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Visit the Mentoring Spotlight for more resources at http://cadrek12.org/spotlight/mentoring.

The goal of the Electronic Teacher Guide project (NSF # 0918702) was to redesign the print teacher guide for the genetics unit of Foundation Science: Biology (NSF #0439443) as an exemplar of a cybertool that would support the implementation of the curriculum and enhance its educative impact. The completion of this goal required collaborative interactions among curriculum developers, technology designers, software developers, researchers and evaluators. The five year collaboration was characterized by major challenges relating to communication, geographical distance, and culture.

This article describes how early childhood teachers engaged in a public preK professional development program. We examine how developing teacher identities mediated engagement with the discourses of developmentally appropriate practice, early mathematics, and funds of knowledge and how they connected present practice to an imagined future. We found that helping them to connect practice experience and new mathematical content knowledge through play allowed them to envision a meaningful place for math with young children.

Munter, C. (2015). Envisioning the Role of the Mathematics Teacher. NCSM Journal of Mathematics Education Leadership, 16(1), 29-40.

The SAGE Encyclopedia of Educational Technology examines information on leveraging the power of technology to support teaching and learning. While using innovative technology to educate individuals is certainly not a new topic, how it is approached, adapted, and used toward the services of achieving real gains in student performance is extremely pertinent. This two-volume encyclopedia explores such issues, focusing on core topics and issues that will retain relevance in the face of perpetually evolving devices, services, and specific techniques.

González, G., DeJarnette, A. F., & Deal, J. T. (2014). Assessing and Using Students’ Prior Knowledge in Problem-Based Instruction. New England Mathematics Journal, XLVI, 38-49.

This article introduces an interview-based instrument that was created for the purposes of characterizing the visions of high-quality mathematics instruction of teachers, principals, mathematics coaches, and district leaders and tracking changes in those visions over time. The instrument models trajectories of perceptions of high-quality instruction along what have been identified in the literature as critical dimensions of mathematics classroom practice.

A key aspect of supporting teachers’ learning on a large scale concerns mathematics leaders’ practices in designing for and leading high-quality professional development. We report on a retrospective analysis of an initial design experiment aimed at supporting the learning of three math leaders who were charged with supporting the learning of middle-grades mathematics teachers across a large US school district.

The scarcity of efficient and user-friendly authoring tools has long been acknowledged as a limiting factor in the widespread development and deployment of intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs). Creating an effective authoring tool for domain experts poses two significant challenges: it must facilitate the creation of curricular content by domain experts who are typically neither ITS experts nor software engineers, and it must support the creation or modification of ITS-specific pedagogical strategies without exposing the complexity of the ITS itself to the domain expert.

Real-time formative assessment of student learning has become the subject of increasing attention. Students’ textual responses to short answer questions offer a rich source of data for formative assessment. However, automatically analyzing textual constructed responses poses significant computational challenges, and the difficulty of generating accurate assessments is exacerbated by the disfluencies that occur prominently in elementary students’ writing. With robust text analytics, there is the potential to accurately analyze students’ text responses and predict students’ future success.