Synchronous Online Collaborative Professional Development for Elementary Mathematics Teachers

dc.creator	Krista Francis-Poscente and Michele Jacobsen
dc.date	2013-07-01T00:00:00Z
dc.date.accessioned	2015-07-20T22:24:03Z
dc.date.available	2015-07-20T22:24:03Z
dc.identifier	1492-3831
dc.identifier	https://doaj.org/article/b56322d7ae2f4600962f29988bcdbf33
dc.identifier.uri	http://evidence.thinkportal.org/handle/123456789/21097
dc.description	Math is often taught poorly emphasizing rote, procedural methods rather than creativity and problem solving. Alberta Education developed a new mathematics curriculum to transform mathematics teaching to inquiry driven methods. This revised curriculum provides a new vision for mathematics and creates opportunities and requirements for professional learning by teachers. Conventional offsite, after school, or weekend professional development is typically “sit and listen, maybe try on Monday”. Professional development that is embedded, responsive, and personalized is known to be more effective at changing teaching practice. Alberta teachers are geographically dispersed making online professional learning a desirable alternative to on-site workshops. As access to and use of the Internet gains momentum in schools across the country, opportunities for collaborative, online professional development become more viable. The online professional development in this hermeneutic study maps on to the new vision promoted in Alberta’s math curriculum, and addresses the challenge of a distributed teacher population. Thirteen geographically dispersed participants, including 10 teachers, a PhD mathematician, and two mathematics education specialists, collaborated in an online professional learning community to build knowledge for teaching mathematics. This paper describes and interprets the shared experiences of learners within an online, synchronous learning community that focused on discipline rich, focused inquiry with mathematics. Findings show that the nature and quality of the mathematics task impacted the quality and nature of the online interaction. Mathematics problems that incorporated easily drawn symbols and minimal text worked best in the online collaborative space. Members of this learning community discovered how to assert their identity in the online environment.
dc.language	English
dc.publisher	Athabasca University Press
dc.relation	http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/1460/2535
dc.relation	https://doaj.org/toc/1492-3831
dc.rights	CC BY
dc.source	International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, Vol 14, Iss 3 (2013)
dc.subject	K-6 education
dc.subject	teacher professional development
dc.subject	mathematical problem-solving
dc.subject	synchronous online learning environments
dc.subject	professional learning communities
dc.subject	Special aspects of education
dc.subject	LC8-6691
dc.subject	Education
dc.subject	L
dc.subject	DOAJ:Education
dc.subject	DOAJ:Social Sciences
dc.subject	Special aspects of education
dc.subject	LC8-6691
dc.subject	Education
dc.subject	L
dc.subject	DOAJ:Education
dc.subject	DOAJ:Social Sciences
dc.subject	Special aspects of education
dc.subject	LC8-6691
dc.subject	Education
dc.subject	L
dc.subject	Special aspects of education
dc.subject	LC8-6691
dc.subject	Education
dc.subject	L
dc.subject	Special aspects of education
dc.subject	LC8-6691
dc.subject	Education
dc.subject	L
dc.title	Synchronous Online Collaborative Professional Development for Elementary Mathematics Teachers
dc.type	article