Eric.ed.gov – Transformation of Teacher Attitude and Approach to Math Instruction through Collaborative Action Research

As a university professor who has taught at the teacher education, masters, and doctoral levels, the life of teaching has been an enduring interest, particularly teaching that occurs in K-12 settings. From the author’s own work as a K-12 teacher and administrator to her earliest studies of effective teaching and in her own university teaching, she has been interested in the complex practice of teaching and in how to make the practice more effective for student learning and more satisfying and fulfilling for the teacher. Thus, she engaged in a yearlong action research project with a fifth-grade teacher who happened to be her daughter. Her objective was to better understand the action research process; she had not anticipated the multi-faceted results in terms of student benefits and her daughter’s increased sense of self-efficacy and professionalism. This article describes the author’s experience in working with two bilingual fifth grade teachers. The focus of the article is on the transformation of these experienced teachers and on factors in the process that the author believes contributed most strongly to their professional growth. Not only was there development in their mathematics instructional approaches, but even more noteworthy, in their attitudes toward their students, toward math as a content area, and toward themselves as teachers of mathematics.