community documentational genesis perspective - Springer Link

ZDM Mathematics Education (2013) 45:1017–1029 DOI 10.1007/s11858-013-0523-5

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Classroom video in teacher professional development program: community documentational genesis perspective Jana Visnovska • Paul Cobb

Accepted: 12 July 2013 / Published online: 30 July 2013 FIZ Karlsruhe 2013

Abstract We examine classroom video recordings as a means of supporting the learning of teacher communities. Drawing on a longitudinal professional development program for middle years mathematics teachers in the USA, we first outline two contrasting episodes in which the teachers analyzed same segments of classroom video in two different points in the program, 2 years apart. We document that the teachers considered dramatically different aspects of video-recorded instruction as relevant to their professional interests and learning in the two episodes. We then analyze the episodes, and the intervening developments, from point of view of the community documentational genesis. In doing so, we highlight the teacher community’s creation of shared repertoire of ways of reasoning.

1 Introduction Using classroom video to support teacher learning has been the focus of research for several decades (Brophy 2004; Lampert and Ball 1998; Marx et al. 1998; van Es and Sherin 2008). Among the key features of video materials that make them attractive as a teacher learning resource is their potential to ‘‘ground the conversation [between teachers and professional development (PD) facilitators] in ways that are virtually impossible when the referents are J. Visnovska (&) School of Education, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, QLD 4072, Australia e-mail: [email protected] P. Cobb Peabody College, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37235, USA

remote or merely rhetorical’’ (Ball and Cohen 1999, p. 17). Along with the increasingly frequent use of classroom video, a number of reports on its use in teacher learning (e.g., Nemirovsky et al. 2005; Sherin and Han 2004) and on heuristics for designing video-based PD activities (Le Fevre 2004; Seago 2004; Sherin et al. 2009) have become available. Yet, much remains to be understood, especially about how specific ways of using video materials become constituted in PD settings. In some cases, teachers were reported to approach video-based PD activities as an opportunity to evaluate the video teacher’s work (Nemirovsky et al. 2005). In other cases, classroom video became a means of investigating students’ actions and mathematical ideas (Sherin and Han 2004; van Es and Sherin 2008). Our goal in this paper is to understand how specific, potentially productive uses of video resources can be established in the context of PD, and how teachers’ participation in these video-based activities can support their learning. These questions are pragmatically relevant and have direct implications for using classroom video to support the learning of teacher communities. The case we discuss comes from a longitudinal PD design study1 (Cobb, et al. 2003a) in which a group of middle-school teachers worked with novel teaching resources in the domain of statistical data analysis. We first focus on two episodes that took place 2 years apart in which the same video clips were used and were framed by the facilitators in similar ways. However, the teachers’ approaches to video analysis and their resulting interpretations of students’ participation and classroom teaching 1

The research team included the authors, Kay McClain, Chrystal Dean, Teruni Lamberg, Qing Zhao, Melissa Gresalfi, Lori Tyler, and Jose Cortina.

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were markedly different. We use these episodes to clarify that video resources do not carry pre-determined meanings, even when they are designed for a specific purpose. We then consider why the teachers analyzed the video clips in the two episodes and illustrate how the documentational genesis approach (Gueudet and Trouche 2012a) provides a useful interpretive framework that highlights both the work of a teacher community and the role of tools in supporting this work. To conclude, we formulate implications of our analysis for supporting the learning of teacher communities with classroom video.

2 Background to the design experiment Our discussion is grounded in a 5-year PD design study conducted with a group of mathematics teachers who work in schools in a diverse urban area in the south-eastern USA. We conducted an initial 2-day summer institute, three 1-day work sessions, and a 3-day summer institute during the first year of the study, and six 1-day sessions and a 3-day summer institute during each of the subsequent 4 years. Ten middle-school teachers were members of the group in the first 2 years, after which four teachers left (leaving the participating schools) and six new teachers joined the group. In addition, two personnel responsible for supporting mathematics teaching in these schools (a mathematics coordinator and a mathematics specialist) participated in the PD sessions. PD focused on statistical data analysis. Two instructional sequences that had been designed in a prior classroom design experiment (Cobb 1999; Cobb et al. 2003b) provided the central means of supporting teacher learning. During development of these sequences, a member of the design research team taught the lessons, which were video recorded in their entirety. These recordings yielded video clips for use in teacher PD. The statistics sequences specify a progression of student learning goals along with the means of supporting this learning. In contrast to more traditional instructional resources where teachers are expected to use tasks in specified order, the statistics sequences require teachers to make instructional decisions based on the actual learning of students in their classrooms. We anticipated that their effective use would require substantial teacher learning. Our goals in working with the teachers included supporting them in (a) deepening their understanding of central statistical ideas, (b) making sense of individual students’ statistical interpretations and solutions, and (c) adapting statistics sequences to the needs and constraints of their instructional situations (Cobb and McClain 2001). The same segments of classroom video were used with the group of teachers in the work sessions conducted

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during the summers at the end of year 1 and year 3. On both occasions, the choice of using video materials was made based on ongoing analyses of previous sessions and with respect to the immediate and the long-term goals for teacher learning. We aimed to engage teachers in conversations about the students’ learning and the means by which the video teacher supported it.

3 Conceptualizing use of classroom video in teacher PD We use design research as the overarching methodology for our inquiry into teacher learning. In our work, we conceptualize teacher learning as situated within the institutional context of their schools (Cobb et al. 2003c) and have adapted the communities of practice (Wenger 1998) framework to both analyze and guide the learning of groups of mathematics teachers. Our research interests center on both the teachers’ evolving forms of participation in PD sessions and the means by which shifts in their participation are supported (Cobb et al. 2009). In our efforts to understand whether and in what ways classroom video materials become a useful means of supporting teacher learning in specific situations, we turned to the documentational approach developed by Gueudet and Trouche (2009, 2012a, b). In the following section, we discuss ways in which this approach is compatible with our conceptualization of teacher learning and helpful in foregrounding the use of classroom video in teachers’ collective work. 3.1 Community documentational genesis Gueudet and Trouche build on the instrumental approach (Rabardel 1995) to propose documentational genesis as ‘‘a general perspective for the study of teachers’ professional evolution, where the researcher’s attention is focused on the resources, their appropriation and transformation by the teacher or by a group of teachers working together’’ (Gueudet and Trouche 2009, pp. 199–200). Teachers’ documentation work includes looking for resources,2 making sense of them, and using them. The products of this work at a given point in time are characterized as documents. The process of documentational genesis 2

Gueudet and Trouche explain that they use the word resources (rather than materials) to include human and cultural resources (Adler 2000) that teachers can draw on in their work. We appreciate this broad view of potential supports of teachers’ work, but consider as resources only those materials and people on which teachers actually draw in their work. For instance, we would not recognize a colleague who never engages in conversations about teaching as a resource even though she is potentially available for such conversations.

Classroom video in teacher professional development program

foregrounds interactions of teachers and resources, and highlights how both are transformed in the course of these interactions. Building on Wenger’s (1998) conceptualization of communities of practice, Gueudet and Trouche (2012a) extend the approach to the learning of teacher PD groups. Such learning then comprises changes both in teachers’ participation in collective practices of the group, and in teachers’ views, production, and uses of various resources. The changes in teachers’ participation characterize a community genesis process that includes the emergence of collaborative practices and a joint enterprise of the group. The changes in teachers’ views and uses of resources characterize a community documentational genesis process that includes the emergence of a shared repertoire of ways of and purposes for using tools (e.g., classroom videos) in the group. Gueudet and Trouche foreground community genesis and community documentational genesis processes, and highlight the duality between participation and documentation. On the one hand, documentation—that is, the shared repertoire of resources along with the practices resulting from conceiving, implementing, and discussing these resources—is an outcome of participation. On the other hand, the shared repertoire of practices and tools supports each member’s further participation in the joint enterprise of the group. Importantly, this conceptualization emphasizes that teachers’ participation in professional communities is situated within and shaped by the broader context of schools in which they work (Gueudet and Trouche 2012a).

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Central to the method we used to analyze teachers’ participation in two video analysis activities is identification of regularities in their ongoing interactions. In making claims about teachers’ views, we do not rely on their selfreports, but instead make inferences from teachers’ participation in PD activities. We used an adaption of Glaser and Strauss’ (1967) constant comparative method that has been described by Cobb and Whitenack (1996). While working through the data chronologically, we continually tested and revised tentative conjectures about both the purposes of using classroom video clips that were established in interaction between researchers and teachers, and whether these particular purposes were reasonable from the teachers’ point of view (Simon and Tzur 1999). We also compared our findings against the findings of additional analyses conducted for the complementary purposes mentioned above. This process resulted in the formulation of claims and assertions that are empirically grounded and span the entire data corpus. Our primary analysis focuses on teacher participation (i.e., the community genesis process). To foreground the kinds of documents that got produced when the community used classroom video as a resource,3 we adapted the reflective investigation methodology (Gueudet and Trouche 2012b) and interrogated previously collected data. Importantly, documents that resulted from teachers’ activities, such as analyses of classroom video clips, were available within the data corpus. Additional data included teachers’ explications of the background assumptions that were implicit in how they participated in PD sessions.

5 Video clip vignettes 4 Data and analysis We draw primarily on data collected during PD sessions beginning with the summer institute conducted in year 1 and ending with the summer institute conducted in year 3. The data for each PD session include a set of research field notes, video recordings, transcripts of the key episodes, and teachers’ individual and collective notes produced during the PD activities. In addition to analyzing these data, we draw on retrospective analyses that members of the research team have conducted, such as analyses of the learning of the teacher group (Dean 2005; Gresalfi and Cobb 2011; Visnovska 2009) and of the school contexts in which the teachers worked (Cobb et al. 2003c; Lamberg 2004). These complementary analyses drew on a larger set of data and included additional data sources (e.g., video recordings of teachers’ classroom instruction and teacher interviews). Wherever relevant, we reference these analyses in our interpretations.

Before presenting the two contrasting ways in which the teachers analyzed the same video clips, we introduce the video clips and describe our purposes for their use. 5.1 Batteries clip, 7 min The teacher opens a whole class discussion of a data analysis task. During the prior 20 min, the students had used a computer tool to analyze data on how long batteries of two brands (10 batteries each) lasted in a torch light. The goal was to determine which of the two brands would be a better buy if they cost the same.

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Our interest in the documentation work of teacher community reflects our interest in understanding and improving the designed means of supporting teachers’ learning. We do not, at this point, have data to trace the impact of community documentation on the documentation systems of individual teachers.

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Teacher: What I would like you to do, Casey, you came up with an argument about which type of battery you would recommend that we buy based on this information. Would you mind coming up and explaining that? While she is doing that, your job is to pay attention. If you have a question, raise your hand. Otherwise, guys, I’m gonna assume that you understand and that you could explain what she is saying anytime. The computer tool is projected on the whiteboard and the teacher operates the display according to students’ requests. Casey focuses on the ten longest lasting batteries (Fig. 1) and points out that seven of them were Always Ready batteries and, thus, she would buy Always Ready. After Janice repeats Casey’s argument, James challenges it, saying that several Tough Cell batteries are ‘‘almost in that area’’ and that if they had looked at the top 14 instead of top 10, there would be 7 batteries of each brand. The teacher follows up by asking Casey to explain why she decided to look at the top ten batteries. Casey explains that ten batteries are half of all the data. The teacher leaves Casey’s and James’s differing proposals open and moves on to Brad, who presents an argument that favors the Tough Cell brand. Through the discussion of Brad’s argument, the teacher presses students to elaborate their explanations (e.g., why Brad decided to organize the data in a particular way) and asks whether students have questions and whether everyone could hear each explanation well. 5.2 AIDS clip, 14 min The classroom discussion centers on four pairs of students’ written reports of the analyses they had conducted. The Fig. 1 Computer Tool 1 with Batteries dataset. Each bar represents the life span of one battery. The Value Bar tool is used to separate the ten longest lasting batteries. Dark bars represent Always Ready and light bars Tough Cell batteries

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students had used a computer tool to compare two treatment programs for AIDS patients. They analyzed data on T-cell counts of the patients with the goal of determining whether an experimental program in which 46 people had enrolled was more effective in raising patients’ T-cell counts than a traditional program in which 186 people had enrolled. The teacher had recreated the four reports in a poster format and attached the first poster to the board: I want us to look at them [the reports] and decide if we think that they are an adequate way to represent these data and we actually understand what these folks are doing… Your job is to look at this person’s diagram and see if you first of all understand what they did and second of all, if you think this is an adequate way to talk about information on AIDS treatment programs. In contrast to the Batteries episode, all students agreed that the experimental program was better, yet they engaged in a lengthy discussion of different ways that the data could be represented. They volunteered their opinions about displayed work and shared their explanations and understandings. Students now asked for clarifications and justifications without prompting, in ways similar to the teacher in the Batteries episode. For instance, following Janice’s statement that Report 1 (Fig. 2) was adequate because it indicated ‘‘where the majority of the numbers were,’’ Derek asked: ‘‘What do you mean by the majority of the numbers?’’ In response, four students offered their understanding of the term majority as it related to the poster. The teacher revoiced the students’ questions and explanations, and encouraged further questions. In addition, the teacher challenged students’ views, trying to elicit greater clarity about issues that she


Fig. 2 Report 1: The numbers indicate the T-cell count of patients at the end of the treatments. A higher T-cell count indicates better health. The term ‘‘old’’ was used interchangeably with traditional and ‘‘new’’ with experimental treatment

considered central to their explanations. For instance, the teacher challenged the argument that the experimental treatment was better by pointing to the absolute numbers of people whose T-cell counts were greater than 525 (i.e., there were more people with T-cell count higher than 525 in the traditional group, 56, than in the experimental group, 37; see Fig. 3). In the subsequent discussion, five students explained why the teacher’s interpretation of the data was not adequate, and other students raised their hands to indicate understanding.

6 Teacher PD and classroom video clips Our intention in selecting the two video clips was to enable teachers to compare and contrast classroom events that occurred 6 weeks apart. One of the key contrasts that we hoped would come to the fore concerned the differences in

Fig. 3 Report 3: The top portion of the diagram represents the traditional treatment data and bottom portion the experimental treatment data

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how students participated in the discussions in the two lessons. This contrast was evidenced by instances where the video teacher had to ask for justifications and encourage students to ask clarifying questions in the first video clip, while this role was taken over by the students in the second video clip. In addition, in the second video clip the students seemed genuinely interested in understanding and corroborating or disproving others’ ideas. We conjectured that if these differences in the students’ participation became a focus of analysis and discussion in the teacher group, the teachers would then be interested in investigating how the video teacher supported these changes. A further point of contrast concerns differences in sophistication of the students’ statistical arguments and in the representations of the data that they considered adequate. We conjectured that analysis of these differences might lead to discussions of the goals of statistical learning and how students can be supported to attain these goals. Our descriptions of contrasts illustrate that we designed the video clips within what Le Fevre (2004) refers to as a curriculum for teacher PD. In other words, we designed the video clips ‘‘to be used in intentional ways towards intentional learning goals’’ (ibid, p. 235). In particular, we anticipated that they might become resources in teachers’ discussions of teaching and student learning. Despite the purposeful selection of the video clips, our delineation of potential learning goals, and our facilitation to achieve those goals (cf. Seago 2004; Sherin et al. 2009), the ways in which the video analysis activity was constituted in the two PD sessions differed greatly. It is tempting to try to account for these differences by looking for factors that differed across the two PD sessions. For example, there were differences in the exact wording used when the tasks were introduced and in the duration of the respective introductions and the activities. This focus on surface level differences overlooks our efforts to ensure that the video analysis activities were constituted similarly on both occasions. The introduction of the activities at the end of year 1 was significantly longer and the facilitators intervened far more directly in an effort to influence how the activities were constituted. However, the ways in which the goals of activities were negotiated were not determined by the specific words we used. Instead, the teachers were active participants who both made sense of the goals and shaped them in significant ways. One important difference that must be considered when accounting for the differences in the video analyses concerns the membership of the group at the end of year 1 and year 3. Elsewhere, the first author (Visnovska 2009, 2010) analyzed whether and how the practices of the group changed with the changes in group membership. The analysis included looking for the discontinuities in group practices, the disparities in the frequencies of the

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newcomers’ and continuing teachers’ contributions to the group activities, and the cases in which the newcomers’ ways of reasoning about mathematical and pedagogical situations differed from those that had been established as normative among the continuing members. The analysis revealed that in year 3, the practices of the group were reestablished during the initial three PD sessions after new teachers joined the group. This indicates that it is reasonable to view the changes in membership in terms of the induction of new members into a single teacher group that evolved across the 5 years of PD collaboration. It is in this sense that we treat the teacher group as being the same in the two video analyses.4 Our intent in presenting two PD episodes is to illustrate that although video clips can be conceptualized as records of specific instructional practices that were selected for specific purposes, they do not carry pre-determined meanings that teachers can ‘read out’ of them unproblematically. Thus, what a video clip becomes a resource for in teachers’ PD work is not pre-determined. While we do not claim that this is a groundbreaking observation, we find it important to provide a case that substantiates this point. This is because classroom video recordings often seem so compelling that we are enticed into believing that they will make the key teaching principles accessible to all teachers.

7 Two analyses of classroom video 7.1 Video analysis 1 During summer institute at the end of the first year of the PD collaboration, the video analysis activity was introduced as an opportunity to explore students’ perceptions of their classroom obligations—both their general obligations and those specific to mathematics—and how these might have contributed to students’ learning. Two facilitators– researchers reiterated this focus for the activity during the first 10 min, both before the group viewed an initial segment of the Batteries video clip and after the teachers discussed the segment in pairs. The facilitators’ intention was to build on teachers’ observations of differences in the students’ participation in the two video episodes to motivate an exploration of how the video teacher supported these changes. The teachers initially made several observations that addressed the focus question, stating, for instance, that in


Batteries episode students were expected to justify their answers and respect one another. However, in addition to reporting on students’ obligations, the teachers initiated a discussion of whether the students were engaged and on task. …If you look at the faces of those who weren’t participating, [it] is as though they felt [they were] being ‘‘stupid’’… When you look at those faces you could recognize those things. Muriel: Some [students] on those front ones [desks] I just thought were bored. Naomi: Yeah. Muriel: Looking like this [demonstrates a blank expression]. [Several teachers join in recounting which students turned around, chatted, or seemed bored. Some teachers laugh.] Naomi:

The facilitators had to provide significant support in the remainder of the discussion to ensure that the teachers focused at least to some extent on what the students were expected to do mathematically. This was evidenced in facilitators taking more than half of the turns in the discussion, usually alternating with speaking teachers. The teachers’ focus on student behavior became even more pronounced when the group moved to the AIDS video clip. While the video was playing, teachers made private comments and jokes. They did not ask for the video to be stopped, but some teachers pointed to one student on the screen saying, ‘‘That’s him,’’ followed by laughter from the group. While several students in the video explained how they had analyzed the data, one student, Derek, had his head down on his desk (Fig. 4) and the teacher briefly asked him to sit up and take his hood off. She then encouraged the speaking student to continue her explanation. The teachers continued talking to one another and laughing as they watched the remainder of the episode. It

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Not all group members were able to participate in each session. Only two new members took part in the second video analysis along with seven continuing members (5 teachers and 2 mathematics leadership personnel). We analyze contributions of new members when we describe the second video analysis activity.

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Fig. 4 Derek with his head on the table. AIDS video clip, minute 3:40


became clear that they no longer attempted to follow the statistical conversation or find out whether the students’ obligations had changed from the Batteries episode. One of the researchers stopped the recording after 3 min and attempted to renegotiate the focus of the video analysis by pointing out that the video teacher’s focus on what students talked about statistically had been an important aspect of her effectiveness in supporting her students’ learning. The teachers then watched the video clip again and engaged in conversation about students’ explanations of their analyses for about 5 min before breaking for lunch. When the group reconvened, the teachers again focused on the extent to which students appeared to be on task, but this time they also explained why this was an important consideration from their point of view. We will detail the teachers’ rationales and what the research team learned about use of classroom video in a later section of this paper. For now, we note that the teachers constituted the observation that Derek’s head was on the table as evidence of the video teacher’s lack of classroom control and of students’ unwillingness to participate in the lesson. On the basis of this evidence, the teachers concluded that the video teacher’s instruction was ineffective.

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infer how the development of this interest had been supported. The teachers’ focus as they engaged in the video analysis activity contrasted sharply with their focus 2 years earlier. The teachers spent almost 4 h analyzing the video clips in three groups of three.7 In doing so, they re-viewed the episodes several times8 and discussed in detail what happened in the classroom. Researchers were present, but did not intervene to influence the focus of conversations. When the teachers presented their findings, they engaged in extended exchanges without any prompting by or guidance from facilitators. To illustrate the teachers’ focus and the depth of the analyses they produced, consider their insights about students’ classroom participation. In the following exchange, Lisa and Esther pointed out a distinction that their group had made between seeing participation as the appearance of paying attention and seeing it as a student’s ability to make insightful contributions: Lisa:

7.2 Video analysis 2 The research team’s goal during the summer institute conducted 2 years later was to continue supporting the teachers in shifting their focus (in PD activities and, ultimately, in their classroom teaching) from the teacher’s actions to the nature of students’ participation in classroom activities.5 The research team conjectured that an activity in which the teachers would analyze the Batteries and AIDS video clips6 might support them in focusing on students’ participation. At the time, the teachers attributed many of the problems they encountered in the classroom to their students’ lack of motivation. We thus first asked them to analyze transcripts of interviews conducted with students from the statistics design experiment classroom. The teachers concluded, somewhat to their own surprise, that the students had developed considerable interest in statistical data analysis. They also noted that when these students described their regular mathematics classroom, they seemed to be just as unmotivated as the students in their own classrooms. Against this background, the video analysis was introduced as an opportunity to determine whether the students were truly interested in analyzing data, and to 5 Others (van Es and Sherin 2008) have reported that when teachers are learning to analyze records of practice, they tend to focus on the actions of the teacher in analyzed classroom, and that transition to focusing on student reasoning requires significant support. 6 No video clips from statistics design experiment were used in the intervening years.

Esther:

Lisa: Esther: Lisa:

We also talked about the little boy that, she [the teacher] had to tell him to get the hood off the head. [Teachers nod and say ‘‘Yeah, Derek’’.] And just the fact that he may not- he didn’t seem like he was engaged but then all of a sudden he took off. Remember? We talked about how he started all of a sudden (see Fig. 5). [jumps in] Yeah, it bothered me how many kids’ heads were on the table… but then they would come back. And I was saying, that [jumps in] So maybe it was a morning class. [People laugh.] when kids have something, when something hits them and they have something to say, that’s when they will go off. So that they have something to say. And they can be listening and not having a thing to say, and just kind of [be there]. But with him [Derek]… the discussion sparked, you know, in some way where he had still something to say about it.

All teacher groups mentioned the episode where Derek first did not appear to pay attention and later contributed to classroom discussion with an insightful comment. The teachers now took Derek’s contribution, rather than his appearing bored, as evidence of his classroom participation. 7

Seven of the participants were members of the group from its inception and the remaining two joined the group at the beginning of year 3. The newcomers’ names are marked with an asterisk. 8 Each teacher was given transcripts of the episodes and earphones for viewing digitized videos. The groups conducted their analyses in separate rooms.

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Fig. 5 Derek indicates that he wants to contribute to the discussion. AIDS video clip, minute 7:30

Most of the remaining issues that the teachers raised when reporting their analyses constituted the video clips as an example of a good instruction.9 Amy’s comment is representative and illustrates the teachers’ valuations of the video teacher’s work: Amy:

The teacher would set goals, and accountability, and expectations. This was something that [the teacher] did a very good job at the very beginning of each of these things [video clips]. She clearly stated what was going to happen and what she expected to happen and throughout the [lesson] she held students accountable for participating in the discussion. And it was done in very what we consider a positive way… Instead of telling a kid ‘‘Speak up! We cannot hear you!’’ it was ‘‘Use your big voice,’’ or it was done in a way that was not an embarrassing or intimidating experience.

The three groups of teachers consistently highlighted positive aspects of the video teacher’s instruction when they reported their analyses. Importantly, none of the teachers suggested that the instruction was ineffective or that the video teacher appeared not to have the class under control.

8 Accounting for differences in the video analyses We treat the two video analyses as documents produced by the teacher group10 2 years apart. These analyses differed

sharply and almost appear to be descriptions of two quite different classrooms. The students in the first classroom were bored and disengaged, and either did not understand or were not interested in what was going on in the statistics lessons. This classroom was led by a teacher who was ineffective in classroom management. In the second classroom, the teacher was skilled in creating a safe learning environment for students. She stated her expectations explicitly and used the data projector skillfully as she elicited and scaffolded students’ contributions to classroom discussions. As a result, even the students who did not appear to be paying attention often had something important to say. In accounting for the differences in teachers’ analyses, we considered a number of possible explanations. For instance, we considered the possibilities that the teachers produced relatively superficial analyses during the first reported episode either because they did not put enough time or effort into their analyses or because they were inexperienced at analyzing classroom video recordings. However, the reader will recall that even during the first episode, the teachers watched the video clips multiple times and were willing to discuss them at length. They made observations about the students’ classroom obligations, but these were not the issues that they wanted to pursue further despite the facilitator’s efforts to make them a focus of discussion. The length of time spent on analyses did not explain the difference in the teachers’ interpretations, which was identifiable from the earliest comments shared in the teacher group during the two episodes. We also considered the influence of the two newcomers who participated in the second video analysis.11 First, we did not find any qualitative differences in analyses reported by the three analysis groups, one of which was composed only of continuing members. Second, all ideas noted as significant by the two newcomers in their reflections on the video analysis activity were similar or identical to those noted by some of the continuing members. The two newcomers and two continuing members did occasionally adopt a student’s point of view in their contributions, a practice that the facilitators attempted to foster, but which was not yet normative in the group. These findings together with evidence that the newcomers consistently contributed to normative practices of the group well before year 3 summer institute (Visnovska 2009) disprove the conjecture that differences in group membership would satisfactorily explain the differences in the two video analyses.

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Seeing teaching in the video clip as good was not a PD goal. Indeed, there were a number of occasions where alternative courses for the video teacher’s action could be proposed. 10 We also treat these analyses as products of a single, continuing teacher group. The changes in the documentation work of this group then provide a summary account of its collective development.

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One of six teachers who joined the group in year 3 could not take part in the summer institute due to time conflicts, and three changed their career paths at the end of the school year and left the group.


8.1 Video clips as a resource in video analysis 1 In accounting for difference between the teachers’ analyses in the two episodes, it proved productive to focus on purposes for which the teachers actually used the video clips. Our data suggest that the video clips were initially used in the group as a resource for assessing the video teacher’s instruction. Indeed, the teachers’ discussions became quite animated when they focused on students’ behavior and classroom management. In the subsequent discussion, the video clips also provided a context for—and thus became a resource for—making the demands placed on teachers by their principals visible to the research team. In explaining why they had laughed while watching the second video clip, the teachers clarified that they had never had an opportunity to see someone else teach before. As it transpired, even the teacher serving as a department chair in her school had not been expected to observe her colleagues’ classrooms. Jeremy, with the assent of others, explained that for the principals, ‘‘learning happens when everyone is paying attention.’’ The teachers went on to explain that principals visited their classrooms, sometimes on daily basis, to gauge teachers’ performance. During these visits, principals checked on the number of students who appeared to be on task and on whether an objective for the lesson from the state mathematics standards documents was written on the board. The principals’ intention in doing so was to ensure that students would perform adequately on high-stakes end-of-year tests mandated by the state. One of the teachers, Rachel, specifically related her and Jeremy’s video observations to how such teaching would be viewed by their principals: Jeremy and I was looking at… this videotape but if I was an administrator here in [one of our schools]— and I just look at some of my own evaluations—if I had the same lesson as [on this tape] I think I will have a score of 3 or 2 [on 5-point scale 1 to 5, where 5 indicates high quality teaching] just for the… number of times that [the teacher] called females to participate… There was a lot of math being taught, but for the number of students that were actually participating, it didn’t look like a lot to me. And if our principals were watching it [they would say to me] ‘‘Hmm, I don’t know, because everyone was not actively involved. Because you had some kids looking [around], had some kids leaning back, they weren’t… talking or anything but you can’t see them to be paying attention.’’ A member of the research team (Dean 2005) analyzed the development of the teacher group during the first 2 years of the PD collaboration and concluded that when the teachers initially watched and analyzed the video clips,

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they focused on student behavior and classroom management because these were the primary criteria by which school administrators evaluated them and judged teacher effectiveness. A related analysis of the school settings in which the teachers worked and in which they refined their instructional practices revealed the absence of any formal and informal networks related to mathematics teaching (Cobb et al. 2003c). As a consequence, the principals’ evaluative visits in classrooms provided teachers with the primary and largely uncontested image of what counted as good mathematics teaching in these schools. These prior analyses complement our findings by clarifying that the additional resources that shaped the teachers’ video analysis at the end of year 1 included principals’ underdeveloped expectations for classroom instruction. We concluded that the teachers engaged in the first video analysis activity, because they were curious about others’ teaching and had an opportunity to compare how another teacher’s instruction was similar to or different from what they were expected to accomplish in their classrooms. This account of the teachers’ analysis indicated that the group needed additional resources if it was to make students’ classroom obligations and their learning a primary focus of video analyses. 8.2 Community documentational genesis process Documentational genesis framework allows us to illustrate that the group’s use of classroom video at the end of year 1 shaped the group’s subsequent learning. We illustrate, rather than fully document, the impact of the initial video activity on both the community genesis and community documentational genesis processes, and on the subsequent development of communal resources that shaped the second video analysis activity. While unplanned, the teachers’ explanation for why they focused on whether students appeared to be on task during the first video analysis initiated changes in the collaborative practices of the teacher group. Dean (2005) documented that when teachers discussed their limited interactions with colleagues, school leaders’ monitoring of their instruction, and the pressure they felt due to state-mandated end-of-year tests, they began to build on each other’s contributions. This collaborative pattern of interaction did not, at the time, occur when teachers discussed pedagogical issues. Rather, the teachers established what Grossman et al. (2001) termed pseudo-agreements, thereby avoiding conflict and creating the appearance of unity. It was as they discussed the school contexts in which they work, and began to see these contexts as limited in some respects, that they initially recognized others in the group as potential allies. The problematic nature of principals’ images of good mathematics teaching led the research team to design PD

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activities in which these images would become available for the teachers’ scrutiny. Some of these activities focused on the effect of ‘‘covering the content’’ (as expected by principals) on students’ learning. In session 4 of year 2, pairs of teachers interviewed students as they solved a series of fraction tasks. Teachers attempted to understand the students’ reasoning and were taken aback by students’ responses. As Dean (2005) clarified, [t]he issue for the teachers was not that the students struggled to understand fractions conceptually. Instead, the teachers claimed it was obvious that the students’ lack of understanding was a result of the instruction they received… Teachers stated that they knew that fractions had been covered in lower grades, but the way students were reasoning was undoubtedly not what the teachers covering the material had intended. Therefore, the issue of simply ‘‘covering the content’’ had become problematic (pp. 139–141). Once the teachers had problematized their principals’ images of good mathematics teaching, they engaged in PD activities in which they planned how they might influence what counted as good mathematics teaching in their schools. Dean (2005) identified this as a key shift as the teacher group became a genuine community of practice (Wenger 1998) characterized by a joint enterprise, productive norms of mutual engagement, and a shared repertoire of ways of reasoning with tools. Dean documented that 19 months into the collaboration (i.e., by session 5 of year 2), the joint enterprise of the group centered on ensuring that students came to understand central mathematical ideas while simultaneously performing more than adequately on high-stakes student assessments. The norms of mutual engagement that were key to the teachers’ documentation work included building on others’ contributions to group discussions, asking clarifying questions, challenging others’ assertions, as well as openly sharing problems or challenges experienced during instruction. Additional norms, specific to mathematics teaching, included the standards to which the members of the community held each other accountable when they justified pedagogical decisions and judgments.12 These developments illustrate that we can trace the community genesis process back to issues that at first became visible to the research team during the first video analysis activity. For purposes of highlighting the resources on which the teachers drew in their subsequent work, we conceptualize the collection of the views and ideas that were legitimized by the group at a particular time as communal documents. 12

As indicated earlier, these normative practices were re-established within the community after the change in membership.

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An example of such a document would be the insight that covering the content is not enough, along with the explanation for this view derived from the analysis of student fraction interviews. Some of these documents had a material presence in the community as electronic or handwritten records. However, we assess the significance of particular documents by focusing on the extent to which they were subsequently used by the teachers in their collective work rather then whether they were materially inscribed. The insight that covering the content is not enough has proved to be a resource on which the teachers drew in their work when they used data analysis tasks introduced during the sessions (similar to the Batteries and AIDS tasks) in their classrooms. In year 3, two teachers co-taught one of these activities before each of the workshops 2, 4, 5, and 6, and shared the video recording of their lesson with the group.13 With respect to our PD goals, these efforts were far from successful. The teachers struggled to support their students’ investigations and seemed to find little value in the collective discussions of these lessons. Indeed, by workshop 6, many complained about the repetitive nature of PD discussions and questioned their usefulness (Visnovska 2009). Nonetheless, all teachers used the tasks with their students and encouraged some form of group exploration and reporting. None of the teachers attempted to merely cover formulas for calculating statistical measures and conventions for drawing graphs. Although the discussions were frustrating for most of the teachers (and require that we modify this PD activity in future design iterations), they enabled the teachers to develop initial images of what using data analysis tasks in classrooms might entail. Lastly, alternative, inquiry-oriented images of good mathematics teaching became available to the teachers in the context of their schools. The mathematics coordinator and mathematics specialist, who now participated more centrally in the PD activities of the community (Lamberg 2004), began working with the teachers in their schools. As part of their role, they organized grade-level sessions that focused on supporting teachers’ use of inquiry-oriented curriculum materials. The images of good teaching promoted at these occasions were different from the school administrators’ views and provided an alternative that the teachers identified as valid within their schools. We will next illustrate that both the communal practices and the images and ideas that the group had developed served as important resources in how the classroom video clips were used during the second video analysis. 13

The discussions of these recordings were significantly less structured than the summer activities that are the focus of this article. Our agenda during these discussions, which usually lasted about 1 h, was to support the teachers in focusing on their students’ reasoning. However, this focus was not achieved during year 3.


8.3 Video clips as a resource in video analysis 2 As we have noted, this video analysis activity was introduced as an opportunity for the teachers to understand how the videoed students became increasingly interested in analyzing data and how the development of their interests was supported. The level of teachers’ engagement suggests that they were not merely complying with the facilitators’ requests (Gresalfi and Cobb 2011). Instead, they seemed to become invested in learning about issues that they considered to be significant to their classroom practice. Once they established that the students in the videoed classroom had become interested in analyzing data, the classroom videos became a means for finding out what had contributed to this outcome that they regarded as significant, and they approached the analysis activity as a genuine inquiry (cf. Sherin and Han 2004; van Es and Sherin 2008). Teachers’ investigative orientation was evidenced both by their detailed explorations and by the way that they took up initially surprising findings that challenged their views of teaching and learning mathematics (i.e., students could be actively participating in classroom activities even when they appear to be disengaged). The teachers’ focus on surprising findings illustrates that the video analysis activity became a means of exploring, contesting, and reorganizing their views of student motivation and engagement. The teachers indicated the value of engaging in this activity after they had completed part of the second video analysis. Lisa:

Erin*:

[You push] to get us to really figure out what is going on in the classroom. And what is going to motivate these kids we’ve got [in our classrooms]. We need to be thinking past just what’s on the surface. We’ve got to. I know it’s hard to think that way. [Teachers nod and one facilitator speaks at the same time as Lisa: ‘‘Yeah, this is not easy.’’] And I think we’ve got some ideas out there that I haven’t really thought about. I know we have. I think, when like Esther said, what we are doing is making the invisible visible. [Several teachers say ‘‘Yeah’’]… if I look down on what I wrote down on that first [activity in this workshop, ‘‘Why are some students motivated and others are not?’’] I’m going: ‘‘Oh, wait a minute.’’ You know, it was [I focused on] more things outside of my control versus [what happens] in the classroom… Just a lot of stuff that goes on in the classroom, that just happens and I’ve never thought that I—how much maybe I played into it. Or have a part in it.

All the participating teachers expressed in some way the importance of addressing issues that had previously been ‘invisible’ to them.

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The way in which the video activity was set up played an important part in eliciting teachers’ interest and investment in the analysis. We learned the hard way that before the teachers engaged in an intensive video analysis, we needed to support them in developing questions that they considered relevant to their teaching and that they could address by analyzing classroom videos. However, we also contend that the resources that the group developed via the community documentational genesis process were crucial to how the second video activity was constituted in the group. Specifically, we suggest that the investigative orientation to the video activity, and in particular teachers’ acceptance of surprising findings, were made possible by the normative practices established in the teacher group that were not in place at the time of the first video analysis. We have illustrated how the group had developed ways of questioning ideas that were once taken for granted (e.g., whether covering the content was a mark of high-quality teaching). In the process, the teachers came to appreciate the role of empirical evidence (e.g., how students actually reasoned about fraction tasks) in determining what should count as good mathematics teaching. In contrast, the reader will recall that during the first video analysis, the teachers drew primarily on the image of good mathematics teaching that was based on their principals’ expectations and that they accepted without question. When the teachers analyzed classroom videos in year 3, they made a number of connections between the videoed classroom and the inquiry-oriented images of good teaching that were now legitimate within the context of their schools (Visnovska 2009). In addition, their own struggles with teaching data analysis tasks in their classrooms contributed to their appreciation of the video teacher’s relatively successful instruction. It is important to note that during both video analyses, the teachers actively made sense of events in the videoed classroom by relating them to their own experiences. However, the different systems of resources on which they drew resulted in significant difference in the analyses the group produced. The episode with Derek became pivotal to the group in that the teachers referred back to it whenever they discussed student participation in the remaining 2 years of PD collaboration (Visnovska 2009). In Gueudet and Trouche’s (2009) terms, the Derek episode instantiated the meanings created during the second video analysis and functioned as an important collective document that was subsequently used to establish and justify specific meanings within the community.

9 Discussion and conclusions Analyses and discussions of records of practice, especially ones that center on students’ reasoning, are frequently

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advocated for as productive activities for teacher groups (Chamberlin 2004; Fennema et al. 1996). We can provide teachers with what we consider to be suitable resources as we support such discussions, but we cannot pre-determine whether or how these designed resources will be incorporated within the lived practices of a teacher group (cf. Gueudet et al. 2012). In this article, we presented two episodes in which a group of teachers produced very different documents as they analyzed the same classroom video clips 2 years apart. This was the case even though the PD facilitators strove to negotiate similar goals and foci for the activities on each occasion. It is worth pointing out that teachers’ interpretations were reasonably consistent across the group in each of the two episodes. Although the content of the video clips was open to multiple interpretations, individual teachers did not simply choose issues on which to focus arbitrarily. Rather, the teachers appeared to use the video clips in each episode to highlight the concerns and issues that they shared and saw as worth addressing in the group. This observation suggests that for purposes of teacher PD design, it is both practical and reasonable to theorize learning as a communal as well as an individual process. It also suggests that classroom video can indeed be a useful resource in supporting the learning of teacher groups. The community documentational genesis framework highlights that to support teacher groups effectively, PD designers and facilitators need to understand the complex resource systems that teachers employ as they make sense of representations of practice. Drawing on this framework, we illustrated several ways in which video activities were used to both uncover and proactively support the development of the resource system employed by the teacher group. 9.1 Making systems of resources visible We propose that the initial uses of classroom video in teacher PD programs could provide a context in which to elicit teachers’ genuine concerns, even (or especially) when the facilitators have only a limited understanding of the teachers’ practices and the school contexts in which they work. The initial viewing of the video clips by the teachers in our study grounded the group conversations (Ball and Cohen 1999) and provided a space for the teachers to notice (van Es and Sherin 2008) and point out the aspects of classroom practice that most vividly illustrated (or breached) their expectations of good mathematics teaching. Importantly, these initial discussions revealed how teachers’ sense-making resources were both limited and influenced by the context of their schools. At the time, we were concerned that the teachers’ initial video analysis activities failed to achieve the intended

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learning goals. However, in retrospect, we view them as an opportunity to develop insights into the teachers’ practices and their school contexts. In future PD collaborations, we plan to ask teachers to explain why specific aspects of the videoed classroom caught their attention or are relevant to their teaching. The data generated in this way can be considered a methodological equivalent of reflective interviews suggested by Gueudet and Trouche (2012b). We believe that such data can provide valuable insights related to resource systems that in the early stages of a PD program shape the teachers’ production of meanings and materials. 9.2 Supporting further development of the resource systems Our analysis also revealed that the initial use of video clips shaped the teachers’ later documentation work in multiple ways. First, the video analysis activity helped to pinpoint the kinds of resources that the group would need to develop to approach analyzing classroom videos in the envisioned ways. The activities that we subsequently designed to support the learning of the group included examining the views of good mathematics teaching promoted in the schools, and building images of inquiry-oriented teaching. Second, the video analysis activity brought to the fore the institutional context of teachers’ schools. In the course of activities that focused on this context, the teachers came to recognize one another as allies and as resources in improving their teaching and their students’ mathematics learning. The view of colleagues as a resource is characteristic of collaborative teacher communities (Little 1993; Sarason 1996). We contend that the development of such views is an important benchmark in the community genesis process and should be proactively supported. Lastly, we illustrated how the documents that the group produced (e.g., covering content is not enough) and additional resources—both those developed within the group (e.g., normative practices of the community) and those that became available to the teachers in their schools (e.g., alternative images of good teaching)—contributed to the collective documentation work of the group during the second video analysis activity. In the process, we found that the learning of a teacher group can be both manageably traced and understood when conceptualized as a process of community documentational genesis. We find this conceptualization particularly helpful because it does not restrict designers’ focus to the envisioned meanings of the designed resources, but brings the resource systems that shape how the meanings might be constructed in a PD group into the picture. In this way, this conceptualization orients us to respect and take account of teachers’ current practices when designing ways to pursue an agenda for their professional learning.


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