Professional Development

The NGSA project seeks to better understand how to build and sustain the capacity of elementary science teachers to instruct and formatively assess students in ways that align with the NGSS. We utilize a professional learning model that places instructionally-supportive assessments at the forefront, and centers student discourse on disciplinary knowledge and practices to engage in sensemaking and reasoning. Teacher partners co-develop multi-dimensional assessment tasks and are starting to use them formatively with their students.

The NGSA project seeks to better understand how to build and sustain the capacity of elementary science teachers to instruct and formatively assess students in ways that align with the NGSS. We utilize a professional learning model that places instructionally-supportive assessments at the forefront, and centers student discourse on disciplinary knowledge and practices to engage in sensemaking and reasoning. Teacher partners co-develop multi-dimensional assessment tasks and are starting to use them formatively with their students.

The goal of the Responsive Math Teaching project is to increase the quality of math instruction by developing the knowledge, skills, and competencies of school-based teachers and leaders and fostering a networked community across schools. Five core components guide the work:

STEP UP is mobilizing and supporting physics teachers with resources that disrupt narrow perceptions of physics and promote supportive classroom cultures to facilitate physics identity development, particularly for women. Drawing on counternarratives, the lessons/materials highlight broad physics careers pursued by diverse individuals, explicitly discuss the role of bias, and recognize those who have been invisible. The lessons/materials were found to have a positive effect on the future physics intentions of women and minoritized racial/ethnic groups.

Taking a Deep Dive (TaDD): Investigating PD impact on what teachers take up and use in their classroom, is a 3-year DRK-12 Impact study within the teaching strand. This study will collect qualitative data from four large NSF funded mathematics PD projects to examine teachers' uptake of content, pedagogy and materials in order to understand and unpack what factors are associated with what teachers take up and use two to three years beyond their original PD experience.

InSTEP is developing an online personalized professional learning platform to support teachers' growth in providing students learning opportunities in statistics and data science using key practices and processes with data. We are creating a scalable, accessible, and flexible approach aligned with research-based principles of effective professional learning. We use design principles for online teacher learning, and our materials are based on research on students' and teachers' learning in statistics and data science education.