Professional Development Materials: Supporting Facilitators at Different Levels

Participants provide feedback on materials from a professional development program developed to help elementary teachers promote mathematics discourse, with attention to the design of facilitation support.

Date/Time
-
Presenters
2014 Session Types
Feedback Session (Work in Development)

The main goal of this session is to share and get feedback on materials from a 40-hour professional development program for elementary mathematics, focusing in particular on the organization of facilitation supports included in these materials. The PD was designed to help teachers promote discourse in elementary mathematics classrooms. In particular, it defines and helps teachers implement “responsive” discourse in the classroom, that is, discourse in which all students are responsible for learning and engaged in probing each other’s mathematical ideas. Because the goal of the PD is to foster responsive discourse in elementary classrooms, it is important that facilitators enact such types of discourse in the PD setting. Thus, a variety of support structures are included in the PD materials to support facilitators’ enactment of the materials in ways that promote the desired type of PD discourse. In this presentation, the presenters analyze various types of support structures included in the materials. The question posed to the group, for feedback, is about the organization of the support structures in ways that provide different facilitators access to what they need without overwhelming them. Other feedback areas include how to allow for layered presentation of the materials and how to include both just-in-case and just-in-time information.