FACULTY FOCUS
Jim Hiebert
Editor’s Note: In this regular feature, faculty of the School of Education answer questions about some of the recent projects or research they have conducted. Jim Hiebert is the Robert J. Barkley Professor of Education and has been with the University of Delaware since 1982. His research interests include classroom teaching and learning in mathematics, including international comparisons of teaching methods. Along with SOE associate professor Anne Morris, Dr. Hiebert served as a guest editor of the May 2009 issue of The Elementary School Journal, which focused on building a knowledge base for educating mathematics teachers. You may contact Dr. Hiebert at hiebert@udel.edu.

Q: What have you been doing with mathematics education internationally?
A: I directed an international video study of mathematics teaching. That was done in collaboration with researchers from seven different countries from around the world. It generated quite a bit of interest because it included videotape of teachers from the different countries, and when you see inside classrooms and watch eighth-grade teachers from seven different countries teach mathematics, in some ways they are surprisingly the same and in other ways they are dramatically different.
That study produced a series of reports and presentations about the way in which the United States teaches math compared to high-achieving countries — the countries in the sample were selected because they all achieve higher than the U.S. The big punch line coming out of the study, which took five years and $10 million, was that teachers in the United States present many of the same kinds of math problems and cover many of the same content as teachers in other countries, but teachers in the U.S. often step in and do the work for the students instead of letting students do the work.
They present interesting problems to the students that could be really great learning opportunities, but then they are very quick to take over and do the work and have students watch. Of all the things we looked at in that study, and we looked at a lot of different variables, that was the one that seemed to be the most distinguishing difference between the United States and every other country.
Q: What about work you have been involved in more locally?
A: The other piece of work that I have been involved in is part of a National Science Foundation center, the Mid-Atlantic Center for Teaching and Learning Mathematics. That is a consortium of three university sites — Delaware, Penn State and Maryland.
The focus of Delaware has been on improving the mathematics portion of the teacher preparation program that we have for K-8 teachers. In that project, probably the most exciting thing has been the process that we are designing to study and improve teaching — study and improve our own teaching as faculty and doctoral students who are instructors in these courses and helping our undergraduates learn how to study and improve teaching when they become teachers.
So we are working on parallel tracks. One is looking at our own practices in the classroom in these courses that we are teaching for undergraduates and trying to design a curriculum in those courses that, along with teaching math content, helps the students develop skills that they can use to analyze their practice as they begin teaching mathematics. Then they can go through the same sort of cycle of collecting data, analyzing it and improving their practice, and doing it again and again.
It is gradually catching people’s attention, not only here, but in places around the U.S. For example, I am going to Los Angeles to give a talk at UC Irvine on what we are doing here because they are designing a teacher education program there. They have heard about the kind of process that is going on here, and they want to know more about how they might do something similar.
Q: What have you learned about the effectiveness of this approach?
A: The data we have collected on the effectiveness of this process is, as we expected, very gradual with incremental improvements. There are not dramatic, overnight successes that go from students failing the class to 100 percent success, but there are, over time, steady increases in students’ performance in these courses.
We use a number of indicators or measures to track changes in students’ performance, and we end up with two kinds of results. One is following a particular cohort of students over the four years that they are in the teacher education program here and documenting increases in their ability to do these kinds of self-assessments. And the other sort of interesting data strand is to look at changes in how cohorts do in a particular course as we tweak the course and tweak the course and tweak the course.
This year we are collecting data on, I think, the fourth cohort we have tracked. So we can look back and ask, “Well, in the MATH 252 course, how did students do in that course on these items four years ago, and are they doing better on these same items today? Has the course gotten better in helping them understand how to prepare mathematics lessons and how to interpret children’s mathematical performance and understanding?” And, yeah, it seems to be working by very gradual, steady increases.
Q: Has it been difficult to be patient, waiting for the results?
A: One of the things we asked ourselves when we started this project was, “If we want to make sure that 20 years from now these courses are being taught more effectively than they are today, what can we do tomorrow? What would be the first thing we would do if we thought about this as a 20-year project?”
So that is what we did, and we outlined a plan of what kind of process we could use to ensure that when we learn something about how to do a particular lesson better, we can record that and allow the next semester’s instructor to use it, build on it, and maybe even ask a more effective question down the road.
The process ends up being pretty intensive and pretty complicated in terms of all the pieces that have to come together. But the great thing is, at least from my point of view, is that all the faculty that are here in math education — and there are seven of us — and all the doctoral students, of which there are about 10 in any given year, have really gotten interested in working together on this project and participating in different ways and playing different roles. We see it now as kind of a big family project where we are all working together in some way or another to make it work. And that has been fun to be part of that group.
A corny quote sort of captures my vision of what we are doing, because the whole idea is to do something that lasts, that’s not a quick fix that goes away as soon as people lose energy or interest. The quote that I remember periodically is actually from a Quaker theologian by the name of Elton Trueblood, who said at one point that what good citizens do is plant shade trees under which they know they will never sit. And that is the idea of developing a program that just kind of carries on and does not depend on a particular person, but that builds educational improvement into the system and makes it part of the culture. And to me that is the exciting thing about what we are doing. We are seven or eight years into it now and it’s rolling along. And as I said, the idea generally strikes people around the country as promising, so when they hear about it they usually get immediately interested and want to know more about it.
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