SMU faculty’s research accepted for presentation

Dr. Roger Peckover, Suzanne Peterson, Pat Christiansen, and Brenda Fischer, members of the Development Team of the Master in Teaching and Learning Program (M.Ed.), have had their research accepted for presentation at the 2009 Annual Meeting of the America Research Association in San Diego.

The paper titled, “Building Teacher Capacity for ‘Disciplined’ Self Study,” reports results of an ongoing programmatic case study of developing teachers’ capacity for using principles of social constructivist learning and discipline based structures of knowledge to build transformative communities of inquiry. The goal of this particular professional development program is to nurture, across two years, teacher capacity to become collaborative inquirers integrating structures of content knowledge into their self-study practices in their teaching.

The program supports teacher development by giving them apprentice experiences in a community of fellow teacher inquirers characterized by a safe cohort in which to engage in classroom inquiry grounded in use of discipline-based structures of knowledge, collaborative problem solving, and mutual care. Results of ongoing programmatic study into how the design of such experiences impact teachers across two years reveal challenges in teacher understanding of discipline-based structures of knowledge and their integration into the process of classroom inquiry into student understanding of content knowledge. Ongoing longitudinal case study examination of teacher thinking and action is yielding insights into the challenges of teachers’ understanding of the structural nature of knowledge in their inquiry into how students learn in their classrooms. Implications for helping teachers understand the structures of knowledge in disciplines and their implications for classroom inquiry are discussed.