Professional Development

Historically, inequities in mathematics education have resulted in mathematics classrooms that do not support all students, and particularly students from marginalized backgrounds. Efforts to transform mathematics classrooms to be culturally responsive, sustaining, and justice-oriented have met limited success at scale. It may be that supporting teachers to develop more equitable teaching practices would benefit from a more incremental improvement approach.

Historically, inequities in mathematics education have resulted in mathematics classrooms that do not support all students, and particularly students from marginalized backgrounds. Efforts to transform mathematics classrooms to be culturally responsive, sustaining, and justice-oriented have met limited success at scale. It may be that supporting teachers to develop more equitable teaching practices would benefit from a more incremental improvement approach.

Building on research on teacher noticing, the goal of this study was to understand what and how mathematics teacher educators notice critical events and how they make connections to consider the characteristics of distinguished coach noticing, meaning the noticing we would hope those coaching would attain to support teachers. We interviewed 29 mathematics teacher educators in two different experience groups and asked them to respond to vignettes of coach–teacher interactions.

Building on research on teacher noticing, the goal of this study was to understand what and how mathematics teacher educators notice critical events and how they make connections to consider the characteristics of distinguished coach noticing, meaning the noticing we would hope those coaching would attain to support teachers. We interviewed 29 mathematics teacher educators in two different experience groups and asked them to respond to vignettes of coach–teacher interactions.

Two teachers—whose students were concerned about environmental injustices in their communities and eager to take action—initiated a collaboration to design freely available, customizable curriculum materials and a model professional development workshop. The workshop was designed to foster teacher efficacy in incorporating social justice into science teaching. To cultivate teacher efficacy, the materials were created to respond to middle school science teachers’ concerns about supporting students’ emotions around social justice issues and empowering students to take action.

Two teachers—whose students were concerned about environmental injustices in their communities and eager to take action—initiated a collaboration to design freely available, customizable curriculum materials and a model professional development workshop. The workshop was designed to foster teacher efficacy in incorporating social justice into science teaching. To cultivate teacher efficacy, the materials were created to respond to middle school science teachers’ concerns about supporting students’ emotions around social justice issues and empowering students to take action.

Although there has been increasing attention to the importance of teacher agency in professional development, there has been little attention to what it takes to facilitate collaborative work that both centers teachers’ assets and expertise and leads to productive learning. This paper presents a framework for focused and responsive facilitation of productive discourse around instructional practice in teacher learning communities.

We explored how various contextual resources accumulated over multiple years operated together to facilitate a team of high school teachers' sustained and agentive learning after a 4-year research–practice partnership (RPP) grant concluded. Specifically, we examined constellations of resources that promoted the co-evolution of the teachers' collective inquiry in the professional learning community (PLC) and classroom instruction, focused on supporting students' scientific explanations.

To better understand integrated STEM education, this work explored scores on the STEM Observation Protocol (STEM-OP), a newly developed observation protocol for use in K-12 science and engineering classrooms. The goals of this work were to better understand how integrated STEM might look throughout an integrated STEM unit and identify limitations of the instrument when examining daily scores and full unit implementation scores. The work takes a mixed methods approach to first examine what scores may be typically seen with daily and unit implementations.

To better understand integrated STEM education, this work explored scores on the STEM Observation Protocol (STEM-OP), a newly developed observation protocol for use in K-12 science and engineering classrooms. The goals of this work were to better understand how integrated STEM might look throughout an integrated STEM unit and identify limitations of the instrument when examining daily scores and full unit implementation scores. The work takes a mixed methods approach to first examine what scores may be typically seen with daily and unit implementations.