Mathematics teachers working and learning collaboratively in communities of practice
Berinderjeet Kaur
National Institute of Education Singapore
“The quality of an Education System cannot exceed the
quality of its teachers”
- Mourshed & Barber (2007) McKinsey Report -
A Life Long Learner
• In-service teacher learning
– MOE funds 100 hours of professional development per year
• Postgraduate Degrees
– MEd (Maths Education)
– MSc (Maths for Educators) – MA, MSc by research
– PhD
The forms of continuing professional
development (PD) teachers engage in are often related to:
• systemic support such as 100 hours of funded PD every year and time-tabled time during curriculum hours to meet, plan and
deliberate on their instructional practices that teachers in Singapore are privy to (Kaur and Wong, 2017) or otherwise;
• the acceptance of PD by teachers as a career-long
endeavour or an administrative duty (Diaz-Maggioli, 2004), and
• teacher compliance due to top-down directives or teacher
agency where they able “to act purposefully and constructively to
direct their professional growth and contribute to the growth of their
colleagues” (Calvert, 2016, p.4).
Models of PD
• Transmission - training, award-bearing, deficit and cascade
• Transitional - standards-based,
coaching/mentoring, community of practice
• Transformative - action research
• Enhancing the Pedagogy of Mathematics Teachers (Reasoning and Communication)
• Enhancing the Pedagogy of Mathematics Teachers (Teaching for Metacognition)
PD Projects
Hybrid Model (Kaur, 2011)
This model integrates the “training model of
PD” (Matos et al., 2009) with sustained support for teachers to integrate knowledge gained from the PD into their
classroom practice.
Characteristics of Communities of Practice
(CoP) (Wenger, 1998)
Communities of Practice
The 3 Phases
Working & Learning Collaboratively
Wenger‟s social theory of learning (Wenger, 1998)
learning within a community of practice happens as a result of that community and its interactions, and not merely as a result of planned learning episodes such as preparing
teaching materials.
Negotiation of meaning - involves the interplay of participation and reification.
Participation is the active, experiential, and social process of taking part and sharing in communities, whereas the
complementary process of reification involves “giving form
to our experience by producing objects that congeal this
experience into „thingness‟ (Wenger, 1998, p. 58).
References
Calvert, L. (2016). Moving from compliance to agency: What teachers need to make professional learning work. Oxford, OH: Learning Forward and NCTAF.
Diaz-Maggioli, G. (2004). Teacher-centred professional development. Alexandria, VA:
Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD).
Kaur, B. (2011). Enhancing the pedagogy of mathematics teachers (EPMT) project: A hybrid model of professional development. ZDM - The International Journal on Mathematics Education, 43(7), 791-803.
Kaur, B., & Wong, L.F. (2017). Professional development of mathematics teachers in Singapore. In B. Kaur, O.N. Kwon, & Y.H. Leong (Eds.), Professional development of mathematics teachers – An Asian perspective (pp. 97-108). Springer.
Matos, J. F., Powell, A., & Sztajn, P. (2009). Mathematics teachers‟ professional
development: Processes of learning in and from practice. In R. Even & D. L. Ball (Eds.), The professional education and development of teachers of mathematics (pp. 167 – 183). New York: Springer.
Mourshed, M., & Barber, M. (2007). How the world‟s best-performing school systems come out on top. McKinsey & Company
Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: learning, meaning and identity. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
