Facilitating stakeholders: Experiences from the Austrian IMST Project

Abstract

IntroductionMany educational systems face the same challenge: Years of research have led to good notions of what might work in a classroom, and even better notions of what does not work. Pilot studies have found promising ways to teach, but those were never taken up large scale and often disappeared once the project in which the teaching methods were explored terminated.This problem is in itself well known, and moved the field of educational research to engage in organizational studies and consider not only professional teacher development, but its embedding in school and system development. This shift also instigated a shift in the perception of the involved teachers: no longer are they seen as individuals who put what researchers have thought about into practice, but they are seen for what they are: Autonomous subjects, who can drive changes or object to them and hinder them for reasons which may be good or bad depending on their local knowledge and their motivation. Konrad Krainer (this volume) has written on this shift and the resulting perception of teachers as stakeholders.In this paper, we will present an elaborate example of what can happen, if you give educational stakeholders a chance to participate and even more instigate change processes in a supportive environment. We will also present this environment, the measures taken and needed to support people in following their vision, and in grounding that vision in research. The narrative of this development is a historical one, starting with the national educational crisis introduced by the perceived poor performance of Austrian students in the 1995 TIMS study.The educational context and the overall conception of IMSTIn 1995 Austria took part in the TEMS-study. The results of the high-school seniors were considered poor, and the ministry of education commissioned an analysis of the state of mathematics and science education in Austria. Main findings were that there exist(ed) many promising projects and initiatives, but they were fragmented and not well known (see Krainer, 2003). Thus, many initiatives had to start from scratch, instead of learning from each other and previous dead-ends. There was also a lack of supportive institutions, no professor for didactics of mathematics for elementary schools and also a lack of professors for didactics of the physical sciences. Additionally, one wanted more teachers engaged in reflecting and working on their teaching.The strategy to rectify that situation was therefore to install a project - the EMST project (Innovations Make Schools Top2) - to support teachers with the main tasks to network teachers working on their teaching, as well as to network projects, developments etc., to raise the number of teachers engaged in a reflection of their teaching, and to support those teachers. Thus, the project had two strands : a) a networking strand, which tried to involve teachers and the educational authorities in a region to implement networking and professional development activities in their region, and b) a teacher project strand organized in the form of a fund (the IMST-fimd), which supported between 100 and 150 teams of teachers3 to conduct action research projects on an aspect of their own classroom teaching. Additionally, the EMST-team was commissioned to map out a support system for the quality development of mathematics, science and technology teaching.4IMST started in 2000, since then the project was re-commissioned several times (so far till 2012). The project went through various phases: At first, there was a stronger direct involvement of subject didacticians, who themselves worked with teachers alongside expert teachers. Later on, the expert teachers working with the didacticians worked with the teachers by themselves. Over the years the range of addressed teachers was increased: the project started initially to support higher secondary schools only (because of the bad results at the TEMSS upper secondary); after four years lower secondary teachers were also addressed, and finally in 2007 the call for participation was opened for elementary school and kindergarten teachers. …