The effects of in-service education supported via on-site visits on the pedagogies of elementary mathematics teachers

This study investigates the effect of a professional development program on teachers' pedagogies that was supported with ongoing visits. The main aim of the on-site visits was to create opportunities for the teachers to involve in a learning process and critique their classroom practices via argumentation with the researchers. Seven teachers had participated the study for seven months. The teachers were visited two lessons in each week during the project timeline. These visits were analyzed in two sections: classroom observations and pedagogical discussions. Classroom observations were video and audio recorded and analyzed using Reformed Teacher Observation Protocol (RTOP) for their implementations. Along with the RTOP analyses, observation notes were compared in order to make sense of teacher change across different implementations. Teachers' pedagogical discussions and classroom implementations were calibrated through discourse analysis. According to the results of the study, on-site visits helped the teachers to implement the pedagogical goals they had identified. Moreover, the teachers had the opportunity to evaluate their own pedagogical improvement based on the discussions with the academics within a safe environment. Keywords: In-service education, On-site support, Teacher change