Susan Million’s research while affiliated with Stanford University and other places

This paper describes a partnership between a university and an urban school district, formed with a goal of preparing mathematics teacher leaders to conduct professional development (PD) at their schools. The university and district partners worked together to achieve the district’s mission of providing every student with high-quality instruction and equitable learning opportunities in mathematics by building the district’s capacity to conduct school-based PD for mathematics teachers. Given the power of school-based subject-specific PD for improving instructional quality, we worked with Teacher Leaders from participating schools to prepare and support them to lead PD workshops at their schools. In this paper, we examine how Teacher Leaders learn and adapt key elements of a PD model over three school years through the lenses of Prediger et al.’s Three-Tetrahedron-Model (2019) and the university’s Learning to Lead model. Over 3 years, we see that Teacher Leaders use the key structures of the PD model; make adaptations in response to school goals, interests, and priorities; and gain confidence in their work with colleagues. By viewing the adaptations through the lens of pedagogies of practice as well as the relationships illustrated by the 3-T model, this work offers insights into the complexities of teacher leadership development.

Background This paper describes the Problem-Solving Cycle model of professional development and the Mathematics Leadership Preparation model of PD leader preparation. These models form the backbone of our current research-practice partnership project in which we are working with a large urban district to adapt these models to develop district capacity to support the implementation of a middle school mathematics curriculum aligned with Common Core State Standards (CCSS). We highlight the central role of video in the Problem-Solving Cycle and our approach to preparing teacher leaders to use video-based discussions to understand student thinking and instructional practices. Results The first phase of the research was designed to identify how the models were adapted to support the district goals for implementing their new CCSS mathematics curriculum and to understand the reasons for the adaptations. The analysis of multiple data sources revealed two overarching categories of adaptations that we made to refine the models to better support the district goals: addressing district priorities and addressing teacher leaders’ limited experience. We made adaptations such as incorporating the district curriculum, addressing the needs of English learners, integrating the teacher leaders’ learning of the Problem-Solving Cycle model into the leadership preparation session, increasing the emphasis on what it means to be an instructional leader, strengthening the role of modeling and debriefing activities to support leadership development, scaffolding the selection of video clips, and incorporating the use of rehearsals and debriefing activities to support leadership development. Conclusion The implications of this work illustrate the need for researchers to be responsive to the context of their school partners if they expect their work to be meaningful. Using the frame of design-based implementation research proved to be an effective strategy for working with the district STEM leadership team and teacher leaders to adapt the Problem-Solving Cycle and Mathematics Leadership Preparation models to support district implementation of a new curriculum that necessitates shifts in teacher practices and for determining how to make video-based discussions more productive activities in the models.

Considerable evidence suggests that dialogical interaction in the classroom promotes students’ scientific knowledge building and reasoning. Hence, scientific argumentation is recognized as a central component of the Next Generation Science Standards. A focus on argumentation, however, requires teachers to adopt instructional practices that facilitate this type of discourse. Therefore, the study reported here examined the impact of a practice-based professional development (PD) program on the scientific discourse practices of teachers and their students. Two cohorts of elementary school teachers attended different versions of the PD: 1 cohort attended the full program (institute, practicum, and follow-up sessions), whereas the other took part in the institute and follow-up days but did not take part in the practicum. We found that all teachers and their students, regardless of the cohort, made statistically significant improvements in their science discourse practices after attending the PD. An unexpected finding was that teachers who attended the full PD (with practicum) did not outperform the teachers who did not attend the practicum. However, students of teachers who did attend the practicum made improvements that approached statistical significance compared to students of teachers who did not attend the practicum. Thus, we report research that provides evidence of an effective model of practice-based PD that helps teachers to address the goals of the Next Generation Science Standards and equips them with instructional practices that promote student learning in science.

This study examines an innovative professional development program that provides teachers with an opportunity to practice pedagogical strategies in a low stakes classroom context. Elementary teachers participated in a one-week summer Institute and two-week Practicum focused on learning strategies for facilitating scientific discourse and argumentation in their classrooms. During the Practicum, teachers taught lessons in a summer program for elementary school students and engaged in daily video-based discussions to reflect on their instruction. This study identified the instructional practices that were most emphasized during the Institute and examined the extent to which teachers took up those practices during the subsequent practicum experience. A classroom vignette illustrates how one teacher engaged her students in the discourse practices, and a coaching vignette portrays her video reflection group's discussion of the episode. Findings suggest that the focal instructional practices were taken up to different degrees during the Practicum, and that opportunities for practice and reflection are potentially valuable features of professional development programs. The project illustrates the value of video as a tool for both professional development and research.