12 - Using Clickers in Professional DevelopmentWorkshops

Summary

Introduction

Much of the existing literature on the use of an electronic personal response system is in the context of increasing participation in a lecture setting. In this paper, we give several examples of using an electronic response system, or clickers, during a workshop for the professional development of in-service teachers. Clickers were used in three distinct settings during the workshop: a) to analyze existing mathematical content knowledge, b) to promote awareness of national mathematics testing data, and c) to conclude a mathematical experiment. In each case, the principal goal of the use of this technology was the promotion of productivemathematical discourse. Participant comments and selfevaluation of clicker use indicate that benefits similar to those found in the lecture setting were also realized in this workshop setting.

Background

District teams of teachers in grades 3 to 9 including special education teachers participated in an eight-day summer workshop to enhance their mathematical content knowledge. With the disparate mathematical backgrounds of the 48 teachers, ranging from teachers with one undergraduatemathematics course to those with an undergraduatemathematics degree, it was anticipated that strategies would be needed to promote productive discourse between the workshop leaders and the teachers and among the teachers themselves. For this reason, the use of clickers in the workshop was anonymous, that is, teacher identity was not associated with a clicker identification number. Springer and Dick [78] describe a discourse move in a mathematics classroom as “a deliberate action taken by a teacher to encourage, facilitate, participate in, or influence the discourse.”