Kazemi & Hubbard (2008)

New Directions for the Design and Study of Professional Development: Attending to the Coevolution of Teachers' Participation Across Contexts

The article New Directions for the Design and Study of Professional Development: Attending to the Coevolution of Teachers' Participation Across Contexts was written by Elham Kazemi and Amanda Hubbard and published in the Journal of Teacher Education in 2008.

Abstract

Research on professional development (PD) typically focuses on what teachers learn as a result of their participation in PD. Questions are framed unidirectionally: To what extent does participation in PD affect teachers' classroom practice? The authors challenge this unidirectional conceptualization of teacher learning and instead argue for understanding the multidirectional influences between teachers' participation across the PD and classroom settings. Drawing on research in mathematics education, they argue that researchers should examine what teachers are learning during and after PD, looking at the coevolution of participation between classroom practice and PD. To advance studies of and designs for PD, the authors' perspective leads them to argue for the importance of better understanding how teachers come to make sense of primary artifacts, depictions, and enactments in and through PD.

Outline of Headings

• Attending to "Knowledge" and "Knowing" Across Contexts in Research and Development Programs
• Practice-Based Professional Education (PBPE)
• What Role Does Teachers' Instructional Context Play in the Design of PD?
• From Unidirectional Analyses to Coevolution of Participation in PD and Classroom Practice
• Illustrating the Coevolution Between PD and Practice
  • Adaptive PD: Teachers Studying Their Own Work
  • Commercially Available PD: Teachers Studying Written Cases
• Implications for Studying and Designing PD
  • Understanding and Eliciting the Diversity of Teachers' Experimentation and Incorporating Depictions of That Work in PD
  • Examining the Situated Nature of Primary Artifacts
  • Exploring How Enactments of Routine Activities Can Support the Generation of New Knowledge and Ways of Knowing
• Conclusion

Summary

Because professional development (PD) has an uneven effect on teachers, Kazemi & Hubbard sought to rethink how we study and understand PD by focusing how teacher learning operates multidirectionally across both PD and classroom contexts. There is relatively little evidence with which to understand how PD acts to support teaching (Borko, 2004; Lewis, Perry, & Murata, 2006; Wilson & Berne, 1999) despite calls to focus PD on inquiry and experimentation (Ball, 1997; Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999; Franke, Carpenter, Levi, & Fennema, 2001; Lampert & Ball, 1998). Using the concept of activity settings (Wertsch, 1985) to identify the different contexts, such as PD, Kazemi and Hubbard distinguish between the knowledge teachers possess and the knowing they put into action (Cook & Brown, 1999. While knowledge is seen as essential, it alone does not explain a teacher's actions and the quality of their teaching. In addition to knowledge of content, of students, and of teaching (Ball & Bass, 2000; Shulman, 1986), teachers need to demonstrate their ability to teach in their specific classroom context. Professional development needs to consider how those contexts affect both the effects of PD on teaching and how teachers learn in PD.

Ball & Cohen (1999) characterized practice-based professional education (PBPE) as a collective professional effort grounded in the activities, questions, analysis, and criticisms of teaching. Practice-based teacher education should simulate classroom activity in ways accessible to teachers. While some commercially available PD programs are meant to generalize to many teachers, adaptive PD (Horn, 2008) attends to teachers' classrooms and challenges. To bridge the PD activity setting and the classroom activity setting, Kazemi and Hubbard use the idea of boundary objects (Star & Griesemer, 1989) and brokering, the negotiations of meaning across settings (Wenger, 1998).

Kazemi and Hubbard's main question was, "What role does the classroom play in the design of PD?" This was supported by three subquestions (pp. 430-431):

1. Whose practice is represented in the PD context and with what kinds of records?
2. What aspects (e.g., persons, tools) of PD appear in the teachers' classroom contexts?
3. When and how are these PD initiatives accounting for individual and collective teacher learning?

Also

• Pages Linking Here
• Mendeley: http://www.mendeley.com/research/new-directions-design-study-professional-development-attending-coevolution-teachers-participation-ac/

APA

Kazemi, E., & Hubbard, A. (2008). New directions for the design and study of professional development: Attending to the coevolution of teachers' participation across contexts. Journal of Teacher Education, 59(5), 428–441. doi:10.1177/0022487108324330

BibTeX

@article{Kazemi2008,
author = {Kazemi, Elham and Hubbard, Amanda},
doi = {10.1177/0022487108324330},
journal = {Journal of Teacher Education},
number = {5},
pages = {428--441},
title = {{New directions for the design and study of professional development: Attending to the coevolution of teachers' participation across contexts}},
url = {http://jte.sagepub.com/content/59/5/428.short},
volume = {59},
year = {2008}
}