TEACHER CHANGE IN MATHEMATICS

As a school administrator supporting your school community in its mathematics instruction and assessment initiatives, it is important for you to be informed of current research in mathematics education. The school administrators as well as the teachers must have some understanding of the change process in education. Research has shown us that the one-shot, workshop-based professional development opportunities that teachers have usually been offered may result in some improved mathematics in individual classrooms. However, necessary long-lasting, school wide change calls for substantive, ongoing, school wide support with continuous formal and informal job-embedded learning strategies being used with your school faculty. For real change to happen, schools need to plan carefully. According to Michael Fullan and Andy Hargreaves (1992), there are three parts to the change process:

1. Providing new materials. This is the tangible part of a change innovation and relatively easy to accomplish.

2. Introducing new behaviors and practices, or the “doing” part of the change process. This is introducing and supporting the different pedagogical style, skills, and practices in which a person will be involved. This would involve changing a teacher’s mathematics instruction from a traditional skill-based program to a more balanced, reform-based program based on rich learning tasks, problem solving, and deep conceptual understanding.

3. Embedding new beliefs and understandings. This is what makes innovation happen—where one internalizes and understands the rationale for the change. This understanding is very important when making the decision about whether or not to implement the change and how to use it. This third part is the crux of the change process in mathematics education. It is absolutely imperative that school administrators, teachers, and the school community have an understanding of the reform movement in mathematics and the change process itself, as both are essential for any meaningful change in mathematics teaching and assessment to happen. The decades of the 1990s and the first decade of the new millennium have had the ongoing theme of “large-scale reform.”We have seen those testing initiatives change in a variety of ways over the past decade. The data sometimes show improvement, but they never seem to show enough improvement. The question is, how do we do better at closing the achievement gap?What qualities do our educational leaders and faculty need to best drive the improvement agenda for a sustainable period of time? “Sustainability is the capacity of a system to engage in the complexities of continuous improvement consistent with deep values of human purpose” (Fullan, 2005). Fullan goes on to explain that sustainability isn’t just about ensuring that an initiative lasts a long time; it also addresses the fact that new initiatives may need to be developed without compromising existing initiatives. As a school administrator, you face the challenge of deciding which initiatives are worthwhile and necessary for a school community and then moving the school in that direction. Once you have decided, together with your staff and school community, that mathematics is a focus for your change initiative, it has been shown that the success or failure of an education program is determined more by whether it upholds or challenges the school community’s beliefs than by the number or breadth of the changes involved in the initiative.

As stated above, teachers’ values, beliefs, and reflections are important in the change process. Several elements have been observed in studies of successful educational reform: shared leadership, awareness of need, adult interaction with each other, ongoing commitment in spite of conflict and tension, desire to learn, and parental support. Elizabeth Smith Senger (1999), in her study of three elementary teachers who were struggling with issues of reform and traditional mathematics teaching in relation to their personal values and beliefs, found some observed paths of teacher change:

The first, newly gained awareness, was initially held without commitment in a tentative questioning mode and was pooled from various sources. Essentially, the teacher has simply gained an awareness of the need for change in his or her teaching; however, no change or commitment to change has been made at this point. If the teacher did not reject this new information and awareness, with time and reflection, produced mental images of new forms of teaching practice (pre-images) are formed. The teacher is thinking about new or different ways to teach and is beginning to visualize them. The pre-images inspired a double-faceted experimentation which involved both verbal and classroom practice trials. The teacher willingly begins to experiment with teaching methods as a result of the visualizations. Verbal experimentation involved the teachers using expressions and descriptions of their pre-images as a means of expressing and assessing several aspects which included:

(a) Their own comfort level

(b) Their confidence that the ideas would work in their classrooms

(c) The ways in which the ideas “fit” with the teacher’s own past history

(d) The teacher’s reputation with her colleagues as “traditional” or “reform-oriented” in terms of initiative and

mathematics teaching. (Senger, pp. 210–211) Senger’s data revealed that the integration of a new belief occurred as a thoughtful and complex process over time, which included imaging, experimentation, and reflection on those values.

One complication for teachers when attempting to implement change in the area of mathematics is that,unlike teaching other subjects such as literacy or history, most teachers face the extra challenge of not having a solid understanding of the mathematics content itself. Borko,Mayfield,Marion, Flexer, and Cumbo (1997), in a study of a group of third-grade teachers who participated in a University of Colorado assessment project on designing and implementing mathematics performance assessment tasks, found the following supports and impediments to teacher change:

Theme 1: Situating the change process in the actual teaching and learning contexts where the new ideas will be implemented is an effective strategy in helping teachers change their practice. This is job-embedded learning in the teachers’ own classroom and school with their own colleagues.

Theme 2: Group discussion of instructional and assessment issues can be an effective tool for the social construction of new ideas and practices. Just as students need to have math conferences or a math congress, so do teachers. This discussion and sharing of practice helps teachers solidify their understanding of the mathematics being taught and their knowledge and understanding of what and how their students are learning. It also helps build confidence so that teachers are willing to continue with the change process.

Theme 3: Staff development personnel and other persons with specific expertise can facilitate change by introducing new ideas based on teachers’ current levels of interest, understanding, and skill.

Theme 4: When teachers’ beliefs are incompatible with the intentions of the staff development team and are not challenged, the teachers are likely either to ignore new ideas or inappropriately assimilate them into their existing practices.

Theme 5:Time is a major obstacle to changing classroom practice. Competition among priorities for limited classroom time is particularly troublesome, as well as for time for necessary job-embedded staff development that occurs during the school day. (pp.14–26) Researchers also acknowledged that teachers’ knowledge and beliefs about learning, teaching, and mathematics subject matter are critical in determining how and whether teachers implement new educational ideas. If teachers believe in traditional teaching (put simply, the teaching of isolated rote skills out of context and not connected to real-world problems) and ignore the research on mathematics reform and on how students construct learning in mathematics, then it is highly unlikely that teachers will change their practice.

Another major factor in the change process is trust. For trust to be developed in a school, both teachers and leaders need to have discovered that it is safe to take risks and chances and that it is safe to make mistakes. The staff need to feel that they are working in a protected learning environment where mistakes will be made but that they will be learned from and that the small successes will be celebrated along the way.

McLaughlin and Talbert (1993) suggested that, for teachers to adapt their teaching practices to meet the new reform agenda, they must participate in a professional learning community that supports risk taking and that discusses new teaching strategies and materials. Borko et al. (1997) also discuss the issue of time in educational reform. They suggest that staff development programs be at least one year in length and that they provide release time for teachers. Change efforts must take into account the feeling that classroom time is insufficient for teachers to accomplish what they feel they need to with the students.