Teacher Attitudes/Beliefs

This self-reflective case study describes our project team’s efforts to promote equity in science professional learning (PL) by centering the voices of educators in the PL design process and within the course itself. We believe that educators’ experiences, priorities, and expertise are essential to developing professional learning that meets the needs of teachers and their students. We have a particular interest in amplifying the voices of those in historically underrepresented communities.

In this study, 82 middle and high school teachers engaged with the InSTEP online professional
learning platform to develop their expertise in teaching data science and statistics. We
investigated teachers’ engagement within the platform, aspects of the platform that were most
and least effective in building teachers’ expertise, and the extent to which teachers’ self-efficacy
changed. Using mixed methods, we collected, analyzed and integrated multiple data sources.

Providing high-quality professional development for teachers with diverse backgrounds and classroom experience is a challenging task. In this work, we investigate the Illinois Physics and Secondary Schools (IPaSS) partnership program, which provides instructional resources and a network of support for high school physics teachers through a partnership with the University of Illinois. IPaSS aims to address disparities in physics instruction by equipping teachers with university physics curricula and equipment adapted to fit the context of their high school classrooms.

In teacher professional development (PD), grouping teachers with varying levels of experience can be a productive and empowering way to stimulate the exchange and co-generation of content and pedagogical knowledge. However, less experienced teachers can face socio-emotional risks when engaging in collaborative science content reasoning tasks with more experienced colleagues (Finkelstein, Jaber, & Dini, 2018), and these risks may impact the collaborative experience of both parties and the learning environment in teacher PD.

Despite interest in how students’ implicit theories—their growth and fixed mindsets about their own learning—affect students as learners, relatively little research on mindset has looked at teachers as learners. This study explores elementary teachers’ implicit theories about the malleability of mathematics intelligence and teaching ability. It also examines how implicit theories of learning relate to teacher noticing, a construct that has been linked to teachers’ classroom practice and their students’ learning outcomes.

This study investigated novice mathematics teachers participating in an online teacher education course focused on covariational reasoning and understanding the behavior of functions. The analysis centered on documenting the emergence of participants’ sociomathematical norms for engaging in online asynchronous discussions. In this paper, we characterized participants’ initial mathematical discourse and documented two emergent sociomathematical norms, namely explaining why and emergent shape discourse.

This study investigated novice mathematics teachers participating in an online teacher education course focused on covariational reasoning and understanding the behavior of functions. The analysis centered on documenting the emergence of participants’ sociomathematical norms for engaging in online asynchronous discussions. In this paper, we characterized participants’ initial mathematical discourse and documented two emergent sociomathematical norms, namely explaining why and emergent shape discourse.

Osborne, J. & Reigh, E. (2021). Towards improving science discussions: A framework to guide instructional decision making [Stand-alone paper]. National Association for Research in Science Teaching conference, Orlando, FL, United States.

Osborne, J. & Reigh, E. (2021). Towards improving science discussions: A framework to guide instructional decision making [Stand-alone paper]. National Association for Research in Science Teaching conference, Orlando, FL, United States.