Professional Development

Disruptions in Ecosystems is a middle school curriculum unit with supporting teacher materials. The unit includes five chapters, each focused on a specific phenomenon related to ecosystem disruption, including questions around the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone and the invasion of zebra mussels in the Great Lakes and Hudson River.

Kastel, D. (2017, August 25). Classroom videos from disruptions in ecosystems unit [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://www.teachingchannel.org/blog/2017/08/25/ngss-from-theory-to-pra…

Much of the literature on science teaching suggests that elementary teachers lack relevant prior experiences with science. This study begins to reframe the deficit approach to research in science teaching by privileging the experiences elementary teachers have had with science – both in and out of schools – throughout their lives. Our work uses identity as a lens to examine the complexities of elementary teachers’ narrative accounts of their experiences with science over the course of their lives.

Science education stakeholders worldwide are engaged in efforts to support teachers' noticing and making sense of students' thinking in science. Here we introduce the design of a science teaching video club and present a study of its implementation. The current design extends prior research on video clubs as a form of professional development for supporting mathematics teachers. Results indicate that the current design supported science teachers in noticing and discussing students' thinking in sustained and meaningful ways.

The study examines geometry teachers' video club discussions in a two-year professional development intervention that combined lesson study, video clubs, and animation discussions to promote teacher noticing of students' prior knowledge. Most discussions pertained to student conceptions (78%), followed by pedagogy (19%). Discussion of students' prior knowledge surfaced only when talking about student conceptions or pedagogy.

Lee, J., Kim, J-H., Kim, S-M., & Lim, W. (2018). How to envision equitable mathematics instruction: Views of U.S. and Korean preservice teachers. Teaching and Teacher Education, 69, 275–288. doi: 10.1016/j.tate.2017.10.010

González, G. (2018). Moving toward approximations of practice in teacher professional development: Learning to summarize a problem-based lesson. In R. Zazkis, & P. Herbst (Eds.), Scripting approaches in mathematics education: Mathematical dialogues in research and practice (pp. 115–146). New York, NY: Springer.

We discuss affordances and liabilities of using a storyboard to depict a written case of a teacher’s dilemma that involves race, opportunity to learn, and student community. We rely on reflections by the teacher educator who authored the written case and later depicted it as a storyboard to use it with his preservice teachers (PSTs).

This chapter focuses on the design of simulation assessments to learn about pre-service teachers’ capabilities with eliciting and interpreting student thinking. We present a simulation assessment and show what a performance on that assessment can reveal about a pre-service teacher’s eliciting and interpreting skills, as well as their mathematical knowledge for teaching. We consider the specific design features that make it possible to appraise pre-service teachers’ capabilities.

In this chapter, we examine what aspects of Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching of Proving (MKT-P) can be observed in written scenarios of classroom interactions, produced by pre-service teachers (PSTs) of mathematics. A group of 27 elementary and middle school PSTs completed an online interactive module, intended to trigger reflection on, and crystallization of their knowledge of the roles of examples in proving.