Structuring Professional Learning Communities for College-Level Instructional Change
By Erin Moss
STEM majors who are placed into college algebra frequently experience the course as an obstacle to success and timely degree completion. Since research has demonstrated that inquiry-oriented instruction leads to increased learning and persistence in STEM degrees, developing faculty who are able to implement that pedagogy in college algebra is a worthy goal. The Supporting College Instructors in Improving College Algebra Teaching and Student Outcomes project engages mathematics instructors at the University of Texas at San Antonio in a three-year Professional Learning Community (PLC) with the hope of facilitating lasting instructional change. Below, Principal Investigator Dr. Priya V. Prasad and co-PI Dr. Jessica Gehrtz describe more about this project.
How many college algebra instructors were involved in the Professional Learning Community (PLC), and what did involvement entail?
At any given time there were either four or six full-time teaching faculty in the PLC, but the instructors rotated in and out of teaching college algebra. By the end of the project, we had had eight unique participants in the project. When they were in the PLC, instructors taught three sections of College Algebra (with a course release relieving them of their fourth required course). We met with instructors either once a week for an hour at a time or once a month for 3-4 hours at a time. During this time, instructors worked through the Continuous Improvement cycle. That is, they (a) identified a course topic and wrote an activity (using Desmos Classrooms) that would help elicit student thinking about that topic; (b) hypothesized student responses; then (c) implemented the activity in class (which was video recorded); (d) watched each other’s classes in a video club; and (e) used their observations and reflections to revise the activity. We would sometimes repeat this cycle again the next semester. We also eventually implemented a week-long summer workshop that merged goals of the project with new instructor induction to teaching the course. Course coordinators from our department were invaluable in running this workshop.
I would like to dig deeper into one particular aspect of the PLC—the observation and discussion of colleagues’ teaching via a video club. How did you facilitate video club meetings in a way that would promote pedagogical shifts?
Before the video club meeting we video recorded each instructor teaching the same lesson. Then we asked them to watch the video recording of one other instructor teaching the lesson and select clips that they wanted to showcase in the PLC. As facilitators, we occasionally asked them to focus on a particular aspect of class (e.g., evidence of student mathematical thinking), but overall left the clip selection up to what the instructors found interesting about the class they were observing. We invited instructors to take a stance of curiosity, to focus on instructional techniques rather than evaluate or critique their colleagues. During the PLC the instructors took turns playing a video clip and describing what they noticed, and then discussing as a group any questions they had for the person teaching or other things that were noticed in the video clips. We facilitated this activity to promote pedagogical shifts throughout the PLC. Anecdotally, instructors highlighted in interviews that they tried new things in their teaching as a result of the video clubs. The video clubs helped instructors to see what was possible.
Beyond the sustained faculty development, there is a research component to your project as well. What questions are you considering, and what data sources do you use for each?
Mostly we were interested in understanding how the structure of the project and especially the use of the Continuous Improvement cycle would encourage instructors to use more active learning in their classes. To investigate this, we recorded all the PLC meetings and relevant classroom facilitations of activities and interviewed participants at different junctures throughout the project. We were interested to see (a) how the participants’ conceptions of active learning (or even their buy-in for attempting it) changed with participation in the PLC; (b) if participants took any of the pedagogical strategies away from the college algebra PLC to other classes as they rotated out of teaching college algebra; and (c) what the student learning outcomes of this project were.
Your project ended in September 2024, but I would imagine your data analysis will continue beyond the official end of funding. What preliminary results can you share with us?
One of our most interesting findings is how powerful the video club was in driving instructional shifts, even with minimal direction. Opening up instructors’ classrooms to each other was a strong motivator for instructors to try out approaches they would see their peers use in class. Also, we have some preliminary data suggesting that student learning outcomes in college algebra improved, despite the project’s tight focus on instruction and instructors.
Author’s Note:
If you would like to know more about this NSF Project, Supporting College Instructors in Improving College Algebra Teaching and Student Outcomes (#2116187), contact Dr. Priya V. Prasad, PI; priya.prasad@utsa.edu
Erin Moss is a Co-Author of DUE Point and a Professor in the Department of Mathematics at Millersville University.