Changing Teachers' Attitudes and Practices Through Professional Development
These analyses suggest that teachers' participation in comprehensive professional development can make an impact on their beliefs about reform practices and their use of those practices in their classrooms. Given previous findings linking student achievement with teacher practices and beliefs, this supports the TEAM-Math logic model, which posits that professional development can lead to improvement in student attitudes and achievement. Future analyses will attempt to link these two sets of findings, in order to look at both the direct and indirect effects of participation in professional development on student outcomes. In addition, we will examine other important facets of the TEAM-Math model, including factors impacting teacher participation, changes in teacher attitudes and beliefs, and student motivation, attitudes and achievement-including administrative support and parental support.
In these findings, we cannot easily disentangle causality between teachers' changes in attitudes and their changes in practices. That is, do changes in attitudes then cause changes in practices? Or do changes in attitudes occur as teachers change their practices? While we cannot answer these questions, our analyses suggest that the two are closely interrelated. Thus, the TEAM-Math approach of simultaneously addressing attitudes and beliefs through professional readings while also providing practical, grade-level guidance about how to change teaching practices seems to be a reasonable approach to take and is supported by current and previous findings. A second limitation of the analysis is the reliance on teacher self-report. However, preliminary analyses of survey data gathered from students suggest that their perceptions of teacher practices are generally aligned with teacher self-reports. We plan further analyses in which we can triangulate teacher self-report with student reports.
Overall, we are finding that quality professional development leads to more teacher engagement, which leads to changes in teachers' attitudes and practices. Often we have found teachers who were genuinely skeptical about the new methods-reform mathematics teaching-but who through their involvement with TEAM-Math have become convinced that the methods really worked. This change has occurred through their participation in both the mathematical challenges/adult problems with their "student hats" on and the investigative activities for their particular grade levels, experiencing their own mathematical growth in ways that were beneficial and eye-opening. Even though teachers' beliefs about teaching and learning are hard to change, as are their teaching practices, we have seen that providing teachers with the right kinds of professional development experiences can make this possible to the benefit of all their students.
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NOTE: A longer version of this paper has been submitted for publication.
