Ilana Seidel Horn

Attending to Problems of Practice: Routines and Resources for Professional Learning in Teachers’ Workplace Interactions

The authors investigate how conversational routines, or the practices by which groups structure work-related talk, function in teacher professional communities to forge, sustain, and support learning and improvement. Audiotaped and videotaped records of teachers’ work group interactions, supplemented by interviews and material artifacts, were collected as part of a 2-year project centered on teacher learning and collegiality at two urban high schools. This analysis focuses on two teacher work groups within the same school. While both groups were committed to improvement and shared a common organizational context, their characteristic conversational routines provided different resources for them to access, conceptualize, and learn from problems of practice. More specifically, the groups differed in the extent to which conversational routines supported the linking of frameworks for teaching to specific instances of practice. An analysis of the broader data set points to significant contextual factors that help account for the differences in the practices of the two groups. The study has implications for fostering workplace learning through more systematic support of professional community.

Making Sense of Student Performance Data Data Use Logics and Mathematics Teachers’ Learning Opportunities

In the accountability era, educators are pressed to use evidence-based practice. In this comparative case study, we examine the learning opportunities afforded by teachers’ data use conversations. Using situated discourse analysis, we compare two middle school mathematics teacher workgroups interpreting data from the same district assessment. Despite similarities in their contexts, the workgroups invoked different data use logics that shaped teachers’ learning opportunities. The first workgroup’s instructional management logic linked increasing student achievement to individualization. The second workgroup’s instructional improvement logic focused on students’ thinking and linked it to instructional changes but was limited by broader instructional management logics. Evidence-based practice cannot be understood apart from the data use logics in teachers’ communities, which are shaped by policy constraints.

Novice Teacher Learning and Motivation Across Contexts: Assessment Tools as Boundary Objects

We present a longitudinal study of novice teachers’ appropriation, negotiation, and recontextualization of assessment tools and practices. During the four years of the study, we observed and interviewed beginning mathematics and social studies teachers, along with their colleagues, mentors, and supervisors, from their time in a graduate secondary teacher education program through their second year of professional teaching. Analysis of fieldnotes, interview transcripts, and artifacts suggests that assessment tools function as boundary objects in negotiations within and between the social worlds in which novices learn to teach. Boundary objects serve as reifications or representations of values, goals, and meanings (Bowker & Star, 1999; Star & Griesemer, 1989; Wenger, 1998). Assessment tools and artifacts, as boundary objects, facilitate engagement of teachers, administrators, students, and their families in coordinating activity across social boundaries and are central to the function of educational organizations. Novice teachers’ motivation to learn promoted assessment tools and their affiliated practices changed as they crossed boundaries between university and school and changed positions from student teacher to newcomer to experienced novice. Implications of this analysis for understanding novice teacher learning and motivation, and for assessment policy more broadly, are discussed.

Opportunities for Professional Learning in Mathematics Teacher Workgroup Conversations: Relationships to Instructional Expertise

Increasingly, instructional improvement efforts include teacher communities as part of their overall strategy, yet the relationship between teachers’ talk and professional learning remains underspecified. Using a discourse perspective on learning, this article compares opportunities to learn (OTLs) in the collaborative conversations of 3 mathematics teacher workgroups. We examined the differences in OTLs in 17 hr of videotaped meetings from 3 groups at different levels of instructional accomplishment in secondary mathematics. Using mixed methods, we uncovered differences in the groups’ interactions and found that OTLs were not equally distributed. Instead, teacher groups whose active participants demonstrated the greatest facility with ambitious instruction also had the richest conversational OTLs. We interpret this as an accumulated advantage developmental story: Because collaborative work in teaching involves problem posing and the articulation of practice, teachers’ conceptions get built into the framing and discussion of pedagogical problems. Accomplished teachers are thus positioned to learn more from talking with colleagues. This analysis contributes to understanding of how OTLs are constituted in teacher workgroups, with implications for making better use of teacher collaboration for professional learning.

Talk and Conceptual Change at Work: Adequate Representation and Epistemic Stance in a Comparative Analysis of Statistical Consulting and Teacher Workgroups

In this article we ask how concepts that organize work in two professional disciplines change during moments of consultation, which represent concerted efforts by participants to work differently now and in the future. Our analysis compares structures of talk, the adequacy of representations of practice, and epistemic and moral stances deployed when workgroups in clinical health sciences and secondary mathematics teaching seek to improve their work in discussions with colleagues and experts. Our comparative analysis highlights interactional supports for identifying, elaborating, and stabilizing relatively small-scale innovations in joint work that contribute to development at multiple timescales. These supports include comparisons over accounts of practice that borrow and extend method or technique, negotiating adequate representations of practice, use and uptake of epistemic stance toward what can be known about shared work, and surrounding organizational structures that provide for (or inhibit) the circulation of new concepts across workgroups.

A Taxonomy of Instructional Learning Opportunities in Teachers’ Workgroup Conversations:

Many school-improvement efforts include time for teacher collaboration, with the assumption that teachers’ collective work supports instructional improvement. However, not all collaboration equally supports learning that would support improvement. As a part of a 5-year study in two urban school districts, we collected video records of more than 100 mathematics teacher workgroup meetings in 16 different middle schools, selected as “best cases” of teacher collaboration. Building off of earlier discursive analyses of teachers’ collegial learning, we developed a taxonomy to describe how conversational processes differentially support teachers’ professional learning. We used the taxonomy to code our corpus, with each category signaling different learning opportunities. In this article, we present the taxonomy, illustrate the categories, and report the overall dearth of meetings with rich learning opportunities, even in this purposively sampled data set. This taxonomy provides a coding scheme for other researchers, as well as a map for workgroup facilitators aiming to deepen collaborative conversations.

Developing pedagogical judgment in novice teachers: mediated field experience as a pedagogy for teacher education

A common critique of teacher education centres on the gap between coursework and schools, with ample evidence that novice teachers seldom bring ambitious forms of instruction into classroom placements. We describe a 6-year design experiment conducted in a university teacher education program secondary mathematics methods course focused squarely on this issue. Using the framework of hybridity, or the merging of two contexts to make a third that has elements of the originals, we developed a pedagogy we call the mediated field experience (MFE). We present our design framework and describe the MFE cycle, where novices learned a concept in course activities, followed by guided classroom observations and facilitated debriefs with partner teachers. We highlight how this pedagogy facilitated connections across coursework and classrooms through narrative cases of novices’ learning. We argue that their learning provided the basis for a complex form of teacher thinking, pedagogical judgment. This article offers a proof-of-concept argument that teacher education can support novices’ learning in the service of ambitious practice.

Teachers Learning Together: Pedagogical Reasoning in Mathematics Teachers’ Collaborative Conversations

In the United States, teaching is an isolated profession. At the same time, ambitious forms of teaching have been shown to benefit from teacher collaboration. What is it about collegial conversations that supports teachers’ ongoing professional learning? In this paper, I synthesize findings from prior studies on mathematics teachers’ collaborative conversations, focusing my analysis on collective pedagogical reasoning. I examine four facets of collegial conversations that support refinements in this reasoning. These facets are: interactional organization, engagement of individual teachers in a group, epistemic stance on mathematics teaching, and locally negotiated standards of representational adequacy. Together, these aspects of teacher talk differently organize opportunities for professional learning.

Accountability as a Design for Teacher Learning Sensemaking About Mathematics and Equity in the NCLB Era

Using a learning design perspective on No Child Left Behind (NCLB), I examine how accountability policy shaped urban educators’ instructional sensemaking. Focusing on the role of policy-rooted classifications, I examine conversations from a middle school mathematics teacher team as a “best case” because they worked diligently to comply with the NCLB. Using discourse analysis, I identify instances of torque in their conversations: when educators’ compliance with accountability logics pulled them away from humanistic goals of education in ways that stood to exacerbate existing educational inequality. This article contributes to documentation on unintended consequences of accountability policies while identifying features that contribute to torque.

Teachers Interpreting Data for Instructional Decisions: Where Does Equity Come In?.

Purpose Though test-based accountability policies seek to redress educational inequities, their underlying theories of action treat inequality as a technical problem rather than a political one: data point educators toward ameliorative actions without forcing them to confront systemic inequities that contribute to achievement disparities. To highlight the problematic nature of this tension, the purpose of this paper is to identify key problems with the techno-rational logic of accountability policies and reflect on the ways in which they influence teachers’ data-use practices. Design/methodology/approach This paper illustrates the data use practices of a workgroup of sixth-grade math educators. Their meeting represents a “best case” of commonplace practice: during a full-day professional development session, they used data from a standardized district benchmark assessment with support from an expert instructional leader. This sociolinguistic analysis examines episodes of data reasoning to understand the links between the educators’ interpretations and instructional decisions. Findings This paper identifies three primary issues with test-based accountability policies: reducing complex constructs to quantitative variables, valuing remediation over instructional improvement, and enacting faith in instrument validity. At the same time, possibilities for equitable instruction were foreclosed, as teachers analyzed data in ways that gave little consideration of students’ cultural identities or funds of knowledge. Social implications Test-based accountability policies do not compel educators to use data to address the deeper issues of equity, thereby inadvertently reinforcing biased systems and positioning students from marginalized backgrounds at an educational disadvantage. Originality/value This paper fulfills a need to critically examine the ways in which test-based accountability policies influence educators’ data-use practices.