An emerging community in online mathematics teacher professional development: an interactional perspective
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An emerging community in online mathematics teacher professional development: an interactional perspective Anthony Matranga1 · Jason Silverman2 Accepted: 15 October 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Online collaborative and content-focused professional development (PD) is becoming an increasingly important setting for supporting mathematics teachers’ professional learning. The purpose of this study was to better understand the process by which a community emerges in such a PD setting by examining how the cohesiveness of 21 mathematics teachers’ social network evolves and associated shifts in the quality of mathematics teachers’ mathematical discourse. We employed social network analysis (SNA) to examine the evolving cohesiveness of mathematics teachers’ social network and coding procedures to examine teachers’ mathematical discourse. A key finding was the documentation of an emergent divide between participation in the core and periphery during initial weeks of the PD and then a reduced divide and emergence of a social network that resembles a community. We argue that the instructor’s pattern of participation that included distributing their interactions across the subgroups while sending a common message regarding expectations for mathematical discourse in the PD may have contributed to the community formation process. We propose the Interaction Assessment Model, which outlines an approach for PD facilitators to use SNA as a feedback mechanism to differentiate facilitation of online collaborative and content-focused PD and build online communities. Keywords Online professional development · Teacher communities · Social network analysis · Cohesiveness · Interaction assessment model
Introduction Meeting the calls of research and policy (e.g., see National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), 2018; Schoenfeld 2014; Stein et al. 2008; Sztajn et al. 2012) for teachers implementing mathematics instruction that supports students developing conceptual * Anthony Matranga [email protected] Jason Silverman [email protected] 1
California State University San Marcos, 333 S Twin Oaks Valley Rd, San Marcos, CA 92096, USA
2
Drexel University, 3141 Chestnut St, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA
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mathematics understanding requires teachers to hold these conceptual mathematics understandings themselves (Silverman and Thompson 2008). Research indicates the importance of mathematics teachers having ongoing opportunities to enhance their mathematics content knowledge (Byerley and Thompson 2017), and professional development (PD) is one mechanism used to support teacher mathematics learning (Fennema et al. 1996; McDonald et al. 2013; Sedova et al. 2016). Furthermore, online PD is becoming an increasingly more important and viable context for supporting teachers’ mathematics learning (Lantz-Andersson et al. 2018; Macià and García 2016); however, many questions remain regarding how communities emerge in online collaborative and content-focused PD. Research indicates
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