don't flex and they don't bend and

they don't do anything different. They teach this standard way of doing it and so

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they just have a pattern of teaching and maybe the kids don't learn but they just

are set.

All the teachers in this study were the same in that they were enthusiastic about

sharing ideas about their practice, even if what they did not agree with what they heard.

They could easily choose who to share with or ignore what was said. Perhaps in choosing

not to participate, they were making their choice.

Observing other teachers. Most of the sharing these teachers value so highly

takes place during conversations just before or after school or in the teachers’ lounge

during lunch time, but talking about what was happens in the classroom is not the same

as going into another classroom and observing what actually happens during instruction.

Most teachers do not get a chance to observe each other in their classroom.

Some of the teachers at Forest Hills were different from the teachers at Greenfield

in this regard. Three teachers from Forest Hills said they were already involved in

observing each other teach. Marilyn worked with another teacher combining classes in

previous school years, although this teacher was no longer at the school. In the school

year during which this study took place, Sarah said she once visited Melissa’s room and

observed language arts instruction. Megan said she was arranging a time observe Melissa

also; I do not know that visit actually occurred.

The usual reason for teaching in the presence of other educators in American

schools is for evaluative purposes during student teaching or early in a teacher’s career;

that person present usually has a supervisory or evaluative role. Megan described in her

final interview how she felt about this evaluation process. She said, “Who really likes

evaluation time, when the principal has to evaluate? Nobody does. Everybody is stressed

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out when that happens and you know you don't teach the same as you would any other

day.” Her feeling is probably typical for most teachers.

Other than evaluation time, if teachers teach with another teacher present in the

room, it is because they made that choice. For example, two teachers might choose to

combine their classes to form a multiage grouping or some other kind of team teaching

situation such as one that integrates content. Teachers involved in this arrangement seek

out teachers they trust and who hold common philosophies and beliefs about teaching.

This was the case for Marilyn; for several years previously she teamed with another

teacher from Forest Hills. She told me they liked it so much they wanted the district to

knock down the wall that separated their rooms.

In other cases where one teaches in front of another, the teacher has a coaching or

mentoring role, such as mine; all of my lessons are taught with another teacher present in

the room. I had the position of Learning Specialist for two years at Forest Hills, one year

was full time. But this was my first year at Greenfield and I was there only one day a

week. I did not have a chance to teach in the classrooms of two of the teachers from

Greenfield who participated in this program. In addition, I spent a lot of time working

with a teacher at Greenfield who was having difficulty in her classrooms. Perhaps I was

viewed as a coach for teachers with difficulties by the teachers at Greenfield.

The teachers who taught the lessons could be characterized as risk takers and

confident, but it was still not easy for them. The night before the lesson implementation,

Sharon said she stayed at school until 8:30 p.m. She shared this knowledge with me that

morning while I was setting up the camera to videotape the lessons. I asked her why she

was at school so late and she said she was catching up. She also mentioned that she

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missed an after school activity with her daughter that evening. She was supposed to drive

another child home and she forgot. Shortly after she told me this Marilyn walked into the

room with a cup of coffee in her hand. She told me that morning that she was up from 2

a.m. until 5 a.m. and that this was beginning to become a new sleep pattern for her.

It was not easy for Sharon in still another way. In her first interview she said she

would enjoy comments from other teachers because “I like to learn. That’s why I teach.”

But the day of the lesson implementation and feedback session she found it difficult to

focus her attention on the mathematics lesson she observed shortly after teaching the

science lesson. She told me what was on her mind:

It was extremely hard to focus on her lesson because I'm still reeling from what

people might be thinking about mine, how it went, what I did, what I could have

done differently, how the kids reacted, were the groupings right? I mean, there is

so much to think about.

Being observed by other teachers was difficult for the teachers who were

confident enough to try it, but breaking away from experience in this way may have

contributed to the reasons for the teachers who dropped out of the program. Ms. Miller

said she had problems with leaving her children with a substitute, but in a conversation

with her in between sessions she mentioned that she hoped to attend another all day

workshop later in May. Although this workshop was a more traditional one day

workshop, I was surprised she planned to leave her students with a substitute again. I

later found out that Ms. Miller had other concerns about this program. During her final

interview she admitted the idea of having more experienced teachers coming into her

room to watch her teach was intimidating. She said:

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I'm still in the observation period where the principal comes in and observes me

every so often, but I think it could be intimidating if you have people who have

been teaching a long time who kind of have it together, whereas newer teachers

are struggling with still trying to get it together, [I] could be intimidated very

easily.

Ms. Miller was under the impression that all the participating teachers would

teach a lesson while others observed. During the final interview she said, “I thought

everybody had to teach. We all signed up to teach. I thought everybody taught. Wasn't

that it? I thought everybody was doing it.” She told me that the idea that all would have a

turn to teach a lesson was discussed among teachers at Greenfield between the sessions.

Ms. Miller added:

But I think maybe she [Ms. McHugh] thought like she had to. She never, we did

talk a little bit here and there. I guess we both thought all of us were going to

teach. I guess we didn't realize that it was just voluntary. So that probably should

be clearer.

The teachers at Greenfield arrived at this erroneous conclusion about how this

program would work with respect to the lesson implementation.

I wondered how they could get the impression that in such a short period of time,

they all could collaboratively plan a lesson and each have an opportunity teach it. The

combined processes of collaboration, observation and reflection that are unique to lesson

study are unfamiliar to the practices of teachers in the United States. Although it was

explained that the purpose of the lesson would be to better understand what the students

were doing and what they were thinking and doing during the lesson, it was not clear to

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most Greenfield teachers that the lesson would be observed for the purpose of learning

about the design of the lesson itself and not the performance of the teacher. They did not

understand or trust the process whereby they would collaboratively design a lesson before

implementing it. Talking among themselves between sessions must have lead to this

misinformation and concern that they all had to teach a lesson, dropping their confidence

and comfort levels. Burdened with this concern, this may have been an obstacle for these

teachers and contributed to their reasons for leaving the program. Opening the door to the

classroom involved risk and more breaking away from typical experiences for teachers.

In this program, teachers with different philosophies and beliefs were asked to

gather together to design a lesson and teach it for the others to observe. The teachers were

not given a choice about who would be involved in their group. This involves a break

from normative permissiveness (Lortie, 1975) where teachers seek out and work with

only other teachers with similar philosophies of learning. It was not easy to open the

classroom door. There seemed to be more reasons for leaving the program than lack of

time, bad timing, and full plates.

Choosing the teacher to teach the lesson. Identifying the teacher who would teach

the lesson early in the program was another issue that may have contributed to the

Greenfield teachers’ reason for leaving the program. Teachers are more confident

teaching a lesson when they are well prepared. They admit they teach differently when

they are observed for evaluation purposes. They carefully plan the lesson they teach

before taking the risk of teaching it in front of their evaluator. During the first session for

both groups, a teacher was identified as the one who would teach the lesson; both of these

teachers were from Greenfield.

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During the first session, Ms. Seymour spent a considerable amount of time

sharing her expertise in cooperative learning and describing how well her students

worked with each other in her room. Because the others were so interested in the success

she had with her students, I suggested she consider being the one who taught the lesson.

I did not know her very well. She was one of the two teachers from Greenfield in whose

classroom I did not yet have an opportunity to work, but she immediately agreed to teach

the first lesson and said that she would like to do an electricity lesson that she just taught

to her class. I explained that the lesson would be one that we needed to plan together and

it would be taught later, perhaps April 24. She then responded by saying that she just

planned a field trip for that day. When May 1 was suggested as an alternative date for

teaching the lesson, she said she would be finished with electricity by then. We talked

about planning a lesson on forces and motion, but Ms. Seymour said she would be

teaching food chains in May. By this time, I was beginning to see that maybe she was

not so comfortable with the idea of teaching the lesson, so I said that we did not have to

decide who would teach the lesson until later, but this may have been too late for her.

The damage may already have been done. A similar situation occurred with Ms.

McHugh. Although I did not ask her to teach the lesson; she volunteered during the first

session.

Knowing that you will be the one who teaches the lesson seems to add a level of

concern that can challenge the confidence of the teacher chosen and interfere with the

other processes that are so beneficial in this professional development opportunity.

Instead of focusing on the content, ideas children have, and pedagogy, the teacher

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identified as the one who will teach the lesson starts to worry about how they will

perform in front of their peers and what their children will do.

From this experience I learned that waiting until the lesson is designed before

deciding who will teach it allows time for the teachers to be comfortable and excited

about the lesson designed collaboratively. By then all teachers would have time to

develop ownership in the new lesson. After Ms. McHugh and Ms. Seymour dropped out,

Sharon and Marilyn volunteered to teach the lessons we planned, but this occurred after

the lessons were quite well developed. Sharon volunteered to teach the lesson during the

last planning session. Marilyn expressed interest in teaching the lesson during the second

session, although I did not learn this until I listened to the tapes of the second session.

Marilyn said to the group when I was gone from the room that she would be interested in

being the second person to teach the lesson, but she did not volunteer to teach the lesson

until the third session when Ms. McHugh was absent and it became apparent that it would

be difficult for her to teach the first lesson since she was not present to plan it.

Teaching the lesson involves taking a risk and was very stressful for these

teachers. Knowing too soon that they were the ones who would teach the lesson may

have contributed to the reason why some teachers dropped out, but even the teachers who

stayed found it stressful. It was not easy for me at this time either. I felt so badly

because I was putting so much stress on these teachers. I wrote in my journal, “Who was

I to ask these teachers to do something so difficult?” I wondered if it were not for my

dissertation, would I have continued to ask this of my colleagues.

The motivation to teach the lesson. I wondered what motivated these teachers to

volunteer to teach the lesson; where did they get the confidence to go through with this?

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During the final interview Marilyn said she taught the lesson because she didn’t think the

others would want to do it and she was not afraid of being in front of other people. She

took acting classes and performed in plays. Marilyn also was the one who teamed with

another teacher in previous years; she already had experience teaching in front of another

teacher. When I asked Marilyn what motivated her to volunteer to teach the lesson she

said:

To be honest, I took so many acting classes; it doesn't bother me to be in front of

other people. And the other fifth grade teachers seemed to be so hesitant that I

didn't want something new to be stressful. And I thought, well, I know it won't

stress me out because I don't care if they're in there videoing and if I have five

people watching…I just think from, when we were discussing who was going to

do it, the looks on their faces, everybody was kind of like, "OH!", you know,

people are going to be in there watching…they seemed to be a little stressed about

that. Whether in the end it would have been stressful, I don't know. It just

seemed at that moment when we were discussing it, you could see the panic on

people's faces.

Sharon had many reasons for wanting to teach the lesson. She thought she would

learn more if she was the one who taught it, but she also may have felt some obligation

since she had the most teaching experience of all the members in her group. Although

Sarah actually had more teaching experience, it was several years ago; she just returned

to teaching after several years of staying home to raise her children. Sharon saw this as an

opportunity to let her colleagues have a better understanding of her as a teacher. During

the final interview, I asked Sharon what motivated her to teach the lesson:

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Sharon: Part of it is because I always learn more if I'm actively involved.

And, well, we know that from kids, that they learn more if they're

actively involved, but, part of it also was because of who my group

members were, and I thought some of them would not be

comfortable in front of everybody else, and because of that, also

because, there were several levels to this.

Monica: I'm interested in them all.

Sharon: One is, simply like I said, I learn more if I'm forced to be in the

middle, in the action. And I knew that I would obtain and get more

from it if I were actually teaching it and remember for this year

you know, that kind of thing, if I did it. The other thing is that

people that I worked with closely wouldn't want to do it because of

their position with, like the number of years that they've been here.

Not that I'm the senior member by any means, I'm getting close, I

guess. But, the other reason is because, on a certain level, your

peers have no idea of who you really are as a teacher, or how you

act in the classroom, unless they are actually in here with you

teaching along side of you or work with as you do when you come

in. But, for them to say something to, like, a parent or, like if a

parent were to come to them, I mean, professionally you wouldn't

say anything negative about another professional anyway. But,

sometimes, you have a doubt, in the back of you're mind about

how somebody really teaches, or do they have control, do they not

have control, or do they cover things in detail the way they should,

or you know, just that kind of thing; and so, in a way, for me, it

was an opportunity to present my style of teaching to my peers,

who then can go and have a more educated view of who I really

am as a teacher.

The teachers started out with an interest and curiosity about each other’s teaching

and with confidence in their ability to give and receive critical feedback. Although they

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admitted difficulty with the implementation and feedback part of the lesson study

process, the teachers who stayed had enough of something to persist. Was it confidence

or was there still another factor involved that helped these teachers continue through the

program. In fact, two of these teachers participated in a lesson study group the following

school year. These teachers were beginning to develop the ability to reflect critically on

the lesson during the planning stages and it was the time spent during the lesson planning

stages that most teachers said were valuable. But there was also a level of collegiality

that existed among the teachers at Forest Hills that seemed to be missing with the

teachers at Greenfield. I will talk about that some more in another section.

Satisfaction with Learning Outcomes of All Their Students

From the research we know that learning and a change in thinking is more likely

to occur in environments that encourage questioning, evaluating, criticizing, and where

there is dissatisfaction with the existing states of knowledge (A. L. Brown & Palincsar,

1989). Posner et al. (1982) argue that in order for a change to occur in a learner, several

important conditions must exist. These conditions include dissatisfaction with existing

conceptions and the presence of an intelligible and plausible new conception to take the

place of the old. A teacher taking part in a professional development activity makes

judgments about the practicality and the worth of what is presented. If she has a need and

sees something that may help her with her need, she may consider this new idea.

To study this, I asked the teachers during their initial interviews if they were

satisfied with the learning outcomes of all their students. The teachers that stayed

expressed dissatisfaction with the learning of all their students and/or expressed a

statement that they were always looking to learn new things. These comments were made

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by four different teachers from Forest Hills who completed the program. I asked them if

they were satisfied with the learning outcomes of all their students:

Teacher 1: Of course not! How could you be? I can’t help him [referring to one

of her students by name] the way I want to. I can’t help a lot of my students!

Teacher 2: No. Not in math. I feel that it's my own weaknesses that cause my

students not to be successful, the way I want them to be.

Teacher 3: No. It's a typical pattern of, I guess trying to ram a lesson down the

middle so the children who understand the concept eventually become bored. The

kids in the middle get a grasp of it and the kids on the other extreme end up just

still turning out and not learning it.

Teacher 4: Not entirely. I think in a lot of instances, students get left or they get

missed and trying to rotate around the room where there's a lot of behavior

problems and a lot of people have troubles working cooperatively. I think I

always miss someone, of whether or not they are understanding or they are just

dragging on the coat tails of the person next to them.

These teachers attributed, at least in part, their teaching methods or lack of

knowledge as the reason for dissatisfaction with the learning of all their students; this

dissatisfaction may have been a factor that kept them involved in the program. In her

first interview, the teacher identified as Teacher 3 said she was getting negative feedback

from her students. This created a need for her to learn some new ideas. She said:

Being a rather insecure person anyway…if you are not totally secure in yourself

and if the data you are getting back from your students in terms of poor test

grades or disinterest or whatever is not real bolstering, then you tend to think,

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what am I doing? Am I succeeding? Am I doing OK? So there is no feedback

except whatever your insecurity or your student data tells you and sometimes that

can be quite negative and rather that is accurately assessing your own

performance, I don't know.

This teacher and some of the other teachers who stayed seemed to fit the

description needed for learning as described by Posner et al. (1982) and Brown &

Palinscar (1989). They were not satisfied with her present state of knowledge and were

seeking some new ideas, or at least they were willing to admit this to me.

The other three teachers from Forest Hills teachers said they were satisfied with

the learning outcomes of their students, but they had some reservations. Teacher Five

recognized there was still much to do:

I'm satisfied with what we've done so far. I feel like there still is a lot to do. I feel

like their mathematics computation is weak. I also feel like the problem solving

is a weak area, and, just some of the basics. They’re lacking in some of the basic

areas.

Although satisfied with what she did so far, this teacher was looking for new

ideas. During her initial interview she talked about how she went to another state to visit

her aunt’s school and she visited her friends who were teachers in other states. She stays

in touch with them regularly through e-mail. She also said she works closely with her

mentor teacher.

Teacher Six said she was satisfied with the improvements her students were

making, but thought every teacher has some dissatisfaction with their teaching. She said

she was always looks for new ideas. Three times during the initial interview she made a

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comment about wanting to learn something new. She said, “They are progressing, in not

only math, but reading too. I've seen a big improvement. But I'm always looking for

new ways to teach them things, you know.” In her final interview, I asked her if she

thought lesson study was worthwhile for any teacher in the district. She responded, “I

think it's worthwhile for people who are discouraged with the way they're teaching. Like

they feel they aren't getting things across to other students. And I'm sure there's some

area where everybody feels that way.”

The last teacher from Forest Hills was not satisfied with the learning outcomes of

all her students, but her explanation fit a different pattern that was similar to the

responses of one of the teachers who dropped out. Instead of looking at her own teaching

practices as an explanation for their poor learning outcomes, she explained that some

students have problems that interfere with their learning. For example, she is not happy

with one student that does not speak English. Her response to the question about her

satisfaction with her students’ learning was:

No. There's a few that, you know, but there are problems that interfere that I know

about with those students. I mean like one is an E.S.L. student and I think most of

the time, he speaks almost no English so he's not even getting what I am saying,

so no, I'm not happy with his outcome.

Although she was satisfied with the learning outcomes of all her students, except

for the ones with special needs, there was an additional factor that kept her interested in

this program. It was this teacher’s first time teaching mathematics. Her need to know

may have kept her in the program. She also mentioned several times throughout the

study that she strongly believed in collaborating with other teachers and previously took

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part in collaborative activities with other teachers. The collaborative nature of this

program strongly matched her beliefs about teaching,

The three teachers who dropped out of the program were more satisfied with the

learning outcomes of their students. Ms. Miller said, “Yeah, I think they are doing very

well. They surprise me sometimes.” When I asked how her students surprise her, she

said:

Like when I took them down several weeks ago when we were working on

fraction stuff, so we went to music and it just so happened he [the music teacher]

was teaching quarter notes and different notes, so the kids, when I picked them

up, he said they were the only class that did well on it. Some of the classes didn't

even have a clue what fractions were and mine understood that. Most of them

could answer questions correctly for him. So that's where I did a lot of the

visuals, with the fractions, that worked.

Ms. Miller said that she learned many of her instructional strategies from her

experience as a teachers’ aid in the school her children attended. She valued the time she

spent working with the teachers in their classroom as a teacher’s aid and said during her

initial interview:

I felt like I really got trained to be a teacher when I was an aid because that's when

I worked with all the different teachers and I learned what worked and what didn't

work. That's where I learned everything. It wasn't in my college classes and it

wasn't from subbing obviously.

She valued her experience as an aid but said she has little time now that she is a

teacher to work with other teachers. What were missing from her responses during her

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interview were suggestions or expressions of a desire to continue the practice of

observing other teachers or to continue to learn more from other teachers. When I asked

her if other teachers influence her practice she replied, “Probably not now, but they

probably have heavily in the past.” At this time in her new career, she was not looking to

add to her repertoire of teaching strategies or challenge what she learned from her

previous experiences. Perhaps she was still processing what she already had.

Ms. McHugh said she was not satisfied with the learning outcomes, but was

satisfied with their effort. She blamed her students’ lack of progress as a result of them

coming to her below achievement levels for their grade level. This is how she responded:

Of all my students? No. But I'm satisfied with the effort they put in. I'm not

satisfied with the outcome. Unfortunately too my of my kids come to me that are

way below level so it's hard for me to teach multiplication when they don't

understand addition yet, but as long as, I think I get a good honest effort out of

most of my kids.

Ms. Seymour, the third teacher from Greenfield that dropped out, also seemed

satisfied with the learning outcomes of her students. This is what she shared about her

students during the first meeting:

I notice just from experience with my class. You have to keep working on it. It's

just like anything they don't know how to do. You have to assume they don't

know how to work cooperatively and you just have to practice, practice, practice.

Have them do it all the time. Any time they have a chance to work. Because I've

noticed that since I've done that I have a lot more success. Like I was just telling

Ms. Snyder today, I did a cooperative learning…and I mean it went like

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clockwork. They were on task. It wasn't really loud in there. They had a great

time with it. I really honestly feel like they learned a lot with that lesson.

Because of her absences, I was not able to interview her at the beginning of the program,

but I interpret her description of her successes with cooperative learning with her students

as evidence that she was satisfied with at least this aspect of her students’ performance.

New standards and federal legislation from the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001

require that schools and teachers must find ways to help all children learn. To

accomplish this, teachers need to learn what their students know through a variety of

assessment practices and be accountable for their learning. Stiggins (Stiggins, 2001)

argues that teachers in the United States have a difficult time assessing their students in

their classroom. The emotional factor is one barrier that makes it difficult for teachers in

the United States to implement better strategies for assessment because if an assessment

reveals that the students are not learning, then it could reveal a problem with their

performance. He argues:

It is our own emotions about the prospect of having our performance assessed and

evaluated. This scares many of us, even as adults. These strong negative feelings

about assessment and evaluation stand in the way of quality assessment in your

classroom and prevent you from being willing to both take the risk and invest the

mental energy needed to rigorously assess your students’ achievement and hold

yourself accountable for that achievement (Stiggins, 2001, p. 104).

Although the observations would be on the children, the teachers involved in this

study knew that their performance would play a part. They needed to be emotionally

ready to have their performance assessed and evaluated when the observations of their

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students’ learning is observed by their colleagues because they would not be the sole

judge of the learning outcomes of all their children.

Administrative Support and Knowledge and Purpose of the Program

There was a lack of administrative support for this program as it was

implemented, but the way it was implemented was not the way it was originally designed.

Originally it was designed with the full support of the principal of Forest Hills to meet the

requirement for professional development from a grant received to lower the class size.

Every teacher at Forest Hills was included. The design of using substitutes for half the

day developed from a successful implementation of another professional development

plan to implement a state grant. With that grant, funds for substitutes were available to

allow groups of teachers from the same grade level work together in the building during

the school day to learn the necessary skills for the new literacy program. They met at a

table in the principal’s office. In the morning they learned new strategies; in the

afternoon they practiced their new skills with individual children from their classrooms.

They had time to meet together at the end of the day to further discuss how the new

strategies worked and to have questions answered that came up while working with their

students.

The problem developed when the principal became the district Curriculum

Director and a new principal was assigned to the building. This new principal did not

want to spend his entire budget on my position, so my position as Learning Specialist was

expanded to include Greenfield and the middle school. Because of the size of the

schools, I was assigned two days at the middle school, two days at Forest Hills and one

day at Greenfield. My research study would now include both elementary schools.

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As a new Curriculum Director in a small district, my former principal was

learning what was politically acceptable and not. She thought it best if it was not

announced to the whole district that this program was a research study for my

dissertation. Although I had the support of the district Superintendent, who suggested I

implement lesson study with the entire district, the principals were not given detailed

information about the study, and its purpose; they were told that this professional

development activity would occur in their schools. The teachers were told that it was my

dissertation research at the first meeting, although some of the Forest Hills teachers were

already aware of this aspect of the study.

Not having full knowledge of this program’s purpose made it difficult for the

principals to give it their full support. The principal at Greenfield was the one that asked

that his teachers be excused from the program. This was his first year as principal; he

was promoted to the principal’s position from within the school. Previously, he taught

there for over thirty years and all the teachers in the school were his colleagues for many

years. There are many challenges for a first year principal. One has to learn and

coordinate all the additional responsibilities. When substitutes are in the building and the

children misbehave, they are sent to him. The situation with the student from Ms.

Miller’s room made the problem worse. Since he was new to the job and not fully aware

of the benefits the lesson study program had to offer, it was easy for him to give into his

teachers’ requests to get them out of it.

It was not easier for the principal at Forest Hills to support the program; he was

transferred from Greenfield that year. He voiced his complaints with me and with the

Curriculum Director. He said parents complained teachers were out of the rooms too

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much. Some of the teachers at Forest Hills complained too, at first. He remained

distanced from this program for its duration. During the implementation of the science

lesson, he peeked into the room. One of the teachers invited him in to see the lesson. He

responded by saying he did not want any part of it.

From the principals’ perspective, teachers were already out of their rooms too

much for other required professional development sessions with the technology grant. At

the beginning of that school year, teachers were told they needed to have so many hours

of professional development each year and were required to attend professional

development activities outside of school, so many signed up for these other sessions too.

For most of the teachers and the principals, it was not good to hear that they were going

to participate in six more half day sessions of professional development. Indeed, the

professional development in this district was a hodge-podge of uncoordinated activities.

Collegial School Atmosphere

A factor that surfaced as an attribute of the teachers from the teachers who stayed

was their social collegiality. The atmosphere at Forest Hills was different. Many

teachers arrived at school early and stayed late. You could find them going in each

other’s rooms or conversing in the hallway. Their conversations were sometimes about

school, but sometimes about home. The school year for Forest Hills teachers starts out

with a gathering of all the teachers a week or two before school starts to share their

summer adventures and discuss the coming school year. Every Friday throughout the

year, one of the teachers or other staff members brings breakfast. A sign up list is posted

in the staff lounge at the beginning of the school year so everyone can sign up for two

weeks of their choice. Sometimes on Friday, an e-mail goes out to the instructional staff

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indicating that they are going to the library after school. The library was their code for

arranging a visit to a more social place at the end of the week. Their social collegiality

was similar to what Yoshida (Yoshida, 1999b) discovered about the Japanese teachers in

his dissertation study. During their first year of lesson study, teachers collect data to

determine what the problems are that they will work on during their lesson study. Their

first year is spent getting to know each other better and this often took place outside the

school.

Teachers at Forest Hills made positive comments about their collegiality that

exists at Forest Hills. Sharon said:

I mean, we're not all the best of friends, but, we are very professional, and work

professionally very, very well together. And, I would say that we have become

friends because of our professionalism, but we weren't initially friends, before we

were professionals, if that makes sense.

Sarah agreed with Sharon that the staff works well together but wasn’t sure if that

was the only reason. When Sarah was asked what she thought made the experience

successful, she said:

I don't know whether that's because basically there's a great group of individuals

who just really like each other and work well together, or if it was the atmosphere

that you created bringing us there. But I can hardly think of how it could have

been better.

These positive working relationships may have been a big reason why these

teachers continued with this program despite the difficulties with leaving their children

with substitutes, lack of administrative support, concerns about opening their doors to

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others, and concerns about taking the time to do this when there were so many other

activities happening at the same time. The teachers at both schools were apprehensive

about the program, but their apprehensions led to different outcomes. Early in the

program, Melissa was apprehensive about the program. She said:

I know there were some remarks, maybe at the beginning of, you know, "I'm out

of my room too much" or "We're working so hard on this. We hope it's going to

be worth our time." I heard comments like that and I was even worried myself

that I hope this is worthy of the time we are taking because we were out of the

classroom…I talked to Marilyn the other day…and she says, "Yeah, I think this is

going to be really good” when I know she was very apprehensive at first, but I

think she's, you know, I think she really grasps that in the end, it's going to be so

beneficial for all of us.

It appears that the lesson study process was a topic of conversation in the halls

and classrooms at Forest Hills, but the talk was positive and did not include the

misrepresentations that were present in the between-session talk at Greenfield. The

Forest Hills teachers encouraged and supported each others’ concerns with positive

attitudes. They talked themselves into giving it a try.

The collegiality that was found at Forest Hills was not present at Greenfield. The

teachers at Greenfield didn’t meet as a staff at the library, although on occasion, a couple

of teachers would plan this type of social outing, but they would share it with just a few

others. They didn’t have a Friday morning breakfast together. In fact, they had difficulty

that year having their winter holiday party. During the final interview one of the

Greenfield teachers said:

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We always have a problem here. Our problem is because we have the extra

people that [the principal] always feels kind of responsible for, the Head Start

program and everything. We always feel like and this comes up a lot. It's like

who is the staff here? Well we are all kind of staff here and how big are we? We

almost didn't do Christmas this year because, who do you include?

Greenfield teachers share the building with a Head Start program. Although they share

the building, at that time, they were not recognized as really belonging there.

I believe the collegiality and a sense of community present at Forest Hills made a

difference in the participation efforts between the two schools. The collegiality and

supportive roles that already existed among the teachers at Forest Hills was a positive

influence for them as they waded through the complaints when this program was first

introduced. As you may recall from earlier descriptions, Sharon was one of the two

teachers that complained during the first session about being away from her class and not

having the time. Perhaps she was persuaded by the positive peer pressure to continue. On

the other hand, Ms. Seymour who also complained during the first session, dropped out.

The peer pressure at Greenfield was not so positive and they talked themselves out of

continuing. The lack of administrative support did not seem to matter for the Forest Hills

teachers, but I wonder if administrative support and encouragement was there for the

Greenfield teachers, if it would have made a difference.

Relationship with the Knowledgeable Other

In addition to having a feeling that one was a valued member in a learning

community, a trust in an outside expert is important. From conversations with the

Curriculum Director from a nearby school district that was implementing lesson study on

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a district-wide basis, I learned that her teachers originally struggled with accepting their

outside expert as a member of their group. Stein, Smith & Silver (Stein, Smith, & Silver,

1999) learned that teacher educators and professional developers need to develop

individuals as well as communities when they were engaged in long-term efforts to help

teachers learn new ways of teaching. Teachers in their study did not want to hear more

philosophy and theory; they needed to see how it worked in their classrooms. They

learned that it is more effective when professional developers immerse themselves more

fully in the settings in which they work.

Fortunately, I worked at Forest Hills for two years before implementing this

program. That gave me time to establish a respected and trusted relationship with the

teachers there. I was not considered an outsider for these teachers. This was not the

situation at Greenfield. I was new to Greenfield. I did not yet have a chance to work

with two of the four teachers who were members of the lesson study group from that

school. This trust I established at Forest Hills and the already supportive atmosphere in

the school may have lead to more positive talk in between sessions that encouraged those

teachers to return each time, whereas the lack of trust may have contributed to talk that

misrepresented the goals of this program which lead to anxiety so teachers at the other

school turned to the excuse of having full plates and a lack of time.

.

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CHAPTER VI

BUILDING KNOWLEDGE IN THE COMMUNITY

A mind that is stretched by a new experience

can never go back to its old dimensions.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Teachers who participated in this professional development activity had

opportunities to stretch their minds and were exposed to ideas during this program.

Accordingly, Oliver Wendell Holmes would argue that their minds can not go back to

what they were before the new experience.

What Teachers Appeared to be Learning

Teachers appeared to be learning content. Marilyn, who taught the fraction

lesson, said she learned about the multiplication of fractions and how to teach this

concept to her children. Previous to this, she said that if she didn’t understand

something about mathematics, she would ask a colleague. The problem was that the

colleague she asked was the teacher in this study who admitted that she hated math!

Marilyn reported that she gained knowledge of fractions and strategies for

teaching. During her final interview, she reflected on how this program gave her the

opportunity to develop deeper understanding about content and this would work for

other content areas too:

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Oh yeah…when you're discussing things on that level, you know, and people are

coming up with questions that you yourself would not come up with, you have to

question things that you were just taking for granted. Therefore, you're having to

go a layer deeper on it, and say, well, I mean, because I could have told the child

what the process of multiplying a fraction by a fraction was. I could not have

explained to a child what that meant. I could have shown them how to do the

numbers, and, you know, the criss-cross and all of that, but I would not have

been able to explain it. Well now, because everybody was questioning more and

talking more, I can actually explain to a child and show them a picture of why it

works. You know, so yeah, I think it does. And I think it would in other areas, if

you did, you know, lesson studies in, you know, grammar, or writing, or social

studies, or science. I think it would. You're starting to question what you

already know, to see if you know, because even as teachers we'll make

generalizations or, ok, yeah, I know that, when maybe you don't know every

piece of it.

During the mathematics lesson feedback session, one of the observing teachers

noticed that the children in the group she observed were not discussing differences in

their answers. They saw that they had different answers, but they seemed to be fine with

it. Marilyn responded that the reason for that might have been that she told them in

advance of the class not to argue. Marilyn said she learned some things she would

change as a result of this experience. During her final interview she said:

Making sure they understand the difference between discussion and argument, so

that they can discuss if they got, you know, different answers and why…making

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sure that they understand [that] because having different answers doesn't just go

for fractions, it goes for any sort of math problem that they would do. If they

have different answers they need to be able to discuss why and who has what and

why they got that, and how they got it. So, that's definitely something that in

overall math I would change.

Another thing Marilyn mentioned in the feedback session that she decided about

teaching fractions in the future was that she will use more than one kind of manipulative

to teach fractions. She said:

One would be using all sorts of sets, when they're using manipulatives with

fractions…You know, I realize, looking back at all manipulatives I used, in, not

just in fractions, but, I always used the same manipulatives over and over and

over, so that if they went, say to the MEAP [state assessment] test, and they gave

them a picture of different manipulatives, those kids weren't going to know what

it was because it didn't look like what they knew. You know, so that's, that's

something that I think has to be changed too.

Learning about mathematics content and pedagogy was not limited to the teacher

who taught the lesson. Melissa especially found the time spent in the collaboration

process of designing the pretest to be valuable. She said:

The thing I liked the most is coming up with the assessment questions because

we all had to make sure we had correct wordage and the question had to make

sense, because some of us even came up with, we came up with questions we

thought "That's not right. We have to reword that whole thing!" Or, “That's not

the right number to use. Maybe that's too hard. That's not the fraction we want.”

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You know, and if I would have been by myself, I might not have done that

revising. And then I also noticed that we did have the different scales of

questions. We went from easy to more complex and I think that's important

when we make our own test, sometimes, we just kind of get the simple facts and

that's all you want. But it should be different level thinking questions so I liked

that idea.

Melissa said she benefited from observing Marilyn teach the lesson. She used

another teacher as a mirror for performance, as did the teachers in Lortie’s study, but

because her observations were first-hand, this mirror reflected what actually happened

rather than what she imagined or was told. She said, “I can compare myself with

Marilyn and we have two different teaching styles so I could see what I was lacking by

watching others and I'm trying to be more organized in the way I present myself now.”

Melissa also said she has another way to teach the multiplication of fractions. She

continued:

It's not as difficult as I made it out to be. There's simpler ways of teaching it than

I did and I think that's going to help me when I teach 5th grade again next year…

The way we did our lesson was with hands on, made it simpler to see it than just

visualize it on the board as numbers. Having the fractions with objects made it

so much simpler for them to see and me to see and to teach.

Megan remarked during the feedback session that she is now better able to

anticipate some problems before they occur. When she said this, several voices were

heard in expressions of agreement. She said she also became more aware of her use of

manipulatives during her mathematics instruction.

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Never did we think that that [the use of pretzels as a manipulative in the lesson]

would distract them from what they were trying to do and it did. So I mean that

really, that really shocked me and changed the way I look at things. I still use

manipulatives in my classroom but I'm careful about why I'm using them, when I

use them and who has them.

Some of the teachers in the science group said during the first session that they

knew how to teach science through inquiry based instruction; they just did not teach that

way because they did not have time. However, during the planning session, a discussion

about drawing conclusions based on evidence revealed that the teachers in this group

don’t ask their children to draw a conclusion during a science lesson.

These teachers discovered that collaborative planning brought each person’s

strengths to the lesson as well as more options to choose from in the lesson design. This

allowed them to develop a lesson that integrated subjects. They said that carefully

planned lessons improved instruction and their day.

Marilyn thought participating in this process improved her ability to

communicate with her colleagues. She said:

I feel that we all learned something from it. We learned a little more about the

subject area. And we learned a little more about working with each other, and

talking to each other, and you know, I find that I do tend to go to teachers more

often after that, than I would have. And I was always very big into going to

everybody. But, I think that I got a little more comfortable with some people in

saying, you know what, hey, I don't really know how to do this. You know.

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Marilyn did get a little more comfortable with the disposition of inquiry. In a very

diplomatic way, she was the only other teacher who made a suggestion to change the

science lesson the next time. She said:

I'm not sure I'm saying necessarily it needs to be revised to include this, but it's

something that I thought of while we were sitting there. The kids, these were

new things to touch and probe with and kind of play with. That I almost think

maybe they should have had a short span of time where they get their materials

and no worksheet, just let them touch it and you know because right away we

saw that going on where they "Here, you see how heavy this is." Well, not all the

groups got that far of experiencing each thing. The group I was watching, they

turned one on the smooth side and one on the rough side and you could see them

all going like this, see and they knew that difference. So I think giving them a

shorter amount of time, a little bit longer time to just play before any directions

were given.

These teachers also discussed what they learned about their students; there were

some surprises. The instructor for the science lesson did not realize that her students,

although noisy, were very productive during the lesson, both socially and academically.

Her students organized themselves within their groups, helped each other with the

investigation and discussed the results with each other in their groups. The children who

could be classified as the low achievers in her classroom were very much involved in

this lesson and gave good explanations of the phenomena observed during the

investigation; normally they are not attentive during lessons. The instructor of the

fraction lesson did not realize how many students had difficulty with the concepts in the

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lesson until she received the feedback from her peers and looked at her students’

journals.

Megan discovered things about her teaching and her students by listening to the

children’s conversation during the lesson. She said:

I assumed a lot of things instead of really taking a look at where the children

were. I assumed that they knew more than they did…But when I had the

opportunity to listen to their conversation, I realized the error of my ways by just

hearing them talk about how basic their knowledge was of numbers.

This professional development experience offered these teachers opportunities to

learn about their practice. A collaborative examination of practice has features that

make this possible.

Affordances of a Collaborative Investigation

There were many affordances in situating teacher learning in this collaborative

inquiry of practice. First, teachers focused on a topic that they would soon teach. This

created a need for them to become active participants in their learning and it made it

their learning relevant. Second, collaborative planning time allowed teachers an

opportunity to learn content and consider new ideas and alternative strategies. Third,

observations of their students provided evidence for the effectiveness of their efforts.

Their personal learning theories were put to the test and having more pairs of eyes

allowed them to see the lesson from multiple perspectives. They had time to be

reflective about their work.

Teacher learning focused on immediate need. By focusing on a topic that

teachers were going to teach very soon and was difficult to teach, there was an

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immediate interest and need for them to learn more about that topic. Teachers were

motivated to continue their learning outside of the session meeting time too. Ms. Snyder

searched the Internet looking for appropriate lessons. While in Sharon’s room one day

in between sessions, I saw her Conceptual Physics (Hewitt, 1993) book from her high

school or college days. She said she was reading more about Newton’s Laws. Sharon

still remembered Newton’s Laws by heart, but rote memorization of a concept does not

indicate understanding and without a good understanding, one cannot to teach it

effectively. Sharon was interested in understanding these concepts better before she

taught them for the study lesson. This program gave these teachers a need and an

opportunity to have an in depth look at the objectives they some could almost recite by

heart but did not understand.

New standards recommend that students be actively involved in their learning. A

comment made by one of the teachers during her final interview indicated that she felt

that by participating in the processes of lesson study, she was more actively involved in

her own learning. When I asked her how her experience compared to other professional

development experiences, she said,

I actually participated! What do you do when you go to a professional

development given by the district? You sit in a chair, you make fun of things

with the people with the cronies sitting next to you, and then you leave. You're

not active in any type of thing.

This response seems to indicate that teachers are very much like their students

when they are not interested or not involved in the lesson when they are the students.

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Giving teachers opportunities to be more active in their professional development may

increase what they learn during that professional development activity.

This professional development was very different for these teachers. In the

United States, much time is spent articulating the curriculum across the grades and

aligning it with local, state or national standards than studying and refining class lessons

to bring those ideas to life (Lewis, 2002b). By the time this is accomplished there is not

adequate time to observe, discuss and improve classroom lessons. This was true for this

district. Previous work in professional development was aimed at the identification of

benchmarks taught in each grade for the purpose of identifying benchmarks that might

be duplicated in other grades and then verifying all benchmarks are assigned to be sure

that students learn all content necessary for the state assessments. To accomplish this,

teachers participated in a curriculum mapping project during district professional

development days. But there was no discussion on which methods or strategies would

best help all their students learn the concepts. It was either assumed that all teachers

knew the subject matter for which they were assigned to teach or if administration knew

there were gaps in this knowledge, there was not much that could be done because there

would not be time to do both.

The collaborative planning process. Most of the teachers in this study described

the collaborative planning time to be one of the most beneficial parts of the process.

Perhaps it was because more time was spent in this phase than in any other because the

curriculum in this district was not well-defined at that time. The elementary schools had

a mathematics text that teachers did not use; most instructional time at the elementary

level was spent on the computation of whole numbers. Fractions, if they were taught,

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involved coloring parts of circles and squares. There were science kits, but no texts, and

teachers were not comfortable using the kits. An appropriate lesson for each of these

topics needed to be designed and it was during the planning session that there were

discussions about the mathematics and science content and strategies for teaching that

content. Similar to project based learning for students, the teachers had a project to

complete to represent their time and effort working together. They designed a lesson

that represented the best efforts of all those present.

In the final interviews, Megan described the benefit of having time plan a lesson

with colleagues:

Especially for me, being a brand new teacher, planning together was awesome

because I was so lost last year trying to find my way through the curriculum,

trying to understand what I should be doing, what do fifth graders look like? As

far as the benchmarks go, what are they supposed to know by the end of the

year? And to have those teachers come together and say, this works, this doesn't

work. Let's try something in between or let's do, let's go with this, or just giving

great suggestions. Some things that I just hadn't even thought of and listening to

them and I just really bought in to everything they were saying. We were just a

great group of teachers, altogether and I had respected everything they would, all

of the information they'd give me in passing. But it was nice to actually sit down

at the table and say this is what we think and this is where we should go with this

lesson and have some time to just reflect on what we did. Also I think it was just

really important. And it's too bad we don't have that kind of time to do that for

every lesson, which I'm sure the curriculum would look a lot different then.

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Putting theories to the test. Acknowledging, comparing and practicing pedagogy

that is different from their lifetime of experiences in the classroom may be a first step in

making that new pedagogy their own. Often times, videos are used to help teachers see

new practices in the classroom, but teachers’ reactions to watching these videos include

comments like: Where did they get those kids? You couldn’t do that with my kids. My

kids are different! My kids don’t act like that! Similarly, when teachers observe lessons

modeled by teachers with more experience, their reaction is, “But you have more

experience. I could never do that!” These teachers designed, taught, and observed a

lesson that was different from what they would normally design or teach. They saw

what was possible with their own students and they saw that they could do it themselves.

Megan said she looked forward to the interactions with other teachers, but she

didn’t realize she would experience even more benefits when the lesson was taught to

the students. Since it was a lesson she helped design, it held greater meaning for her.

She also liked the opportunity to focus her attention more on the students. In her final

interview, she said:

At first I went into it with the understanding that I was going to be doing a lot of

interacting with other teachers and listening to their ideas and discussing

problems that they have in the classroom and try and help each other work

through it. That was my first impression of what we were going to do. But then

I gained even more than just being there the day that she presented the lesson and

being able to be in the audience and look into the children's talk so that at that

point I thought, "Wow! This is just even better than I had expected just because I

had that opportunity to be the fly on the wall…The lesson study gave me an

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opportunity to watch somebody else teach and listen to their [students’]

responses while they were receiving the lesson. It's not something I ever had the

opportunity to do in my own classroom because when I'm teaching, I can't be in

two places at once. So that was probably the most beneficial part of it. Listening

to the children and I watched someone else teach a lesson. And it was a lesson I

helped design, so it wasn't that she was teaching in a way I wouldn't have. So it

was neat to see.

The lesson observation was the most beneficial part of the program for Mary

Ellen too. She also liked having the chance to focus on children’s ideas during a lesson

to see how they react:

I thought that it was nice to just sit and watch somebody teach the lesson like

that. Because sometime your wondering if you're doing the right thing when

you're teaching something, or if you're covering it the right way, or you're saying

things the right way. So, I thought it was good to watch somebody else do it so

you could compare it with what you're doing or you could add something, or you

can also see what they were doing or what they could have done maybe

differently…you have the chance to observe the children, where normally, you

don't see the whole picture; you're focused on what you're saying and you might

only be looking at one child, where when you're doing that lesson study, you can

see all the children in the room, and how they are reacting to it…It was nice to

see the whole picture from a different perspective than just being up there

teaching it.

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This program gave these teachers time to be reflective and consider new topics

and strategies. When I asked Sarah if there were strategies that she observed during the

program that she thought were worthwhile and worthy of trying again, she responded:

Well, I am also a great believer in moving away from paper and pencil, and

trying to do questioning, and inquiry and hands-on. I believe in all that, and I

strive to do that in many, many subjects. Again, this showed me that I probably

do too much lifting the lid up and pouring it in, instead of really just, here, let's

explore a lesson. Do this. So, yes, I thought it was revealing to see that and see

the process of making it where you're more guiding than telling.

Although some of their experiences during the program were rough and

uncomfortable, they were taking the steps needed to break from their experiences.

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CHAPTER VII

CONCLUSION

This study set out to investigate a recently attractive approach to facilitate

teachers’ learning in mathematics and science. Specifically, I wanted to find out how a

collaborative professional development experience, situated in teachers’ own practice,

helps elementary public school teachers develop their knowledge for teaching. I argued

that a professional development experience that requires teachers to become actively

involved in a collaborative effort to solve an immediate problem in and from their

practice would be more meaningful for the teachers and would increase their

opportunities to develop their knowledge for teaching.

Characteristics of Their Engagement in this Intervention

The teachers in this study were similar to the teachers in Lortie’s study (1975).

They worked in isolation and were concerned about their time with their students in their

classrooms. Conservatism was present in one teacher’s question during the first session:

“Where’s it going to go? I guess my question was where’s it going?” She was teaching

in this district long enough to be cynical of the professional development programs

presented over the years. This district is typical of most districts in the United States

where there is a lack of coherence in professional development. Teachers were told at

the beginning of the year to attend professional development workshops of their choice

in order to fulfill state requirements. Additionally, the district received a technology

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grant and teachers were pulled out of their classrooms to learn how to use new hardware

and software acquired with the grant funds.

There was a lack of support for this program from the administrators and this had

an impact on the teachers’ engagement in the program. Only the curriculum director,

who participated in the early design of this program as principal of my school, gave her

total support. Building level support during the time of this research was lacking; the

principal at Forest Hills said he did not want to be “anywhere near” when he peeked in

the door to the classroom during the lesson implementation. The principal at Greenfield

asked that his teachers be excused. This lack of support at the building level can be

explained partially by the fact that they were not introduced to this program ahead of

time and were not made aware of its benefits and how it was aligned with reform

documents.

The lack of administrative support impacted the teachers differently for each

school. Most of the teachers at Forest Hills were excited about this program and decided

to participate whether the principal supported it or not. The curriculum director was the

principal at this school the previous year and the teachers knew she gave her full

support. The principal at Greenfield supported the wishes of his teachers; he was a

teacher there for more than thirty years before he was promoted to be their principal.

These teachers and their administration could be portrayed as individuals

working with other individuals in a pseudocommunity as described by Grossman et al.

(2001). They operated under the premise that everyone is to behave as if they all agree

and challenges to others were against the rules. But these teachers were curious about

their colleagues and wanted to know what they were doing. They talked about creeping,

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sneaking and stealing ideas. They said they wished they had more opportunities to

observe them.

Challenges

Individualism was a challenge. Teachers were concerned that they would lose

their individualism by working together, but discussing long-term school-wide goals

during the first two sessions, planning the lesson and critiquing it presented these

teachers with an opportunity to consider the needs of the larger community rather than

their individual needs. They expressed their surprise at the end of the program that

working together did not make them feel like they lost their individual identity. Making

their individual contribution to the process helped them feel a part of the collective

effort.

However, working and planning together presented another challenge. These

teachers needed to learn to talk to one another. The needed more than their comfortable

small talk. They needed the kind of talk for which there are no norms in schools today.

They needed the kind of talk where they could say what they thought and felt without

worrying that they would hurt somebody’s feelings. They needed to feel that they could

ask questions without being made to feel inadequate, they could argue without being

considered disagreeable. They needed to learn to talk it in such a way that they did not

hurt somebody’s feelings. They also needed to be able to accept the kind of talk that

challenged their ideas without getting their feelings hurt.

These teachers made their ideas about teaching and learning visible to themselves

and their colleagues during this program. They did not always agree with each other.

Compromises were made to accomplish the task of deciding on goals and planning the

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lesson. Their discussions included issues about behavior management, cooperative

learning, guided reading strategies, assessment practices and more. They talked, they

listened, they questioned, they asked for clarification and they even sometimes

challenged one another’s ideas. But when it came time to challenge the lesson as it was

implemented, they had difficulties. Some admitted they could not be critical of their

colleagues’ lessons. Their given reasons were two: (a) it was too hard to give feedback

to teachers who were their friends or not and (b) they didn’t see a need for improvements

to the lesson.

Talk was a challenge for the administration too and this made an impact on the

engagement of these teachers in this study. I was asked by the curriculum director not to

talk about this study because it was my dissertation research and as a new administrator

to the district, she was uncertain to how this program would be accepted. She was afraid

the program might be canceled before it began. After the teachers received notice that

they were selected to participate, it was discovered that administrators did not possess

the norms needed to deal with challenges from their teachers. Their response to the talk

from the teachers who complained about attending the program was to complain to the

superintendent. The superintendent’s response to the talk from her administrators was to

back away and try to silence the talk by canceling the program or changing its structure.

However, one administrator did to listen to the talk without taking back her support. She

convinced the superintendent to allow the program to continue despite the complaints by

the few.

Time was another challenge throughout the program. The teachers said they

didn’t have time to teach the way they know they should because teaching that way takes

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too much time. They also didn’t want to spend time away from their classrooms.

Teachers from Greenfield dropped out because they didn’t have enough time; their

plates were full. The occupation of teaching in the United States does not allow time for

teachers to interact with each other. Teachers spend most of their day in front of

students. In our culture, it is thought that teachers are not performing the duties of

teacher if they are not in the classroom. However, the teachers who took the time to

complete the program and collaborate with other teachers all said it was worth their time.

Why Did Some Leave?

There were three basic differences between the teachers who chose to stay and

finish the program and those who didn’t. First, the teachers who continued to the end of

the program were not satisfied with the learning outcomes of all their students and/or

they expressed an interest in learning new ideas for their practice as an important

ongoing activity for them. These teachers said they found the program increasingly

beneficial as the time went on.

Second, the teachers who stayed already had an established and trusted working

relationship with me. This was my first year of working in the classrooms of the

teachers who dropped out of the program. At the time of the implementation of this

project, I did not yet have an opportunity to work with one of the teachers who quit.

One of the teachers who stayed told me she found the projects she was previously

involved in with me were worthwhile, so she reasoned that this would be valuable as

well. I didn’t have an opportunity to work with Ms. Seymour and her class until the

following school year. If you recall, Ms. Seymour attended only one session. I received

this e-mail from her that October:

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Monica, I just wanted to thank you for all of your help with Science this year. I

appreciate all of your hard work, and your willingness to share all of your good

ideas. Science has been very fun and enjoyable for all of us. I thought you

needed to here [sic] this because sometimes people aren’t acknowledged for their

hard work. You are a wonderful asset to our District. We are lucky to have you.

Keep on doing what you are doing!! (Personal communication, October 22,

2002)

I wondered if I had the opportunity to work with her before my research study would she

have chosen to stay.

Third, there already existed a collegial relationship among the teachers who

stayed. They worked together on committees for the NCA process in their school. Their

social committee was strong, offering many opportunities throughout the year for social

interactions. One of these teachers had previous collaborative experiences with another

teacher. They combined their classes and shared the responsibility for teaching all of

their students.

New Opportunities

Analysis of the data revealed that the teachers who completed the program

appeared to be developing their knowledge for teaching. In their conversations during

the feedback session and final interviews, they talked about what they felt they learned.

These teachers said they realized the value of collaboration in designing a lesson; they

were proud of their lesson they designed and said they would not have had the time or

been able to individually design a lesson similar to the ones they designed as a group.

They said they learned more about the subject we studied - multiplying fractions or force

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and motion. They described new strategies they would try in the next school year. They

also learned new things about their students. They were feeling more comfortable with

each other about asking questions about their practice.

For teachers to develop the kind of teaching practice as recommended by

educational reform, teachers need to overcome their individualism and learn new ways

of talking to each other. This professional development program provided opportunities

to experience collaboration which can help them develop a professional role orientation

to teaching (Buchmann, 1993) in which work with others, on goals shared as

professionals, overrides the powerful draw of personal style. It provided opportunities to

talk, so they could get better at talking to one another in new ways. These teachers were

not yet experts, but to become an expert, opportunities to practice, make mistakes, and

learn from them are vital.

Implications for Professional Development

A common belief in our society is that experience is the best teacher. Buchmann

and Schwille (1983) find fault with this commonsense theory of knowledge - that we

learn most reliably through sense experiences. Sight and sound can convey

misinformation. Consider the way the sun appears to move around the earth. Knowledge

that is limited to being-there experiences can be a cognitive trap. It can hold one captive

to the culture and thinking of their present situation, closing the avenues to conceptual

and social change, closing the door to education reform. One of the challenges of the

teacher educator is to provide the kind of experience that can help teachers overcome

years of classroom experiences as students and develop a practice more consistent with

reform in education (Buchmann & Schwille, 1983; Lortie, 1975). In doing so, teachers

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are faced with many challenges and these challenges make it difficult for them to break

from their previous experiences.

Teachers need to be the primary driving force behind change (Stigler & Hiebert,

1999). It became apparent that teachers in these two schools were the decision makers

concerning their participation in this program. It was the teachers at Forest Hills who

decided in conversations among themselves to go ahead and try this program despite the

lack of administrative support. It was the teachers at Greenfield who decided in

conversations among themselves to leave the program. Greenfield teachers received

administrative support, but in the opposite direction intended by the intervention. The

teachers asked the principal to get them out of the program and he did. In this study, the

teachers were key in deciding their level of participation in this professional

development intervention.

Each building had its own norms that were established by the teachers. Ms.

Snyder wanted to continue the program but found it uncomfortable to be the only one

from her school attending the sessions. Ms. Snyder did not have the support of her

colleagues at Greenfield but found a way to break away from traditional norms. She had

the interest and perhaps experienced enough satisfaction from the sessions she did attend

to make the decision to come back alone for the last two sessions.

Most of the teachers at Forest Hills found a way to work around the challenges of

time, talk and individualism and they supported each other in the process. Sharon, who

like Ms. Seymour complained at the beginning about participating, perhaps yielded to

the norms of the culture that existed at Forest Hills; she continued with the program,

although she was the one who first voiced her complaints during the first session. She

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even taught the science lesson. The challenge for teacher educators is to find a way to

get teachers to break away from their traditional norms of the teaching practice and to

provide support for them in this process.

Teachers will need support of time; this will require a shift in thinking about

what teachers should do with their time. They need to have time during the school day

to have opportunities to collaborate. But time alone will not guarantee that collaboration

takes place. Teachers need a structure to help them organize their time. Solving a

problem, like designing a lesson about a difficult concept for the purpose of inquiry

about their teaching, within this structure could help them focus their time more

productively.

The Japanese spend the first year in their lesson study cycle getting to know one

and another, assessing the needs of the school and deciding on goals. In my study, we

spent only the first session and part of the second session on setting long term goals.

Deciding common goals is a worthwhile process that I believe helped the group to take

their first steps away from their individualism and become a community; long term goals

create a purpose for a community’s existence. But long term goals need sustaining

conversations which are tied to enabling structures and the real work of teachers.

Enabling structures would exist if the intervention were long term. Enabling

structures are characterized by a “specific time set aside with predictable regularity, a

group understanding of the purposes of these times, and someone to facilitate the

conversation” (Lambert, 1995, p. 93). Lambert continues:

Sustaining conversations are those that continue, endure, over a period of time

and are essential to sustaining the development of the community…If the

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individuals are becoming different, that is, taking on new assumptions about

teaching and learning, this is sustainable development, and it emerges primarily

from sustaining conversations. (Lambert, 1995)

Sustaining conversations about long term goals are important in developing the

kind of professional talk needed for school improvement but they can’t exist and endure

without the development of a structure to support them.

Teachers must see a need to create new knowledge or learn something new. A

needs assessment in their school building might help, although this could be difficult,

because not all teachers will be able to recognize the same problems or issues as a need.

Some teachers see external forces such as the environment, culture or language as

problems which influence their students to such a degree that it is impossible for them,

as their teacher, to have an influence or exert control. But observing students in the

classroom during a lesson and discussing observations as evidence of student learning

can lead some teachers to recognize that their students’ successes and difficulties in

learning may be a result of the lesson, their approach, or their own disposition and not

the students’ social class or perceived intellectual abilities.

Groups that are more collegial have a better chance of completing this type of

professional development. Opportunities to learn about each other should be provided

before they begin a program like lesson study if they do not already have collegial

relationships. Principals can play an important role in developing this by creating a

collegial atmosphere, but more research could help discover ways to best develop

collegiality among the school staff. The person leading group needs to establish trust

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among the members of the group. Participants need to believe that person has something

that will benefit them in their practice.

Some teachers may benefit from entering the process more slowly. The program

could start with volunteers first. Participating in classroom observations as an observer

in their own school before they become involved in the full process of an examination of

practice may help scaffold new teachers to this process without creating a threat and help

give that teacher a new vision of what is possible with their colleagues and students.

Waiting to decide who will teach the lesson that is planned until after the lesson is

designed may help support the teachers who are having difficulty with the challenges of

this program. It may not have been a coincidence that two of the teachers who dropped

thought they were going to teach the lesson first. This may have created unnecessary

stress for them.

Implications for Research on Professional Development

The challenges that I found in my study, the issues of time (Cochran-Smith &

Lytle, 1993), talk (Ball & Cohen, 1999; Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1993; Fernandez et al.,

2003) and individualism (Grossman et al., 2001; Little, 1990; Lortie, 1975), are the same

challenges that others have found in their work. The fact that these challenges keep

appearing in studies, even after thirty years, shows their resiliency.

Lesson study, a kind of teachers’ collaborative inquiry situated in teachers’

practice, is a very appealing kind of professional development. It was the professional

development process that brought about educational change in Japan (Lewis, 2000). It

provides a comfortable forum for tackling problems about practice (Fernandez et al.,

2003). It meets the standards for professional development because it is collaborative,

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sustained over time, situated in authentic activities of teachers, and includes time for

reflection. But the shifts needed in the structure of the American teaching practice to

overcome the challenges I found are not going to happen just by introducing lesson

study or any other type of professional development. These issues that challenge our

work need to be addressed more directly by design.

Lesson study is successful in Japan, but for it to become successful in the United

States, teachers and their administrators will need support. How do you get teachers to

become collegial? What can administrators do to foster this collegiality among their

teachers in their school? How do you get teachers to move away from their self interests

to consider the bigger needs of the community? How can you develop big talk among all

the members of the community? More research is needed to answer all of these

questions.

Think back to that first year teacher I introduced in the first chapter. Her ideas

were different from others in her school, but she managed by closing the door and

searching for ideas from outside the school. Her work focused on improving instruction

for her students in her classroom, but she had to work alone in her building. My work

today is to assist teachers in providing better opportunities for their students’ learning.

Teachers can learn many things by working together. In this project, I asked my

colleagues to come to the edge, to break away from their comfortable and safe places.

Eight came. I found the courage to push them and they flew!

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APPENDIX A

The Teachers in this Study

Teachers from Forest Hills are identified by a first name; teachers from

Greenfield are identified by last names. Teachers planning the mathematics

lesson have names that begin with “M”; teachers planning the science lesson

have names that begin with “S”. One of these teachers was male, but to mask his

identity, he is referred to in the feminine gender.

239

Mathematics

5th Grade

Science

4th GradeFo

rest

Hill

s

Marilyn

Melissa

Megan

Mary Ellen

Sharon

Sylvia

Sarah

Gre

enfie

ld Ms. McHugh

Ms. Miller

Ms. Snyder

Ms. Seymour

APPENDIX B

Initial Interview Questions

Do you enjoy teaching math/science? Why?

How do your students best learn math and science? Why do you think that? Is that

true for all your students?

Have you ever had an opportunity to do research in your classroom? If yes, what

did you learn? If no, what do you think you might learn?

Are there any special features or elements of a lesson you include in every math or

science lesson? What are they?

Describe a typical math/science lesson in your classroom.

If not already described, ask: How do you assess what your students know before

instruction?

How sure are you about what they know before, during and after a lesson?

Are you satisfied with the learning outcomes of all your students? Explain.

What do you do to help the students who are having a difficult time in learning?

Do other teachers influence the way you teach? How?

Do you get a chance to talk to other teachers about teaching practices?

What kinds of things do you share? Do you feel that talking to other teachers about

teaching is worthwhile? Why? Could there be any times when it may not be

worthwhile?

Do you get a chance to observe other teachers? Do other teachers get a chance to

observe you?

What kind of feedback do you get from others who observe you? How does that

feedback make you feel? Why do you feel that way?

How do you feel about giving feedback to other teachers you observe teaching?

What makes you feel that way?

Is there anything you would like to ask me?

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APPENDIX C

Final Interview Questions

I’d like to start out by thanking you for taking the time to do this interview. As I listened

to the tapes of our lesson study, I thought of questions about what happened. I wonder

what you were thinking then and now. When answering these questions, please be as

honest as possible. Don’t worry about being impolite or critical, or hurting my feelings

because if you are not completely honest I am not going to learn very much. Your

responses will remain confidential and I will protect your identity. As a reminder, this

conversation and your statements are not related to any performance review for the

district. Do you have any questions for me before we begin?

Questions Probes

What was your overall impression of the

lesson study?

Why did you participate in lesson study? Some teachers said they didn’t want to be

out of their classrooms so much. Did you

feel the same way?

Not really wanting to be involved

Thought it was worth a try

Really was the right thing to do

Did you ever think about how you might get

out of it or consider dropping out? Why or

(why not)?

Two teachers did call in sick, one for eye

surgery and the other for a vacation. They

will be asked: How did you feel about

missing the session when you were absent?

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Did your reasons for participating change at

all during the study?

If yes, how and why?

How did you feel about the Greenfield

teachers dropping out? How do you think it

affected the outcome of our sessions? Why do

you think the Greenfield teachers dropped

out?

Was there a particular feature of lesson study

you felt was the most beneficial for you?

Why?

Some people mention these. Did any of

these seem particularly important to you.

Planning a lesson with a group of teachers

Watching other teachers teach

Sharing ideas about teaching

Being able to watch students more carefully

during a lesson

Deciding on common goals (long term and

short term)

Getting feedback from other teachers

Choosing your own topic to study during

professional development

Thinking and learning more about the

content before teaching it to kids.

What features of lesson study do you find

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least useful? Why?

Did you learn anything about your own

teaching practices? What did you learn? How

did you learn this?

Were there any new ideas or strategies that

seem to work better than you thought they

would and you think you might try to use in

the future?

Were there any ideas or strategies that you

have used in the past that you are thinking

aren’t really working so well?

Did you learn anything about the teaching

practices of your colleagues? What did you

learn? How did you learn it?

What did you learn about multiplying

fractions (or forces and motion)? How did

you learn that?

Did you learn anything about your students

by participating in lesson study? What did

you learn? When did this happen? How did

it happen?

Megan was relieved to see that Marilyn’s

students reacted in ways similar to her own

children. Did you notice anything like that

when you observed other teachers’ students?

Did you learn anything about another

teachers’ students or students in general?

What did you learn? Did anything surprise

you? Why? What happened that you

expected?

Sharon was surprised how some of her

students who usually don’t perform very

well were “wrapped” in the lesson. What

did you think when she said that during the

feedback session?

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What did you think about the planning

sessions?

How does planning a lesson alone compare

to planning a lesson together? What kind of

things happened with the group that

probably doesn’t happen when you plan a

lesson alone? Why might this happen (or

not)?

What did you learn during the lesson

enactment?

What did you like about the feedback

sessions? What would you do differently

next time? Why?

What did you learn during the feedback

session?

Researchers say that in order for American

teachers to realize the full benefit of lesson

study, they need to learn to be more honest

and give constructive feedback to each

other. Did you see that happening in our

sessions?

How is lesson study as a form of professional

development different from other

professional development activities you

participated in? Is that good? Why or why

not?

Lesson study seems to give more

responsibility for professional development

on the teacher. Do you think this happened

in our lesson study?

Did you feel like you had ownership in the

lesson? Why?

Did anything happen during lesson study that

challenged what your personal ideas or

beliefs about teaching and learning? How did

it challenge them? What are you thinking

about that now?

Marilyn’s ideas about using manipulatives

in mathematics seemed to be challenged

during the lesson study. She said she likes

to use manipulatives but that her kids don’t

like to use them. She thought the

manipulatives messed the kids up during the

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lesson. But at the end of the feedback

session she said that she would definitely

use different kinds of manipulatives next

year when teaching fractions. Do you think

lesson study created a challenge of beliefs

for Marilyn? Did the lesson challenge your

beliefs about using manipulatives or

anything else?

Research says that before teachers implement

different teaching or learning strategies in

their classroom they need to first experience

them as a learner themselves. Do you think

that is true? Were there any ideas or strategies

you experienced during lesson study that you

think would work for you in the classroom?

Examples:

Using journals for students to record their

thinking

Collaborative learning environment

Designing a project with a team

Taking advantage of the strengths of each

individual to enhance the quality of the

project

Learning from expertise of peers and not just

the teacher as the expert

Depending on the strengths and resources of

others

Peers explaining ideas to each other

(Classroom discourse)

Do you think our lesson study was

successful? Why? What do you think made

it successful (or not)?

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Would this lesson study be worthwhile for

other teachers in the building? In the district?

Why or why not? How could this be done? Is

this a kind of work that would be hard to get

most teachers to do together, or do you think

most teachers would want to do this?

How aware are you of the reformed efforts in

math and science? Is lesson study a good

way to help you learn and practice the ideas

suggested by the math and science reform?

Why?

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APPENDIX D

The CoWeb Page

What are our lesson study goals? We need a broad, long term goal that could be

motivational or social and a short term goal that covers content. First, for the

long term goal, think about the students you serve.

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APPENDIX E

Fifth Grade Fraction Pre-Test

Use the space provided to show how you solve the problems.

Miss K has 24 students in her class. ½ of

the students are going on a field trip. How

many students will be going on the trip?

The three fifth grade classes had a party.

Each class had 3/8 of a pizza left. How

much pizza is left from all three classes?

Miss R has 20 cupcakes. Her class ate 3/4

of those cupcakes. How many cupcakes did

they eat?

A caterpillar is 1/3 of an inch long. After it

turns into a butterfly it is 4 times as long.

How long is the butterfly?

The students in the movie “Econ and Me”

are building a clubhouse. They used a piece

of wood that is 2/3 of a foot long. When

they finished they had ½ of the piece of

wood left. How much wood is left?

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APPENDIX F

Multiplying Fractions Lesson

Finding a fraction of a whole number

Plan of the study lesson

a. Goals

i. Long term - Students will have respect for self, others and

learning and take personal responsibility for their behavior

ii. Short term - Find a fractional part of a whole number

b. How this study lesson is related to the lesson study goal

i. Long term goal - the students will work with partners and

explain their answer and way of thinking. They need to

collaborate with their partners with positive statements.

ii. Short term goal – This is one of the first lessons in the

multiplication of fractions

c. Process of the study lesson

i. Start with a story problem with ½ of 12 have three students

explain their answers and thinking.

12 students from Ms. Marilyn’s class are in chorus.

Only ½ of the students in chorus will attend the spring

concert. How many of Ms. Marilyn’s students will

attend the spring concert?

ii. Give the same story problem using ¼ of 12. Ask students how they

will figure out the answer. Lead to drawing a picture of using

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manipulative. Work out the problem with partner. Share answers and

thinking with the whole class.

12 students from Ms. Marilyn’s class are in chorus.

Only ¼ of the students in chorus will attend the spring

concert. How many of Ms. Marilyn’s students will

attend the spring concert?

iii. Then give two problems to work on independently. The students

will work independently; write their answers for both but the thinking

for one, share their answer and thinking with their partner. Then we

will share with the whole class.

a. 1/6 of 18

b. 1/3 of 24

iv. Then give a story problem with factions that have numerators greater

then one. Read together, answer at their desks, discuss with partner

then share strategies with whole class.

There are 12 teachers at Forest Hills. 2/3 of the teachers

will be at a meeting Wednesday morning. How many

teachers are going to be at the meeting?

v. Give another story problem. Students work independently, share

with their partners, share with the whole class.

250

There are 12 teachers at Forest Hills. ¾ of the teachers

will be at a meeting Wednesday morning. How many

teachers are going to be at the meeting?

vi. Then give two problems to work on independently. The

students will work independently; write their answers for both

but the thinking for one, share with a partner, and share with the

class.

a. 3/5 of 20

b. 5/6 of 18

d. Evaluation – Draw a picture of how it is solved, write the answer and write

your thinking in words.

i. There are 24 computers in the lab. 4/6 of the computers are working

today. How many computers are working?

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APPENDIX G

The Science Lesson: Brick Slide

Long Term Goals:

Students will have respect for self, others, and learning.

Short Term Goals:

A force is a push or a pull that can speed up, slow down, stop or change the

direction of an object. Friction is a force that slows things down.

Introduction:

Introduce and read story about Egyptian pyramids

Discuss Egyptian pyramids and how they moved large “bricks” to construct.

Focus Questions:

What happens when we move our brick across different surfaces?

How much force does it take to move a brick?

Materials:

12 small bricks

12 boards (smooth on one side and sand paper glued onto the other)

12 spring scales

Procedure:

1. Show students pictures of the pyramids and the bricks used to build them.

Read story.

2. We know the Egyptians had to move their bricks over different surfaces

because they had to move them from where they quarried or made them.

Over which surfaces would it be easier to move the bricks?

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3. We can simulate the troubles the Egyptians had by moving our bricks over

the various surfaces we will have set up at your desks. Ask students: What

happens when we move our brick across different surfaces? How much force

is needed to pull the bricks across the different surfaces? In our investigation,

we will find out how different surfaces affect the movement of the brick. One

person from each group will retrieve materials from the workstation.

4. Students will be given the opportunity to practice measuring force in

Newtons.

5. Students will predict and record the amount of force needed to pull the

brick.

6. Students will measure and record the force needed to pull the brick from

one end of the board to the other. There will be three trials for each surface.

7. Students will summarize results and draw a conclusion by answering the

questions given.

8. Each group will gather materials to be put away

9. In a whole group discussion, ask individual groups to share and record their

data.

10. Discuss differences in data if needed and individual groups conclusions.

What conclusion can we make as a whole class?

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APPENDIX H

Power Point Slides for the Science Lesson

254

255

APPENDIX I

The Science Worksheet

APPENDIX J

Classroom Observation Protocol

258

Observer: ______________________

Teacher:________________________

Name of Lesson_________________

Topic: _________________________

Time Lesson Began: ______________

Time Lesson ends: ________________

Materials: _______________________

Date of Observation: _______________

What are the goals of the lesson?

Where is the lesson situated in the development of the unit?

Lesson Flow: Describe the main tasks or activities that occurred during the class

period and the amount of time devoted to each.

Observations of Tasks/Activities

1. Describe the task as presented orally or in writing by the teachers. Use

the teacher’s language in the description.

2. Describe the interactions of the teacher with the students.

What kinds of questions were asked? How did the teacher respond to

the student?

3. Describe the students’ responses. Did they explain their reasoning?

Did they support or justify their claims?

4. What kinds of questions did students ask?

5. Did the lesson motivate students to work together to solve a problem?

6. How did the students interact with their peers? To what extent did it

reflect substantive conversation about mathematical/science ideas?

7. What was the level of engagement of most students most of the time?

8. Did the lesson match students’ understanding and prior knowledge?

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9. After the lesson, did the students feel like they accomplished

something?

260

APPENDIX K

Feedback Session Protocol

1. Assign the role of moderator

2. The moderator begins the session with a brief outline of the agenda for discussion.

The feedback session should end with comments from an outside advisor, if present.

3. The teacher who taught the lesson first comments on the lesson and gives reactions.

This will give the teacher the opportunity to describe what was being studied, what

worked, what didn’t, what she would change about the lesson.

4. When observers begin to share their feedback, they first thank the teacher who taught

the lesson and then discuss what they liked about the lesson. Observers could then

share critical feedback by phrasing it in a statement that might begin like, “When I

taught this lesson, I did (blank) differently because…” They could then ask the

teacher to explain their reasons for why they did it their way.

5. Each observer should comment on a specific aspect of the lesson and give other

observers the chance to reply or comment on related aspects. This is done to avoid the

problem of one observer dominating the conversation and allowing others to share

feedback.

6. The teacher who taught the lesson should wait until all observers have a chance to

comment about a particular aspect of a lesson before responding to observers. This

establishes a waiting etiquette and allows all participants to voice and absorb

feedback in a reflective manner.

BIBLIOGRAPHY