Responsive teacher professional development

If we want teachers to teach in ways that are responsive to their students' ideas, we should be teaching teachers in ways that are responsive to their own ideas. so what does that look like and what is needed?
I want to figure out the literature that I need to read in order to explore this issue.

TPD that is responsive, what does that mean? To some people, it is responsive to the needs of the teacher. So what is the literature for that? Cochran-Smith's stuff about teacher communities comes to mind. So does the Tobin cogenerative dialogues come to mind. In those, the teachers have a say in the agenda and what they want to explore more deeply. Is the development work in the direction that the teacher wants or is it a mix of what the professional developer and the teacher? I am still a bit old school in this and think that as a professional developer, I have things I want my teachers to develop. Things that given the system they are currently in, they might not develop- such as particular ways of valuing the students' ideas in their course work. In any case, I think I need to check those out further and see how they speak to my question.

Okay, next possible body of literature: action research, teacher-teacher collaborative work, etc. There, the teacher definitely has full control over the direction of their own work. That is responsive in a way. How am I thinking of responsive here? Does it mean teacher having control over the agenda? I have a feeling that is not exactly what I mean.

In science learning, I think it is something along the lines of listening to students' ideas, understanding where those ideas are coming from, understanding how students are seeing the world such that those ideas are reasonable ideas, and understanding how to help them refine their ideas. In my eyes, refinement of those ideas necessarily means engagement in the practices of participating in a scientific community. In the students' case, that would mean the practices of the developing scientific community in their own classrooms. So how does this translate into teaching? What maps over and what doesn't? Well, for one thing, the teachers are not in a developing teaching community of their own classroom. They are the community (especially if we are talking about practicing teachers...new teachers may be closer to my idea of the science middle school or high school student). Also, how do we define the practices of the field? I guess the trouble here is that we have so many definitions out there, some theoretical and some already entrenched in the practices of the teachers, I don't know if we know what the practices we should be aiming for are, as a community. As a teacher educator, I have a sense of what I'd like my teachers to aim for. But that might not be what they want to aim for.

hmm...

Okay, back to my "analogy" of the science student. I think in teaching responsively to science students, a very important thing is that teachers need to be able to assess what students are doing. Assess them not in the formal large sense of quizzes, tests, or even exit cards. I mean simply on an everyday, paying attention to what students are telling you/doing right in front of you sort of way. So, how do we think about assessing teachers in teacher professional development and learning? I think that as researchers, we might implicitly do assessment of the interactions along the way- e.g. showing how conversations/activities produced are different along the way. But I think for now, I want to focus just on articles and research that talk about different kinds of measurement tools. Well, many places use pre-post tests/surveys. Some places use portfolios. Some places use a combination. the ones I know that talk about ways to assess the conversation of the TPD meetings are the teacher noticing folks. Anybody else? Is that the kind of assessment that will be most helpful for responsive teacher PD? Does that assess the in-the-moment ideas? I think it depends on what I am trying to assess for. Does this go back to what are the kinds of knowledge and skills we want to help teachers develop? Or should we be thinking about attitudes and blah blah blah. The categories depend on what we think is necessary in teaching and what we thinking teaching should look like. It also depends on how we think about teacher cognition and learning. If we think of teachers as having unified networks of beliefs or if we think of teachers as having resources that they use. And how do adult learners complicate things (adult learners as opposed to student learners).

Does this mean i have to look up literature on adult learning? Eep. But okay, this is good. I am brainstorming and just want to know the possibilities. I might decide not to read everything.

So then we do an assessment of the in-the-moment ideas of the teachers. Our response depends on how we think about what teaching should be. So this might have implications for how we train future teacher educators. ok.

Okay, so I have a start of a plan. This topic is exciting to me because I have been tossing it around in my head for the past few years. I had put it aside but it keeps coming back, so it must be something I'd want to spend some time on. That's exciting to think of my next big research agenda, now that I am coming near the end of my dissertation.