Examining an On-line, International Exchange Professional Development Program for High School Teachers

该项目旨在调查在线、跨国教师合作在促进专业发展方面的潜力，从而支持数学教师从实践和相互学习中学习。设计利用教师经验和知识的专业发展是支持教师专业学习的一种方式，因为它使教师能够专注于发展与实践特殊性相结合的技能。通过相互合作设计和修改课程，数学教师可以在许多方面支持彼此的学习，包括提出问题，提出替代方案，并根据各自不同的专业经验和知识详细说明考虑事项。本项目旨在为以实践为导向的协作性专业发展构建一个结构，通过促进教师与教师在文化背景内和跨文化背景下的互动，提高协作学习的能力。通过召集国际教师团体设计课程，并提供和回应对其课程设计的评论，该项目介绍了在美国数学教学中呈现和破坏共同经验、假设和规范的可能性。具体而言，该项目将利用一种名为“故事圈”的创新中学数学教师专业发展形式，作为文化内部和跨文化教师互动的背景。故事圈是一种以实践为基础的专业教育形式，它将教师聚集在一起，共同迭代地设计和修改课程。该项目更广泛的影响在于，有可能扩大一种创新的、以实践为基础的、以课程为中心的专业发展模式，拥有大量教师，可以以相对较低的成本制度化，并完全在线实施。该项目将在三个相互关联的研究中展开，旨在描述和解释课程的内部和跨文化注释如何干预：(1)参与美国故事圈的中学数学教师之间的专业发展互动；(2)参与美国故事圈活动的中学数学教师构建的一套课堂人工制品；(3)美国和国外中学数学教师的专业注意，否则他们不会参与课程的制作。该项目将召集8个故事圈小组（由6名来自美国的在职教师组成），他们将共同设计代数和几何课程，并与其他教师分享。每节课都将由美国和国外的实践教师团队进行审查，他们将留下评论供创作团队考虑。一旦这些评注完成，StoryCircles小组将重新召开会议，考虑评注并对他们的课程故事板进行修订。项目研究人员将利用从故事圈互动中收集的工件（包括视频、故事板课程和课程评论）以及从所有项目参与者收集到的基于场景的调查的反馈，以探索数学教学合理性的各个方面，例如：教师的各种个人资源和专业的社会资源如何聚集在一起，以支持或反对与开放的、新颖的问题教学相关的决策？这些教师的实践论证在不同国家的数学教学背景下有何不同？如何利用这种差异来支持美国教师对数学教学和学习的文化假设的浮现、挑战和破坏？探索研究preK-12项目（DRK-12）旨在通过研究和开发创新资源、模型和工具，显著提高preK-12学生和教师对科学、技术、工程和数学（STEM）的学习和教学。DRK-12计划中的项目建立在STEM教育的基础研究和先前的研究和开发工作的基础上，为拟议的项目提供了理论和实证依据。 该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project is concerned with investigating the potential that online, cross-national teacher collaboration has for improving professional development that supports mathematics teachers in learning from practice and from one another. Designing professional development that leverages teachers’ experiences and knowledge is one way to support teachers’ professional learning, as it allows teachers to focus on developing skills that are integrated into the particularities of their practice. By collaborating with one another to design and revise lessons, mathematics teachers can support one another’s learning in many ways, including asking questions, suggesting alternatives, and detailing considerations based on their varying professional experiences and knowledge. This project aims to elaborate a structure for practice-oriented, collaborative professional development that increases the capacities for collaborative learning by facilitating teacher-to-teacher interactions within and across cultural contexts. By convening international groups of teachers to design lessons and provide and respond to commentaries on their lesson designs, the project introduces possibilities for surfacing and disrupting common experiences, assumptions, and norms in US mathematics teaching. Specifically, the project will leverage an innovative form of professional development for secondary mathematics teachers called StoryCircles as a context for teacher-to-teacher interaction within and across cultures. StoryCircles is a practice-based form of professional education that gathers teachers to collectively and iteratively design and revise a lesson. The broader impacts of this project lie in the possibility to scale an innovative, practice-based, lesson-centered model of professional development with large numbers of teachers that can be institutionalized at relatively low cost and implemented completely online. The project will unfold across three interconnected studies that aim to describe and explain how intra- and cross-cultural annotations of lessons, serve to intervene on: (1) the professional development interactions among secondary mathematics teachers engaged in US-based StoryCircles; (2) the set of lesson artifacts constructed by secondary mathematics teachers engaged in US-based StoryCircles; and (3) the professional noticing of secondary mathematics teachers in the US and abroad who were otherwise uninvolved in the lesson’s production. The project will convene eight StoryCircles groups (made up of 6 inservice teachers drawn from the US) who will work together to design algebra and geometry lessons for sharing with other teachers. Each lesson will be reviewed by teams of practicing teachers both in the US and abroad who will leave comments for the authoring team to consider. Once these commentaries are completed, the StoryCircles groups will reconvene to consider the commentaries and make revisions to their lesson storyboards. Project researchers will draw on artifacts collected across the StoryCircles interactions (including video, storyboarded lessons, and lesson commentaries) as well as responses gathered from all project participants to scenario-based surveys to explore aspects of the rationality of mathematics teaching, such as: How are various personal resources of teachers and social resources of the profession assembled in arguments for or against decisions relevant to teaching with open, novel problems? How do those teachers’ arguments for practice vary across national contexts of mathematics teaching? How can that variance be leveraged to support the surfacing, challenging, and disrupting of US teachers’ cultural assumptions about mathematics teaching and learning?The Discovery Research preK-12 program (DRK-12) seeks to significantly enhance the learning and teaching of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) by preK-12 students and teachers, through research and development of innovative resources, models and tools. Projects in the DRK-12 program build on fundamental research in STEM education and prior research and development efforts that provide theoretical and empirical justification for proposed projects. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.