Synchronous online collaborative professional development for elementary mathematics teachers

Math is often taught poorly emphasizing rote, procedural methods rather than creativity and problem solving. Alberta Education developed a new mathematics curriculum to transform mathematics teaching to inquiry driven methods. This revised curriculum provides a new vision for mathematics and creates...

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Autores principales:	Krista Francis, Michele Jacobsen
Formato:	article
Lenguaje:	EN
Publicado:	Athabasca University Press 2013
Materias:	K-9 education teacher professional development mathematical problem-solving synchronous online learning environments professional learning communities Special aspects of education LC8-6691
Acceso en línea:	https://doaj.org/article/f031b4cc4a4142678e13229317444967
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spelling	oai:doaj.org-article:f031b4cc4a4142678e132293174449672021-12-02T18:03:24ZSynchronous online collaborative professional development for elementary mathematics teachers10.19173/irrodl.v14i3.14601492-3831https://doaj.org/article/f031b4cc4a4142678e132293174449672013-07-01T00:00:00Zhttp://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/1460https://doaj.org/toc/1492-3831Math is often taught poorly emphasizing rote, procedural methods rather than creativity and problem solving. Alberta Education developed a new mathematics curriculum to transform mathematics teaching to inquiry driven methods. This revised curriculum provides a new vision for mathematics and creates opportunities and requirements for professional learning by teachers. Conventional offsite, after school, or weekend professional development is typically “sit and listen, maybe try on Monday”. Professional development that is embedded, responsive, and personalized is known to be more effective at changing teaching practice. Alberta teachers are geographically dispersed making online professional learning a desirable alternative to on-site workshops. As access to and use of the Internet gains momentum in schools across the country, opportunities for collaborative, online professional development become more viable. The online professional development in this hermeneutic study maps on to the new vision promoted in Alberta’s math curriculum, and addresses the challenge of a distributed teacher population. Thirteen geographically dispersed participants, including 10 teachers, a PhD mathematician, and two mathematics education specialists, collaborated in an online professional learning community to build knowledge for teaching mathematics. This paper describes and interprets the shared experiences of learners within an online, synchronous learning community that focused on discipline rich, focused inquiry with mathematics. Findings show that the nature and quality of the mathematics task impacted the quality and nature of the online interaction. Mathematics problems that incorporated easily drawn symbols and minimal text worked best in the online collaborative space. Members of this learning community discovered how to assert their identity in the online environment.Krista FrancisMichele JacobsenAthabasca University PressarticleK-9 educationteacher professional developmentmathematical problem-solvingsynchronous online learning environmentsprofessional learning communitiesSpecial aspects of educationLC8-6691ENInternational Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, Vol 14, Iss 3 (2013)
institution	DOAJ
collection	DOAJ
language	EN
topic	K-9 education teacher professional development mathematical problem-solving synchronous online learning environments professional learning communities Special aspects of education LC8-6691
spellingShingle	K-9 education teacher professional development mathematical problem-solving synchronous online learning environments professional learning communities Special aspects of education LC8-6691 Krista Francis Michele Jacobsen Synchronous online collaborative professional development for elementary mathematics teachers
description	Math is often taught poorly emphasizing rote, procedural methods rather than creativity and problem solving. Alberta Education developed a new mathematics curriculum to transform mathematics teaching to inquiry driven methods. This revised curriculum provides a new vision for mathematics and creates opportunities and requirements for professional learning by teachers. Conventional offsite, after school, or weekend professional development is typically “sit and listen, maybe try on Monday”. Professional development that is embedded, responsive, and personalized is known to be more effective at changing teaching practice. Alberta teachers are geographically dispersed making online professional learning a desirable alternative to on-site workshops. As access to and use of the Internet gains momentum in schools across the country, opportunities for collaborative, online professional development become more viable. The online professional development in this hermeneutic study maps on to the new vision promoted in Alberta’s math curriculum, and addresses the challenge of a distributed teacher population. Thirteen geographically dispersed participants, including 10 teachers, a PhD mathematician, and two mathematics education specialists, collaborated in an online professional learning community to build knowledge for teaching mathematics. This paper describes and interprets the shared experiences of learners within an online, synchronous learning community that focused on discipline rich, focused inquiry with mathematics. Findings show that the nature and quality of the mathematics task impacted the quality and nature of the online interaction. Mathematics problems that incorporated easily drawn symbols and minimal text worked best in the online collaborative space. Members of this learning community discovered how to assert their identity in the online environment.
format	article
author	Krista Francis Michele Jacobsen
author_facet	Krista Francis Michele Jacobsen
author_sort	Krista Francis
title	Synchronous online collaborative professional development for elementary mathematics teachers
title_short	Synchronous online collaborative professional development for elementary mathematics teachers
title_full	Synchronous online collaborative professional development for elementary mathematics teachers
title_fullStr	Synchronous online collaborative professional development for elementary mathematics teachers
title_full_unstemmed	Synchronous online collaborative professional development for elementary mathematics teachers
title_sort	synchronous online collaborative professional development for elementary mathematics teachers
publisher	Athabasca University Press
publishDate	2013
url	https://doaj.org/article/f031b4cc4a4142678e13229317444967
work_keys_str_mv	AT kristafrancis synchronousonlinecollaborativeprofessionaldevelopmentforelementarymathematicsteachers AT michelejacobsen synchronousonlinecollaborativeprofessionaldevelopmentforelementarymathematicsteachers
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Synchronous online collaborative professional development for elementary mathematics teachers

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