Confronting mathematical pseudo-community: A domain-specific analysis of a middle school mathematics department

Abstract

Teacher professional community refers to the extent to which teachers collaborate to further their own and their students' learning. Peck (1995) drew distinctions between pseudo-community and professional community, where pseudo-communities rely on suppression of conflict and the tacit understandings that it is "against the rules" to challenge others' beliefs and ideas. The teacher education literature is predominantly composed of domain-general characterizations of teacher community. This study investigates the pseudo-communities of five middle school mathematics teachers' through a domain-specific characterization of criteria of professional community. These characterizations are made using teacher responses to surveys and interaction analysis during a meeting between middle school mathematics teachers and researchers. These analyses allow for the investigation of why domain-general characterizations of pseudo-community may be limited.