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In the baseline (preproject) teacher questionnaires, most teachers indicated that they were using such standards-based practices as using open-ended questions, requiring students to explain their reasoning, encouraging students to communicate mathematically, encouraging students to explore alternative methods for solutions, and so on. Yet in the baseline observations we essentially saw no evidence of these practices. How do we handle this kind of discrepency when trying to evaluate teacher change over the course of the project?
We don't necessarily believe that the teachers are being dishonest, rather that there is a range of possible interpretations of these "standards-based" practices. In a perfect world, we would do follow-up interviews with selected teachers and ask them to clarify the meaning they ascribe to the practices they claim they are implementing.
It may be more important to understand how teachers make meaning of the practices advocated in standards-based teaching, particularly in how that meaning changes over time as they participate in the project. This may be more valuable than simply asking them if they do or if they don't. But how do we get to this within the framework of the HRI evaluation?
Erick Smith,
1/13/1998
Impact Of LSCs' Progress
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