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Spring 2001
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Jo Boaler, at right, with her team of research assistants,
both graduate and undergraduate students. |
“All of the energy that has been devoted to fights over the math curriculum in California could be better spent helping teachers teach more effectively. I’ve seen different teachers use the same curriculum with drastically different results. So we know that curriculum alone is not the answer. ”
-Professor Jo Boaler
Good math teachers realize that knowing the rule as a result of rote memorization and a conceptual understanding of the problem are two different things. They also know that children who only know how to apply rules are unable to solve problems that look just a little different from what they have practiced in school, even when the mathematical concept is the same. What do teachers need to do to make sure children really understand mathematics?
Associate Professor Jo Boaler is working on just that. She is helping teachers expand their repertoire of effective teaching practices by learning from each other. Boaler is researching different teaching methods and developing a series of videotapes of master teachers. This gives other teachers an opportunity to observe and reflect on each other’s classroom practices and strengthen their own. The goal of the videos is to capture examples of effective teaching on tape. Boaler has already begun using the videos with groups of between 40 to 100 mathematics teachers in school districts, and with as many as 200 teachers in plenary sessions for the annual conference of the Northern California Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
“At the conference, I showed two clips of an award winning teacher from Santa Cruz. She has established an amazing teaching environment in which her students are totally engaged, and can be seen debating high-level mathematical concepts and solving complex problems.”
During her professional development sessions for teachers, Boaler typically stops the video after a few minutes and asks, “What do you see?” Often participants think that the students are particularly talented or unusual. “The main point I try to get across,” explains Boaler, “is that this teacher has worked very hard to develop certain conditions for learning in her classroom. The availability of video technology is providing us with a great opportunity for teachers to learn from each other in ways that have not been possible before.”
“I have received a lot of feedback from teachers saying how much they have learned from the opportunity to reflect on teaching practices in real classrooms. Traditionally there has been an unfortunate disconnect between the academic world of researchers and what happens in schools. Journal articles reporting educational research findings have had a minimal impact on practice. New technologies provide a wonderful opportunity to cross the research-practice divide, for we can disseminate knowledge of teaching and learning through records of actual practice that is grounded in schools.”
Boaler’s line of research is based on new findings that stress the key role teacher communities play in developing and supporting teacher learning. Her videotape presentations and discussions with groups of teachers are intended to support such communities by getting them more accustomed to examining and improving practice together.
Indeed, Boaler believes educators and policymakers would be well advised to shift their priorities away from fights over curricula and instead focus resources on teacher professional development. “All of the energy that has been devoted to fights over the math curriculum in California could be better spent helping teachers teach more effectively. I’ve seen different teachers use the same curriculum with drastically different results. So we know that curriculum alone is not the answer.”
Boaler’s work in professional development is actually part of a much larger study funded by the National Science Foundation. She and a team of research assistants are working in three Northern California high schools collecting data on the impact of different teaching approaches in mathematics.
Two of the schools in the study offer both traditional and reform math programs. The third school was chosen because of its unusually coherent teacher community. Part of the aim of the study is to better understand how relationships within the math classroom—between teachers and students and among students themselves—affect learning, and how students’ own identities as learners also play a role.
Boaler is using findings from the study to build a practice-based teacher education program in mathematics as part of the Stanford Teacher Education Program (STEP) at SUSE. At the center of the course will be “exemplars” or “cases” drawn from the three school sites. Each case will illustrate practices such as student-teacher interaction, innovative teaching and assessment, or a particular use of technology. Other materials used may include samples of student work, videotapes of classroom lessons, teachers’ notes and plans, student reflections on their learning, and so on.
As an adjunct to all of her other work, next summer Boaler has arranged for SUSE to offer a special algebra course for elementary and middle school teachers. Ruth Parker, an exemplary teacher from Colorado who is well known in mathematics education, will teach the course. As Parker teaches algebra to teachers through a series of carefully chosen problems, she models pedagogical strategies that teachers can later use in their own classrooms. Having previously read some teacher evaluations of the course and then traveled to Colorado to watch Parker in action, Boaler became convinced that it changed teachers’ views of mathematics in incredibly positive ways. The course is one more example of how her work at SUSE is positively impacting teachers, and how those teachers’ students will benefit as well.
