Professional Development

Incorporating video case study of mathematics teaching into professional development (PD) can provide opportunities for teachers to develop new ways of seeing teaching and learning and inform efforts to enact new instructional practices. However, more research is needed to understand how such PD can foster sustained teacher learning about high-quality instruction and materials. In this paper, we share the evolution of our analytic method that aims to reveal how secondary mathematics teachers learn while collectively analyzing video of mathematics teaching.

This study explored how two professional development approaches to reforming math instruction with different mechanisms for fostering change might have valuable synergies when used in tandem to support take-up, i.e., teachers’ acceptance, adoption, and incorporation of ideas into practice. This investigation of Practice-Based Professional Development and Collaborative Lesson Design found that take-up was a recursive process that occurred across both PD types as teachers iteratively moved between building and deploying knowledge.

Cohen, J., Wong, V., Krishnamachari, A., & Jones, N. (2021). Simulations as a platform for understanding and improving teachers' classroom skills. AAAS Arise Blog.

Cohen, J., Wong, V., Krishnamachari, A., & Jones, N. (2021). Simulations as a platform for understanding and improving teachers' classroom skills. AAAS Arise Blog.

This study explored an innovative coaching model termed video-based online video coaching. The innovation builds from affordances of robot-enabled videorecording of lessons, accompanied by built-in uploading and annotation features. While in-person coaching has proven effective for providing sustained support for teachers to take up challenging instructional practices, there are constraints. Both logistical and human capacity constraints make in-person coaching difficult to implement, particularly in rural contexts.

This study examined how mathematics coaches leverage written annotations to support professional discourse with teachers about important classroom events during synchronous debriefing conversations. Coaches and teachers created the annotations while asynchronously watching video of an implemented lesson as part of online video-assisted coaching cycles. More specifically, this project examined the extent to which a coach and teacher discussed the annotations during a debrief conversation in a coaching cycle.

In this project, we have designed, implemented, and started to research an innovative fully online video-based professional development model for mathematics coaches in rural contexts. Coaches in rural areas often lack access to professional development available in more populated areas, fueling the need for an online model that bridges geographic barriers (Howley & Howley, 2005; Maher & Prescott, 2017). The intent of the poster will be to share the professional development model and describe the research processes that are currently in progress.

In this chapter, we describe a three-part fully online model for the professional development of middle school mathematics teachers. While the model could be applied to any context, we created it for rural mathematics teachers to provide them access to high-quality professional development and to demonstrate that we could move face-to-face experiences to an online context without losing interactional qualities or intellectual rigor. We describe the model and how we researched it.

In this chapter, we describe a three-part fully online model for the professional development of middle school mathematics teachers. While the model could be applied to any context, we created it for rural mathematics teachers to provide them access to high-quality professional development and to demonstrate that we could move face-to-face experiences to an online context without losing interactional qualities or intellectual rigor. We describe the model and how we researched it.

The rapid expansion of K-12 CS education has made it critical to support CS teachers, many of whom are new to teaching CS, with the necessary resources and training to strengthen their understanding of CS concepts and how to effectively teach CS. CS teachers are often tasked with teaching different curricula using different programming languages in different grades or during different school years, and tend to receive different professional development (PD) for each curriculum they are required to teach.