Six Questions that Should Guide Professional Development

Mary KennedyMichigan State University

mkennedy@msu.edu

1. What do Teachers Actually Do? Homework reviews Lectures Demonstrations Question and answer routines Organized learning activities Responses to student questions and

confusions

2. What are the Constraints on Their Work?Time: Inflexible time slots guaranteed bad days Limited planning time Need for routines and habits

Groups of students Threat of Entropy Uneven student attendance Uneven student engagement Student bargaining High student engagement

Uncertain relationship between teaching and learning

3. What are the Rewards? Meeting cultural role expectations Being admired or appreciated by those

with whom they work Doing the job well.Note: All three depend on studentsAnd student responses are ambiguous and

hard to interpret

4. What do Teachers Care About When Teaching? Content coverage How to foster student learning

Student willingness to participate Classroom norms

Personal needs Lesson momentum

Summary to This Point1. The work consists or orchestrating a sequence

of events that will move a group of students through a defined body of content in a fixed period of time.

2. The work is constrained by students who vary in their day-to-day

presence, interest, and comprehension. students are either not engaged or are overly

engaged.

Summary to This PointThe work is also constrained by an inability to

decipher how well they are doing.

Yet the psychic rewards also depend on students. Teachers need students to:

Cooperate as they enact their cultural role of teacher

Provide recognition and approval Provide evidence of teaching success by

performing well on assignments, tests

Why Have I Asked These Four questions?

We need to design our professional development to accommodate real teaching, not idealized visions of teaching

We need to address all six areas of concern to teachers, not just the one we care about

5. How Does PD Link to Practice?

Different PD programs assume different paths from PD to student learning

6. What is the Best Content and Pedagogy for PD?

Assumptions:Teachers string together various events

that can be completed within rigid time limits Create enough engagement to maintain

attention and cooperation Don’t allow too much engagement

Best Content? Math content itself How to teach math How to manage time, students, &

classrooms How kids learn math, how to assess

learning The relationship between teaching and

learning math

Best Pedagogy? Situated In practice Acknowledging their constraints Acknowledging their concerns, especially

lesson momentum

Situated in Practice1. We need to place our message in their

situations so they can see it, not just hear it.Look at videos, look at examples of student work, look at homework assignments, look at textbook treatments of particular topics

2. We need to use concrete language for talking about teaching events. Don’t talk about concepts, talk about what students are actually doing or saying, what mistakes, what confusions, etc.

Acknowledging their ConstraintsDiscussions of teaching practices should

acknowledge that many of them are necessarily based on routines and habits

Discussions of teaching practices should acknowledge the core building blocks of most lessons– lectures, organized learning activities, Q&A sessions etc

Acknowledging their ConcernsWe also need to acknowledge ALL of their

areas of concern. We can’t spend all our time talking about how to engage students in lively discussion if we don’t also talk about how to close down that discussion by the time the bell rings.

Also acknowledge their personal needs, e.g. for order, silence, time etc.

Six Questions that Should Guide Professional Development

Mary KennedyMichigan State University

mkennedy@msu.edu