Collaborative work with resources and teacher professional development
Résumé
The work of mathematics teachers, in and out-of-class, is often considered as individual. Apart from some training programs, or very particular contexts, teachers seem to work by themselves to prepare and implement their lessons. In this presentation we argue to the contrary that teachers’ work comprises many collaborative aspects and that the interactions with colleagues, often through resources, are crucial for teacher professional development.
In terms of theoretical framework, we consider a “resource” in its wider terms leaning on work by Adler (2000). Textbooks and website are resources (e.g. Remillard 2005), and discussions with colleagues or student work may also constitute resources for teachers. Teachers select resources, combine and modify them, use them in class etc. – we call this “teacher documentation work” (Gueudet, Pepin & Trouche 2012) and argue that teacher documentation work and professional development are intertwined. In one direction the documentation work depends on teachers’ professional knowledge; in the other working with resources shapes teachers’ knowledge and pedagogic practice, and in turn ‘produces’ new resources.
Our conclusions are based on the analyses of two cases: Vera, a mathematics teacher in France; and Claire, a teacher in Norway, both teaching grade six mathematics classes. Both teachers were observed in class and selected lessons video-taped. They were interviewed about their resource systems (drawings were produced) and how these linked to their lesson preparations and pedagogic practice. Further documents (e.g. lesson preparations) were collected and the data analysed on the basis of our understandings of a teacher’s documentation work and of the contexts in which these teachers were working.
Results show that both teachers’ documentation systems were to a large extent influenced by their working conditions, the constraints and affordances to work collaboratively, in their environments. Interestingly, both teachers claimed that during their professional lives they had encountered few opportunities to work with colleagues over a prolonged period of time, and those were mainly linked to particular initiatives supported by the school, or school authority. However, our analyses of their respective systems identified several collaborative aspects of their work, which were, albeit, not given priority or time in the schools’ action plans. Further, it appeared that ‘serious’ collaborative work was always linked to particular resources: Vera talked about working in the same room, a “maths and physics laboratory”, and using the same single textbooks as a central resource. Claire discussed the “arbeidsplan” (work plan for each individual pupil) in detail, which linked her to work with colleagues. Thus, we claim that particular resources help to ‘produce’ particular collaborative teacher interaction, and that these resources link individual teacher’s documentation system, to develop, over several cycles, into a larger dynamic system of teacher collaboration.
This has implications for mathematics teacher education and professional development, for individual teacher learning/knowledge and for development at scale. Contrasting these two cases permits to identify (1) particular systemic features of teachers' work with resources; and (2) what could appear as deep invariants linked to the collective dimensions of this work.