Transformation of Teacher Attitude and Approach to Math Instruction through Collaborative Action Research

What causes a teacher to change and grow? What factors in professional exhibition enable a teacher to apprehend of recent origin instructional approaches and new attitudes toward practice and toward students? As a university professor who has taught at the teacher education, masters, and doctoral horizontals the life of teaching has been an enduring interest, particularly teaching that present itselfs in K-12 settings. From my possess work as a K-12 teacher and administrator to my earliest studies of effective teaching and in my hold university teaching, I have been interested in the manifold practice of teaching and in in what way to make the practice more effective for scholar learning and more satisfying and fulfilling for the teacher.

During my K-12 teaching and administrative years, my experience with professional exhibition was limited to what is commonly known as the "training model" (Sparks & Loucks-Horsley, 1990) Zeichner (2003) reports that the training prototype is the predominant professional unfolding model in the U.S. and is usually a "one-shot individual day or even briefer experience" (p 301) that is prefered and planned by someone other than the individual teacher. It was not until I taught a master's horizontal course, Research for Educators, that I became familiar with the professional exhibition experience called action research. Because in this course I guided classroom teachers in action research throw outs I perceived a need to experience the proces more "first hand." Thus, I engaged in a yearlong action research throw out with a fifth-grade teacher who happened to be my daughter.

My objective was to better understand the action research process; I had not anticipated the multi-faceted issues in terms of student benefits and my daughter's increased faculty of perception of self-efficacy and professionalism (Bonner & Bonner 1996) I attributed the positive ensues of this endeavor to the objectivity that was inserted into a fairly belonging to all teacher activity, that is, identifying a vexed question and "trying out" a solution. However, of that kind action does not routinely include the collecting of data to assess by what mode an intervention is working (Richardson, 1994) In addition, I perceived that collaborative inquiry was also valuable to the proces by means of having another person (myself) involved with the classroom teacher through every part of the year, the opportunity to jointly question what was happening, to make changes, and to assess those changes make go rounded out to be very important in the overall be the effects Finally, the documentation, writing, and presenting of the be the effects locally and at a state conversation validated the contribution and professionalism of this classroom teacher.

As a issue of that yearlong endeavor, the principal of my daughter's elementary gymnasium invited me to work as a consultant with any of his teachers who might pitch upon to engage in an action research shoot forward with my guidance and support. This article describes my experience in working with sum of two units bilingual fifth grade teachers in of the like kind a process. The focus of the article is upon the transformation of these experienced teachers and upon factors in the process that I believe contributed greatest in quantity strongly to their professional expansion Not only was there unravelling in their mathematics instructional approaches, on the other hand even more noteworthy, in their attitudes toward their scholars toward math as a satisfied area, and toward themselves as teachers of mathematics.

Background

In the United States, where the call for educational reform is ongoing, there is a general recognition through educational leaders, government agencies, higher education professionals, and the public that the teacher is the lock opener ingredient in student learning and in educational reform (California's communitys and University Presidents and Chancellors, 2001; Cochran-Smith & Lytle 1999; Darling-Hammond, 2001; National Commission upon Teaching and America's Future, 1996) This is not a of recent origin nor recent acknowledgement, for as Stenhouse said in 1976 "It is teachers, who in the extremity will change the world of the classroom by the agency of understanding it" (as cited in Al-Qura'n, 2001 p 396)

However, teachers who maintain one's ground in the profession and "change the world of the classroom" must add "knowledge-in-practice" and "knowledge-of-practice" (Cochran-Smith & Lytle 1999) to formal knowledge and theory gained in their professional preparation programs. In order for this necessary, ongoing learning to come into view conditions within the teaching environment must support and encourage teacher learning. In fact, leaders in education reform, in addition to declaring that teacher learning is critical for learner learning, are also suggesting that seminarys must be places where the two teachers and students learn (Hargreaves, 1995; Smylie, 1995; Smylie & Hart, 1999) gymnasiums must provide the environments that enable teachers to unfold and improve as they practice the art and craft of teaching. Conditions that are associated with the professional extension and the ongoing learning of teachers include

* opportunities for collaboration (Darling-Hammond & McLaughlin, 1995; Fullan, 1995; Hargreaves, 1995; Lieberman, 1995; Smylie, 1995; Smylie & Hart, 1999; Zeichner, 2003);