What Influences Teachers' Modifications of Curriculum?

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This proposal acknowledges the fact that despite curriculum developers' best efforts to ensure faithful implementation, teachers often make modifications; reordering, skipping or adding lessons, changing an "exploration" into a lecture, and so on. This project pursues three related research questions: What types of modifications do teachers make (and why), which types of modifications best help students learn, and how do teachers' modifications change in response to professional development activities designed to help them become more attuned to students' thinking? To pursue this research in collaboration with teachers, the project will conduct professional development activities based on a successful model from a previous project. Three teams, each consisting of nine high-school physics, biology or ecosystems teachers of diverse student populations (Montgomery and Baltimore Counties in Maryland), will meet twice a month to discuss video snippets from their classes, collected with the help of project staff. Discussions will focus on students' thinking and on how and why teachers modified curricula. Data to be collected and methods used to address the research questions include triangulating between data sources that include videotapes of teachers' classes and team meetings, interviews with teachers and test results from their students.