Session Information
15 SES 03, Paper Session
Paper Session
Contribution
Earlier research findings indicate that the opportunity for teachers to collaborate is a crucial factor of high-quality professional development (Borko, Jacobs, & Koellner, 2010). Teachers typically have limited possibilities to collaborate with others who can support them in their instructional practices. Action research is one way to find insight into teachers’ practices, their understanding of their practices and professional development (Kemmis, 2009).
A common feature in action research is that it originates from the problematic areas formulated by teachers themselves. It involves participants in self-reflection about their practice as active partners in the research (Kemmis, 2009). In this paper we describe the evaluation of the two first years of a longitudinal action research project. It involved a primary school and a university in Sweden. The project emerged from some primary school teachers’ interest to collaborate with researchers in order to improve teaching in biology and mathematics from grade 1 to 6. The project was set up for two and a half years ago, with the overall aim to stimulate teachers’ professional development and pupils’ learning in biology and mathematics.
Learning Study (LS) (Marton & Pang, 2006), combined with Content Representation (CoRe) (Loughran, Mulhall, & Berry, 2004) were applied in this action research in the purpose of stimulating teachers to consciously reflect on their conceptions, methods, and processes of teaching and learning. LS is a cyclic process that starts with choosing and defining the object of learning in a specific subject area (Marton & Pang, 2006). Previous teaching experiences and research concerning the subject area are the starting point for designing a pre-test. The results from the pre-test are used when planning the first lesson. When the lesson and a post-test are conducted the experiences and the results from the tests are analyzed by teachers together with researchers. If the outcomes, in relation to the curriculum goals are not satisfactory, the teacher team revises the lesson. Finally, another teacher implements the new lesson plan in his/her class. This cyclic process continues until the critical factors for pupils’ learning can be discerned. In this study the teachers have used pre-and post-tests for diagnostic purpose in order to develop their teaching.
LS inspired cycle was combined with Content Representation (CoRe) and Pedagogical and Professional-experience Repertoires (PaP-eRs) in order to plan lessons and reflect on experiences. CoRe document focuses on different issues of Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) (Magnusson et al., 1999) concerning the specific content to be taught in the classroom. Teachers can use CoRe document as a collaborative tool for planning lessons and helping identify important teaching aspects of the content. After conducted lessons teachers’ experiences are documented individually or collectively in PaP-eRs documents. The intention of these documents is to help teachers to better understand the specific subject content and to illuminate the decisions underpinning their actions (Loughran, Mullhall, & Berry, 2004).
This paper provides insights into the primary school teachers’ experiences concerning what conditions they found crucial when this action research project was implemented. It also describes teachers’ experiences on how the project influenced their teaching practice in biology and mathematics. The study was guided by the following two questions:
1. What conditions did in-service teachers experience as crucial in the action research project?
2. How did the in-service teachers experience the project influence on their teaching practice?
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Borko, H., Jacobs, J., & Koellner, K. (2010). Contemporary approaches to teacher professional development. In P.L. Peterson, E. Baker, & B. McGaw (Eds.), Third international encyclopedia of education (pp. 548-556). Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Elsevier. Kemmis, S. (2009).Action research as a practice-based practice. Educational Action Research, 17(3), 463-474. Loughran, J. J., Mulhall, P., & Berry, A. (2004). In search of pedagogical content knowledge in science: developing ways of articulating and documenting professional practice. Journal of research in Science Teaching, 41(4), 370-391. Magnusson, S., Krajcik, J., & Borko, H. (1999). PCK and science education. In J. Gess-Newsome & N. G. Lederman (Eds.), Nature, sources, and development of pedagogical content knowledge for science teaching (pp. 95–132). Dordrecht: Kluwer. Marton, F., & Pang, M. F. (2006). On some necessary conditions of learning. The Journal of the Learning Science, 15 (2), 193-220.
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