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Thesis advisor: Marilyn Cochran-Smith / Professional development is widely viewed as a key lever for school change. Each year, federal and state governments pour billions of dollars into developing teachers, while researchers seek to identify which professional development programs are most effective. However, even as consensus has been growing in the research and policy communities about what constitutes high-quality professional development, teachers continue to vary greatly in what and how much they learn through such programs. There is no theory of teacher learning that explains this variation. In this dissertation—a comparative case study of two teachers from the same school who were participating in the same professional development initiative —I used complexity theory as a lens to understand teacher learning as a complex system. The intention was to develop causal explanations of teacher learning that accounted for the interactions between a particular teacher, a particular school, and a particular professional development. Data analysis revealed that whether, what, and how the teachers learned through professional development was contingent upon learning conditions that resulted from three intersecting systems: the teacher, the school, and the professional development. Although they were colleagues, the two teacher participants experienced professional development under different learning conditions, resulting in different learning outcomes; one teacher changed little, while the other ultimately transformed some of her beliefs and classroom practices. I found seven structural elements, across the three system levels, that shaped the system of teacher learning. Based on my analysis, I propose an analytic framework that can be used to analyze the conditions within and the interactions between the three systems. By offering a new means to analyze professional development through a complexity lens, this study contributes to a broader understanding of teacher learning. There are also important implications for designing and selecting professional development that will meet the needs of individual teachers in specific school contexts. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction.

Australian policy contexts are promoting school transformation through teacher learning and the development of schools as professional learning communities. However, Australian practitioners have very limited contextualised research to guide their efforts in response to these policies. The researcher’s involvement in a school revitalisation process provided the impetus for this research study that investigates the practitioner experience of a developing professional learning community at RI College (pseudonym for a large independent girls’ school in Brisbane). This study endeavours to gain a more informed and sophisticated understanding of developing a professional learning community with the intention of ‘living’ this vision of RI College as a professional learning community. Praxis-oriented research questions focus on the practitioner conceptualisation of their school as a developing professional community and their experience of supporting/hindering strategies and structures. The study gives voice to this practitioner experience through the emerging participatory/co-operative research paradigm, an epistemology of participative inquiry, a research methodology of co-operative inquiry and mixed methods data collection strategies. Incorporating ten practitioner inquiries over two years, recursive cycles of action/reflection engaged practitioners as co-researchers in the collaborative reflective processes of a professional learning community while generating knowledge about the conceptualisation and supporting/hindering influences on its development. The outcomes of these first-person and second-person inquiries, together with a researcher devised online survey of teachers, were both informative and transformative in nature and led to the development of the researcher’s theoretical perspectives in response to the study’s research questions. As outcomes of co-operative inquiry, these theoretical perspectives inform the researcher’s future actions and offer insights into existing propositional knowledge in the field. Engagement in this practitioner inquiry research has had significant transformative outcomes for the co-researchers and has demonstrated the power of collaborative inquiry in promoting collective and individual professional learning and personal growth.

This thesis explores the nature of teacher collaboration for professional learning, key enabling and inhibiting factors, and their implication for the development of a culture of collaboration for professional learning in Kazakhstani schools. The current teacher professional development reform initiative in Kazakhstani secondary education has incorporated teacher collaboration as a strategy to encourage teachers to take ownership of innovations and changes. The underlying assumption for it is that when teachers engage in professional collaboration, there is both an individual and collective benefit. However, an increasing scepticism that followed the initial enthusiasm about the benefits of teacher collaboration in Western countries, where a second look at collaboration from a cultural and micropolitical perspective identified the contradictions between human agency and power, voluntarism and determinism, action and settings. Against this background, this study was undertaken to examine the Kazakhstani teachers’ beliefs, values and attitudes towards collaboration and interdependence. The study draws upon case study data gathered in three purposefully selected Kazakhstani schools. The first two schools represent Kazakhstani schools established during the Soviet communist era. One of them is selected from among the comprehensive rural schools and the second is a gymnasium located in a district town. The third one is an autonomous school tasked to serve as a platform to pilot a new reform initiative before its dissemination to all the mainstream schools of the country. Each case-study was covered during a six-to-seven week period, which corresponds to a term in a school year in Kazakhstan. The findings demonstrate the dependence of teachers’ personal beliefs and values about teacher collaboration on micropolitical, school organisational culture, and socio-political factors, mainly inherited as a legacy of the Soviet education system, as well as ambiguities in the understanding and implementation of reform initiatives dictated from the top. The study suggests that Kazakhstani school history and the culture of the teaching profession possess the potential to overcome these barriers, for there is a tradition of peer evaluation and peer observation in the system with teachers expected to observe and be observed by other teachers on a frequent basis within an appropriately defined school organisational structure, which historically is seen by the authorities as a means of control. The study concludes that it is of particular importance to build on the momentum of the recent reform initiatives and help teachers to develop agency by providing the support and conditions conducive to the continued development of professional learning communities based on teacher collaboration for learning.

Thesis advisor: Katherine L. McNeill / Science education is shifting from a vision of students memorizing facts towards engaging in figuring out the natural world as students build ideas from their own experiences and backgrounds. This shift is hard for teachers. One way to support teachers is curriculum-based professional development, which pairs high-quality instructional materials with professional development to help teachers understand the philosophy of those materials and what that looks like in practice. This three-paper dissertation uses the OpenSciEd middle school field test, a curriculum-based professional development program, as a context to investigate how to support teachers with this shift. The first paper is a quantitative look at teacher surveys taken across the first two years of the OpenSciEd field test. I tracked changes in teachers’ beliefs about science instruction and confidence in implementing OpenSciEd. I used Hierarchical Linear Modeling to identify teacher characteristics associated with differences in those changes. Beliefs and confidence changed initially and leveled out over time, but confidence took longer to change than beliefs. Teachers who had more experience and found the PD more valuable were less likely to hold traditional beliefs and more likely to have higher confidence. The second paper is a conceptual look at practice-based professional development activities focused on one new one: the student hat. Student hat is when teachers engage in science activities while considering ideas and experiences their students might bring to them and sharing those ideas using students’ language. Student hat uniquely helps teachers to consider students’ relationship to the science ideas under discussion and their cognitive and affective responses to reform science instruction. The third paper is a qualitative look at the use of the student hat in one professional development workshop. I engaged in thematic analysis of interviews and video to determine what student hat helped teachers to learn and how. Student hat provided safety for teacher confusion, allowing teachers to learn science ideas. It also helped teachers develop their epistemic empathy for students, helping them to learn about their students and the OpenSciEd instructional approach. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction.

This dissertation is a multi-part inquiry into the question, what could liberatory mathematics teaching and learning be? It works from an understanding of liberation as plural, collective, sociohistorically situated, radically imaginative, and practicable in the here and now (Combahee River Collective, in Taylor, 2017; Escobar, 2015; G. Gutiérrez, 1973/1988; Kelley, 2002; Walcott, 2021). Rather than pursue final or totalizing answers, the dissertation engages a question that holds infinite multiplicities (Martin et al., 2019). It includes three studies, two of which foreground the perspectives of K–12 educators; the third is an analysis of extant scholarship. All three center educational research and practice with explicit commitments to justice and liberation. The first study profiles an elementary educator’s reflections on teaching across school disciplines. Drawing on ethnographic data from a year-long collaboration, including observations, interviews, and video-based reflection conversations, the analysis explores a rift (Booker & Goldman, 2016) that this teacher experienced between liberatory pedagogy and school mathematics. The paper describes key facets of her liberatory praxis, which developed largely in the humanities, and considers challenges and possibilities of liberatory teaching and learning in mathematics. The second study is an integrative analysis (Torraco, 2016) of scholarship that takes critical perspectives on mathematics education. The paper brings extant literature from mathematics education and the learning sciences into conversation with ideas from Warren, Vossoughi, Rosebery, Bang, and Taylor’s (2020) chapter, “Multiple Ways of Knowing: Re-imagining Disciplinary Learning.” Warren and colleagues call educators and researchers across fields to pursue disciplinary learning that liberates from the EuroWestern normativity of academic disciplines and K–12 schooling. The paper highlights contributions, limitations, and future possibilities of critical mathematics education scholarship in light of this call. The third study is an analysis of conversations with six mathematics educators—spanning grade levels, roles, and institutional settings—who centered commitments to justice and liberation in their teaching. In one-on-one conversations, we discussed the educational histories, teaching experiences, and political values that shaped their praxis. The paper synthesizes themes across their accounts of liberatory mathematics teaching and learning, highlighting the prefigurative orientation these educators brought to pedagogy as they visioned and practiced freedom within systems that were far from liberatory (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016; Boggs, 1977; Givens, 2021a). Across the studies, educators and researchers offer incisive critiques of mathematics education as a force for sociohistorical injustice and point toward its liberatory potential. Common themes from the three analyses include: a multi-scale political perspective on mathematics education; harm, healing, and social connection in mathematics; learning from life beyond school; and creative inspiration in mathematics. Themes unique to individual studies are: the microrelational work of liberatory pedagogy (Paper 1), turning a critical eye on mathematics as a discipline (Paper 2), and educators examining their own relationships with mathematics (Paper 3). Taken together, the studies suggest that mathematics pedagogy as the practice of freedom (Freire, 1973; hooks, 1994) can—and perhaps must—take multiple forms. These include critically navigating normative systems and seeking radical departures from them. The dissertation concludes with directions for future inquiry in mathematics education and teacher professional learning, highlighting possibilities for critical collaborative study with educators. / 2025-01-12T00:00:00Z

This narrative inquiry examined how a small group of general educators constructed three essential understandings of themselves as teachers within the context of inclusive education: (a) To move past their fear of disabilities and negative perceptions of students with disabilities, they had to learn to see children with disabilities in new ways, identify what it was about their differences that mattered, and respond to them as valued members of their classrooms; (b) To move past feelings of inadequacy and incompetence, they had to figure out how to negotiate those learning differences that mattered the most; and (c) To keep from being overwhelmed with the additional demands inclusion placed on them as teachers, they needed to garner support through a variety of relationships, and work through conflicts that arose from trying on new roles and patterns of interaction. These understandings were constructed through two interrelated processes: Learning through experience, and learning through narrative, specifically, informal talk, structured dialogue, and stories. The representation of this inquiry was a polyvocal text which privileged what the teachers had to say, and which featured their voices in solo and in dialogue with others. This alternative format was used to convey the evolving nature of the teachers' practice, as well as the contradictions and complexities that expand our understanding of teacher learning and development in inclusive educational settings. / Ph. D.

In Scotland, the interest and investment in the professional development of teachers is currently focused on the ongoing development and implementation of its new curriculum: Curriculum for Excellence. To cope with ever-evolving curricular and pedagogical demands and to be able to effectively identify and meet the needs of the students they teach, teachers need to become, and be, teachers-as-learners. Accordingly, teachers and those with responsibility for defining and supporting teachers’ development are likely to have a vested interest in identifying and understanding what might best facilitate teachers’ learning. Engaging with this agenda, the purpose of this study is to promote and inform dialogue within and between all those in the educational community who have responsibility for teachers’ continuing professional development (CPD), so that some of the complexity involved in becoming and being teachers-as-learners might be recognised and better understood. With the aim to explore what we can learn from teachers’ own accounts of becoming and being teachers-as-learners in Scotland today, this co-operative enquiry was conducted with nine Chartered Teachers (CT), six of whom were fully qualified CTs and three of whom were still en route to achieving full CT status. To meet the Scottish Standard for Chartered Teacher, teachers need to demonstrate that they are teachers-as-learners. Enquiring with these teachers was, therefore, seen as particularly apposite to this study’s chief aim. Attending to the personal, professional and political influences they perceived as significant, these teachers shared their views, when they looked inwards to their own feelings, reactions and dispositions; outwards, to the professional and political environments with which they interact and backwards and forwards, over time. This is the first study to carry out an inquiry with Chartered Teachers in a way that allowed them to explore this complexity, because it sought to explore all four dimensions, i.e. inward, outwards, backwards and forwards (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000:50) of their storied accounts. Storied accounts of the teachers’ learning journeys were co-created during a loosely structured, dyadic, in-depth interview. Integral to this process, was discussion about the artefact(s) that eight, of the nine, participants had created for this study, to represent, reflect upon and record aspects of their journeying. Thematic narrative analysis has illuminated the complexity and particularity of each teacher’s learning journey as well as some important commonalities across them. This thesis further explores the teachers’ accounts of their experiences, in depth, and the key issues these accounts raise. Through examination of individual accounts, we learn, for example, that the teacher’s own disposition to professional learning really matters but, importantly, that it does not necessarily define the outcome. Sometimes supported and sometimes inhibited by the professional and political contexts in which they work, these teachers, motivated by a powerful sense of moral purpose, report that they have made significant and apparently, sustainable changes to their thinking and practice. Postgraduate CT study proved crucial to their journeying because, for the first time since qualifying, they had been encouraged and supported to make sense of why and to what extent, their day-to-day practices would, or would not, meet the needs of their students. It is this understanding why that appears to have made the greatest difference to their practice and to the reconstruction of their professional identities. It emerged as one of the most significant influences to their becoming and being teachers-as-learners. To do so, however, the teachers felt they have had to ‘dare to be different’. Their ability, willingness and commitment to talk about, promote and evaluate learning, in critically informed ways has meant they have often felt isolated. Despite this, the perceived benefits of being a teacher-as-learner were seen to more than compensate for what might be viewed as negative experiences. The findings suggest significant implications for the provision of, and teachers’ participation in, CPD in Scotland. They indicate the need to establish a much clearer and more critically informed focus on developing teachers’ knowledge and understanding of why they do what they do to promote learning and to develop their professional enquiry skills and understandings. If this is to happen, it will necessitate systemic change and support, involving, individual teachers, teachers as collectives within school cultures, CPD facilitators/providers and policy makers at all levels.

Professional learning communities are receiving attention in research on in-service teacher professional development. Arguments for professional learning communities emphasize teacher learning as a long-term, continuous, developmental and collaborative process. Such learning is viewed as necessary for supporting sustained improvements in teachers’ teaching practices and learners’ learning. The study reported in this thesis drew on these ideas to investigate how mathematics teachers learned in a professional learning community, and how their learning influenced changes in their teaching practices and identities. The study was a pilot for a larger, on-going project at the University of the Witwatersrand. Using the ideas of situated learning theory and data-informed practice, the case study involved a professional learning community of five mathematics teachers and the researcher. The study was conducted in one township high school in Gauteng, South Africa. The professional learning community participated in a year-long professional development intervention, which consisted of a set of developmental and structured professional learning activities. The activities involved analyzing learner errors in mathematics, identifying learners’ learning needs, planning and teaching innovative lessons for addressing the learning needs, and reflecting on how the lessons supported learners’ learning. The study investigated how teacher participation in the opportunities for learning was linked to shifts in their teaching practices and identities. The results show changes in teachers’ practices and their identities. Two teachers made shifts in their mode of teaching, task selection and implementation, and in their ways of engaging with learners’ ideas. Two other teachers made shifts in task selection. The shifts were sustained by one teacher in her teaching of the post-intervention lessons. All the teachers shifted in their ways of identifying themselves as members of communities. During and after the intervention, the teachers identified themselves as members of the professional learning community, and expressed visions of progressively learning together and improving their practice together. The shifts in teaching practice and teacher identity are explained by the opportunities for learning in the professional learning community. The results show how the links among teacher learning, teachers’ teaching practices and teacher identity were supported or constrained by features of the professional learning community.

Professional Learning Community (PLC) structures require focused sessions of teacher collaboration as part of developing effective instructional practices leading to improved student performance outcomes. The PLC structured collaboration model has been implemented in schools across the country, however the current body of research regarding PLC structures has been focused on student performance and rather than the teacher learning processes that occur within the model. Teachers must learn throughout the PLC model, as they collaborate, plan instruction, create assessments, analyze data, and adjust implementation to improve results. A mixed-methods approach was used to explore correlations between PLC structure ratings and teacher self-identified learning preferences, with Kolb’s (1984) Experiential Learning Theory as the basis for determining learning preferences. The study included 115 elementary teacher participants from a school district that has prioritized PLC structures for nearly 10 years. Significant correlations were identified between PLC structural elements and teacher learning preferences, with qualitative results providing additional descriptive analysis regarding teacher perceptions of their learning within PLCs. The findings within this study indicate that teacher learning preferences may be a key consideration for school site administrators as part of PLC team construction and development.