Developing and Supporting Mathematics Teacher Educators Through Virtual Collaborations

Introduction

Continued development for understanding teaching and learning is a long established norm in the field of education, “essential for everyone who affects student learning” (National Staff Development Council, 2001, pg. 2). Identifying and providing differentiation based upon the varying needs of all students is the reason that education must continue to evolve. By affording, the best possible education to every student today allows educators to ensure the future needs of our society are met. With this goal in mind, education utilizes what it has learned, and continues to learn, in order to help propel the field of education, and thus the development of all students, forward into our collective future.

Learning how to improve teaching is important for all teacher educators, not just those who do the research studies and write books, but also those working in the classrooms of all levels. Educators in K-12 settings are provided multiple opportunities to receive professional development from their districts on and off campus with funds provided by their districts. School leaders even set aside large amounts of time ranging from a day to weeks at varying points in the school year for the purpose of on-going teacher professional development. The focus of these professional development are sometimes geared toward a common purpose, a district or campus initiative, and enables teachers to move as a collective whole with the purpose of student achievement in mind. Varying levels of support may be instituted to assist teachers in implementation of the professional development goals, which can include additional professional development opportunities at other times for reinforcement of the original training goals.

In higher education, this type of professional development initiative is much less common. This is likely due to a wide variety of interests, needs, and availability to opportunities across a wider university setting. Despite being rare, the need for collaboration and professional development is still of great issue for those in higher education. Yoshida (2012) stresses the need to overcome isolation if improvement in teaching and learning processes are to occur. Continued study is much more personal professional “development” than that of the model for K12. This means that faculty must seek out professional development on their own, which is often relegated to, and reliant upon, acceptance of presentations at conferences and the availability of university travel funds. Issues with this type of professional development can arise, thereby limiting the type of professional development offered to higher education faculty. One such issue includes the options for professional development being limited to only what is being offered at the conference of attendance. While most conferences have a wide-variety of topics covered, some topics, such as lesson study, may not be as prevalent, due to its specialized focus. Another issue is that any professional development is usually delivered in one sitting, requiring the faculty member to continue to study in the area on their own or to gather their own resources and collaboration to explore the ideas further, which takes time on the part of the faculty member. Finally, the presentations may only be set up to give out broad information, thus requiring the faculty member to do more extensive research to get a more narrowed and focused understanding for its application in their own setting. While presenters are often faculty themselves, support for implementation of ideas may or may not be an option after leaving the conference setting, due to time, interests by the presenter to engage, and distance constraints. This is compounded with the fact that oftentimes, especially in smaller institutions, the faculty member is the sole faculty member in the method or the content area, and distance can make collaboration difficult with colleagues at other institutions. Soto et al. (2019) supports the difficulty that collaboration of faculty with common interests causes when they are not always located at the same physical location. Finding means and methods of collaboration become important to extend learning and support growth beyond one location or university. Soto et al. specifically recommends the use of technology in overcoming geographical barriers, for these very reasons.