Illustration 10: A teacher’s action
research on her own biases
We adapted the illustration in this
section from a teacher’s personal account of her
eye-opening experience with action research (Wickett, 1997).
Her experience took place in the context of the NSF-funded
Equity in Mathematics Education Leadership Institute project
(also known as the EMELI project).
In a workshop on equity issues, this
teacher learned about the empirical evidence showing that
teachers call on boys more often than girls in mathematics
classrooms. She became interested in exploring whether she,
too, had some unrecognized biases in the way she called upon
students in her class. She feared such biases might impede her
goal of providing equitable access and support to all her
students.
While the focus of her action research
was clear, she struggled with the decision of what kind of data
to gather. She searched for a systematic way to examine her
classroom practices that would not make her self-conscious and
unduly influence her daily practice. After rejecting, for
various reasons, the options of audiotaping or videotaping some
of her classes, she decided to examine the charts that she
routinely created to record students’ contributions in a
mathematical discussion. As it was her practice to create these
charts by writing down each student’s contribution
verbatim, followed by the student’s name, these existing
records were indeed ideal to address her question.
Her analysis of the charts created over
several weeks revealed some interesting and surprising
patterns. While there was not much difference in the numbers of
girls and boys she called on, she noticed that she tended to
call on the boys first. She also noticed that she usually
included students with limited English proficiency only toward
the end of the discussions. The teacher describes these
findings as “upsetting” to her because they
suggested unconscious biases in her behavior.
These finding led to the teacher
reflecting on the reasons she called on students in a mathematical
discussion and the potential implications of
these instructional choices for her students’ learning
opportunities. She realized that she tended to call on certain
students first because she expected their contributions to be
catalysts for other students’ ideas; she was also
hesitant to call on students until they volunteered, and some
students (especially students with limited English proficiency)
tended to do so only later in the lesson, if at all. Despite
these reasonable justifications, she concluded that her current
practices were not truly giving all students equal
opportunities to participate in her mathematics classes. She
decided to try to change these practices.
To make sure that she gave all students
an equal opportunity to answer first, she made a conscious
effort to pause before calling on students during a
mathematical discussion. Whenever possible, she asked other
adults in the class to write down the students’ responses
so that she could pay more attention to facilitating the
discussion and to asking questions that could invite more
students to contribute. To encourage more students to share in
a large group, she also successfully experimented with the use
of “dyad.” In this technique, each student has the
opportunity to express his or her thoughts to a partner without
interruption; each partner is allotted an equal amount of time
and students may choose to use their primary language.
The teacher reports feeling empowered by
this process. She was able to make positive changes in her
classroom practice that resulted in better learning
opportunities for her students. At the same time, she had done
it at her own pace, taking only the steps she felt comfortable
taking at the moment. She sums up her experience in this way:
I had enough information that I could
make positive changes yet not so much information that I felt
overwhelmed and defeated. … By looking at my practices
honestly and without condemning myself, I began the process of
recovery and change. … I was able to remain open, freeing
myself to try new ideas with my students’ best interests
in mind. (Wickett, 1997, p. 104)
Main elements and variations
Teachers can gather and make sense of
information in many different ways. In the illustrations in
this chapter, we highlighted the following elements common to
gathering information and making sense of it:
• Teachers gathered information for a purpose. In other words, teachers gathered data and
evaluated it to address a felt need or answer a question they
had posed themselves.
• Teachers actively made sense of the information. Teachers engaged in hands-on interpretation
of data, readings or presentations in each activity we
reported.
• Teachers made sense of the information in
interaction with others. In all
the activities, teachers at some point negotiated
interpretations and made meaning with peers, facilitators
and/or experts. Through this process, they benefited from
different perspectives and others’ constructions of
meaning.
Despite these common elements,
professional development experiences in which teachers gather
and making sense of information can be quite varied. This was
already evident in our two illustrations, and many more
variations are reported in the literature. Indeed, the
professional development experiences examined in this chapter
can be seen as a “collection” related by the fact
that each example explicitly engages teachers in learning from
and with information of various kinds.
Variations within this collection mostly
depend on the source of
the information, how the information is gathered, and how
the information is examined and used.
As we consider the first variable, the source of the information, the following possibilities should be
considered, as they can all present valuable learning
opportunities for teachers:
• Lectures or presentations. These can be offered by an expert, such as the
mathematician in Illustration 9, a more experienced colleague,
or even another member of the group. In Illustration 9, for
example, each participant contributed a unit presentation.
• Published texts.
These could include for example articles, books, textbooks or
curriculum series. All these resources were used in the inquiry
on the geometry curriculum reported in Illustration 9.
• Texts produced by other members of the learning
community. These texts could be
created by a facilitator, individual teachers or even the group
as a whole. The list of key geometry ideas the group generated
based on the unit presentations in Illustration 9 is a good
example of this kind of text.
• Videotaped excerpts.
These could capture examples of classroom practice as well as
other events related to school mathematics reform.
• Materials available in electronic form. These could include
CD-ROMs, information
gathered from the Internet, and even data available in
electronic databases.
• Various kinds of artifacts. These could have been generated in classroom
implementations (such as student work, lesson plans or the
“discussion charts” used by the teacher in her
action research reported in Illustration 10), or in other
reform-related experiences (such as agendas or minutes of
important meetings, policy documents, etc.).
• Various kinds of data. These data could be the results of the
teacher’s own observations or analysis of artifacts
and/or demographic information (such as the number of times and
the sequence in which different categories of students were
called upon in the teacher’s classroom, as transpired
from her analysis of the discussion charts in Illustration 10)
or data available in the research literature or other sources
(such as the data about boys being called on more than girls in
mathematics classrooms that the teacher in Illustration 10 read
about prior to her own action research).
Each source of information listed above
may convey some informational content better than others. Also,
different kinds of activities may be more appropriate than
others for making sense of information conveyed from these
different sources.
A second source of variation in this kind
of professional development is how the information examined was gathered. This can happen mainly in two ways:
• The facilitator selects the information and makes it accessible
to the participating teachers.
• The teachers themselves
gather the information, following some directions or guidelines
set by the facilitator.
The first option is often the preferred
one because it saves teachers valuable time. Teachers also
benefit from the facilitator’s expertise. However, there
is value in empowering teachers to gather their own
information, at least some of the time. Whether they search the
library, browse the Internet, or collect their own data,
teachers can learn skills that will serve them in the future as
they research issues independently.
Finally, this type of professional
development varies according to what is done with the information. Since the options in this case are too many
and too context-dependent to list, we will simply refer readers
to the two illustrations featured in this chapter for some
examples. We would like to point out, however, how reading and
conducting action research seem greatly enhanced when they
occur in conjunction with other activities in summer
institutes, workshops or study groups, rather than in
isolation.
The role played by the professional
development provider in this type of experiences may appear to
be less central, yet it is by no means unimportant.
Professional development providers can serve as invaluable
resources for participants as they gather and make sense of
information. Moreover, providers can be very influential in
framing and guiding these activities and in connecting them to
other parts of the professional development program. Depending
on the content and format of the information gathering
activities, providers may require different kinds of expertise
in order to be effective.
Continued
