Abstract
Math is often taught poorly emphasizing rote, procedural methods rather than creativity and problem solving. Alberta Education developed a new mathematics curriculum to transform mathematics teaching to inquiry driven methods. This revised curriculum provides a new vision for mathematics and creates opportunities and requirements for professional learning by teachers. Conventional offsite, after school, or weekend professional development is typically “sit and listen, maybe try on Monday”. Professional development that is embedded, responsive, and personalized is known to be more effective at changing teaching practice. Alberta teachers are geographically dispersed making online professional learning a desirable alternative to on-site workshops. As access to and use of the Internet gains momentum in schools across the country, opportunities for collaborative, online professional development become more viable. The online professional development in this hermeneutic study maps on to the new vision promoted in Alberta’s math curriculum, and addresses the challenge of a distributed teacher population. Thirteen geographically dispersed participants, including 10 teachers, a PhD mathematician, and two mathematics education specialists, collaborated in an online professional learning community to build knowledge for teaching mathematics. This paper describes and interprets the shared experiences of learners within an online, synchronous learning community that focused on discipline rich, focused inquiry with mathematics. Findings show that the nature and quality of the mathematics task impacted the quality and nature of the online interaction. Mathematics problems that incorporated easily drawn symbols and minimal text worked best in the online collaborative space. Members of this learning community discovered how to assert their identity in the online environment.
Highlights
The quality of professional development is measured by the teachers’ success in developing pedagogical competencies and perspectives, which are reflected in new visions and approaches to practice, while unlearning the beliefs about students and methods of instruction that have dominated their professional lives to date
An invitation to participate in the online mathematics professional learning community was sent to teachers who had participated in Galileo Network’s professional development in previous initiatives
The other five teachers all held previous experience with Galileo Educational Network (GENA)’s professional development and were from unique schools located in different geographic locations in Alberta
Summary
Professional DevelopmentIt is well known that to successfully implement new curricula, teachers need professional learning opportunities and ongoing support to make the needed changes to their pedagogical practices (Darling-Hammond & Bransford, 2007; Fernandez & Yoshida, 2004; Jacobsen, 2006; Stigler & Hiebert, 1999).Professional development is often offsite, after school, and on weekends. It is well known that to successfully implement new curricula, teachers need professional learning opportunities and ongoing support to make the needed changes to their pedagogical practices (Darling-Hammond & Bransford, 2007; Fernandez & Yoshida, 2004; Jacobsen, 2006; Stigler & Hiebert, 1999). Geographic and temporal limitations often prevent suburban and rural teachers from being able to attend meaningful and transformative, face-to-face professional development opportunities. In their seminal work on educational reform, Darling-Hammond and McLaughlin (1995) outlined the difficulty that many teachers face accessing quality professional development while attempting to transform their teaching.
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