Strength in numbers: Peabody researchers investigate preservice training and induction of math teachers

topics: Math and Science Education, Teacher Preparation, Teaching and Learning

Fall 2007, Ashley Crownover, Ideas In Action

The increased focus on K-12 math and science has made U.S. colleges of education acutely aware of the need for improved teacher preparation in these areas. As the No. 3 graduate school of education in the nation (U.S. News and World Report), Vanderbilt’s Peabody College has long led the way in progressive teacher training. Now the awarding of several major National Science Foundation (NSF) grants to Peabody faculty has placed the college at the forefront of research examining every stage of teacher preparation, from preservice to induction to professional development.

What NSF refers to as the “teacher professional continuum” begins with a teacher candidate’s own training in math and science. This initial exposure to the subject area, along with subsequent content training, is the focus of a five-year, NSF-funded project led by Marcy Singer-Gabella, research assistant professor of education, and colleagues. The researchers are examining two of the basic concepts emphasized in Peabody’s own teacher education programs: the development of mathematics and science content knowledge and the ability to examine students’ mathematical and scientific thinking to inform instructional practice.

Though it’s agreed these fundamentals are essential to good teaching, says Singer-Gabella, there is little guidance in how best to achieve them. “Prior research on preservice teacher education has not focused on this,” she says, “but we need to understand how to prepare teachers who are familiar with important disciplinary ideas and practices, have a view of student learning in relation to this disciplinary content, and who continually make sense of student thinking as they make instructional decisions.”

In following preservice teachers from undergraduate math and science courses to education courses and then into their first years of teaching grades two through six, Singer-Gabella hopes to gain a better understanding of how teachers develop these understandings over time and how these skills are connected to improved student achievement. Along with Peabody faculty members Amy Palmeri, assistant professor of the practice of education; Rich Lehrer, professor of science education; and Leona Schauble, professor of education; associates Molly Bolger and Ann Kindfield; and researchers at the University of Pittsburgh, Singer-Gabella began with an examination of the introductory undergraduate math and science courses preservice teachers typically take. She and her colleagues discovered that these courses’ approach to the topic differed from the methods teachers are expected to use in the classroom.

“Introductory courses are hard to teach,” she notes. “It’s challenging for faculty, as experts in the field, to define a reasonable chunk to study.What typically happens is that they take a swath across a lot of topics and, rightly, link these topics with current issues.” There is little opportunity, however, to introduce undergraduates to ways of thinking about disciplinary ideas and practices that will aid them in teaching math or science. As a result,most preservice teachers’ first introduction to these concepts is in foundational math and science education courses, which focus on helping them develop both an understanding of key practices in the subject area and an insight into student thinking. “We’re entering into the discipline with them from a very different point of view than in the introductory classes,” Singer-Gabella says.

After students graduate from their teacher preparation program, Singer-Gabella and colleagues intend to follow them into the first few years of teaching. “This is going to be a critical phase for us,” she says of the period known as “induction.” Because the teaching and learning environment varies from school district to school district, researchers are very interested in discovering how new teachers implement what they have learned in these different contexts.

“We’ve seen them try to enact [their training] in controlled circumstances in classrooms and student teaching,” Singer-Gabella says, “but when they leave us and they’re out in districts that may or may not be partners with us, we need to understand what the friction is. What are the forces that will enable them to enact the ideas and approaches our programs have emphasized, and what does it look like as these get transformed because the environment is not totally supportive of these approaches?”

Induced Labors

This difference in contexts and how it affects new teachers’ practice and content knowledge is also the focus of a project directed by Peabody researcher Thomas Smith, assistant professor of public policy and education, and researcher Laura Desimone at the University of Pennsylvania. Along with project coordinator Kristen McGraner and research associates Marisa Cannata and Erin Henrick, they are following 120 new seventh- and eighth-grade math teachers in nine school districts in Tennessee and Kentucky through their first three years in the profession. The goal is to learn what resources are available to new teachers and which of these resources improves their content knowledge.

“We are very interested in how the district context shapes both what’s offered for new teachers and how they respond to it,” says Smith. “We have hypotheses about the kinds of supports that are useful—a mentor in the same field, collaboration with colleagues, access to professional development, a supportive principal—but we also want to get a handle on what supports the different districts think they are providing, and why.We are also looking at it from the teachers’ perspective—what kinds of supports do they see themselves as actually receiving?”

After examining the number and type of resources available, Smith and colleagues will assess new teachers’ understanding and development of content knowledge in these different contexts. “Our main interests are in looking at how both their content knowledge for math and the quality of their instruction changes,” Smith explains. “We’ll look at teachers who had access to different kinds of resources—a mentor with math background,more professional development opportunities in the district, or they just came in knowing more math to begin with—to see how that affects these trajectories.” This information will be shared with school districts, who will be able use it to improve their induction programs.

Both Smith and Singer-Gabella intend to create instruments that can be used by other researchers to understand how teachers develop content knowledge over time. “There’s such a press for schools of education to show they make a difference in student learning,” says Singer-Gabella, “but the measures that are commonly used don’t help you make sense of teachers’ knowledge. Standardized test scores are not a reasonable proxy for what teachers know. We want to dig deeper into what teachers understand and how that may play out in their classrooms—what it might look like in terms of student learning.”

Smith agrees. “Ultimately we are interested in whether or not there’s change in the achievement of students in these teachers’ classes. But we’re in some ways more interested in how interactions with mentors and colleagues influence student learning by changing both teachers’ own knowledge of how to teach math and their instructional practices in the classroom.We want to understand how different kinds of supports for teachers might be influencing student achievement.”

The Right Setting: What Teachers and Students Need

In addition to teacher preparation and induction programs, the learning environment also plays a significant role in achievement for both students and teachers. “How teachers teach depends in large part on the institutional settings in which they work—the schools and districts,” says Peabody researcher Paul Cobb, professor of education. Along with collaborator Thomas Smith, assistant professor of public policy and education, Cobb is conducting a comprehensive, NSF-funded study of the kind of settings that support and enhance teacher learning and professional development. Unlike much previous work in this area, the project examines relevant district policies using what Cobb calls a “bottoms-up” approach.

“‘Top-down’ doesn’t have a negative connotation,” he says, “but typically and quite reasonably, people in policy tend to ask this sort of question: ‘Here’s a policy mandate (a federal law, a state law, a district law). How does it make its way through the system, and what consequences or changes does it actually bring about?’” In contrast, he says, “we’re starting from what we know about students’ learning and teachers’ instructional practices, the teachers’ learning, and trying to figure out what might be important in terms of organizational development.”

Cobb and Smith hope that the resulting “institutional improvement framework” will lead to the development of tools that can be used to create settings conducive to teacher professional development—and, ultimately, to increased student achievement. “As an educator,” Cobb says, “the bottom line for me is kids’ learning. That’s the justification for everything—are kids learning or not?”