Video Case Materials and the Development of Collective Professional Knowledge

The dynamic nature of teaching means that teachers are making in-the-moment decisions on a daily basis. Video case study professional development can be used as a way to provide teachers an opportunity to analyze real teaching scenarios to prepare to make these decisions in practice. While work has been done to reveal the effectiveness of using case studies as a teaching tool, there has not been research conducted to determine if video case studies can be used to foster the development of collective professional knowledge. This study utilizes a particular professional development model using video case studies grounded in the Teaching for Robust Understanding framework (Schoenfeld, 2016) to determine how teachers in a community of practice can use these tools to develop collective professional knowledge. The study also attempts to understand the nature of the conversations teachers engage in during various parts of the professional development model. Data was collected during teacher engagement in the professional development sessions and during personal reflections after the sessions. During the professional development sessions, the teachers investigated the mathematical tasks of a formative assessment lesson, determined the mathematical ideas behind the lesson, watched a video of the lesson enacted in the real classroom, and analyzed the video for student understanding and teaching moves. The results of the study indicated that the community of practice had used the professional development model to approach the development of collective professional knowledge. However, they were not able to meet all of the characteristics to claim that they were able to completely develop collective professional knowledge. In addition, the professional development model lent itself to different framings of problems given the activity teachers were engaged in throughout the model