Rural High School Mathematics Teachers' Response to Mathematics Reform Curriculum Integration and Professional Development
The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine rural high school mathematics teachers’ responses to the initial implementation of Louisiana’s Comprehensive Curriculum during their second year of involvement in a professional development program. The curriculum changes were the culmination of an alignment between standards, curriculum, assessments and instruction which exemplified the shift to standards-based accountability and high-stakes testing characteristic of post-NCLB systemic reform efforts. I further investigated some of the discrepancies between the teachers’ professed beliefs about mathematics and their classroom practices. The research questions probed the responses of forty-seven teachers to the implementation of the Comprehensive Curriculum, their impressions of the impact of the professional development program, and the nature of mathematics as portrayed in the new curriculum. The study was framed in symbolic interactionism and grounded theory. The concerns and interests of the rural mathematics teachers guided the interview discussions and some of the observations. Data sources included surveys, participant-observations, interviews and other documents. Predetermined and constant comparative coding themes contributed to the constant comparative data analysis. Analysis of the data revealed three major themes that pervaded the teachers’ perceptions of the educational changes they were undergoing: expectations, need for alignment, and big picture. Both teachers and teacher educators agreed that there was a misalignment between the different districts’ goals and foci and they identified strengths and weaknesses in the professional development program. The implementation of the new curriculum coupled with the professional development program and the pressures for increasing test scores offered me an opportunity to study teachers during a challenging and uncertain time. The findings of the study may contribute to a better understanding of how teachers perceive mandated changes to their practices as prompted by reforms in mathematics education.
Mathematics education, teacher professional development, reform curriculum, curriculum integration, teacher response, teacher beliefs, teacher dispositions, high school mathematics, Louisiana
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign