Professional Development

By taking a responsive approach to the design and enactment of teacher professional development (PD), PD instruction can be tailored to teachers' needs, interests, and concerns. This is of considerable importance in the high school physics teacher PD space, wherein teacher needs turn out to be particularly complex and diverse due to differences in teacher preparation within the discipline. More generally, understanding the degree to which PD programs are responsive to their teachers' needs can support increased responsiveness. To this end, having a validated survey can assist in measuring the criteria for this responsiveness. This study presents the initial development of a responsive professional development (RPD) survey based on interviews with 13 high school physics teachers.

Although most teachers recognize the importance of taking investigative, open-ended approaches to students’ learning experiences, implementing them in high school classes can be challenging for teachers. In this work, we analyzed data from multiple sources from a teaching Community of Practice (CoP) to investigate (a) barriers to taking an open-ended approach in teaching labs in physics classes, (b) shifts in teachers’ beliefs about taking an open-ended approach during their engagement in a physics teaching CoP in a partnership program, and (c) a case study of one teacher whose shifts in perceptions about taking an open-ended approach in teaching labs led to her successful implementation in her class.

In this paper, we propose a mathematics professional development tool designed to support teachers’ noticing for equity and improve their ability to provide powerful mathematics and an inclusive discourse community for each and every student.

In this paper, we propose a mathematics professional development tool designed to support teachers’ noticing for equity and improve their ability to provide powerful mathematics and an inclusive discourse community for each and every student.

Teacher reflection on the teaching and learning of mathematics is essential for driving instructional change. While teacher noticing is key to reflecting, this skill does not necessarily develop through teaching experience alone. Professional learning (PL) opportunities can play a critical role in supporting teachers’ use of reflection to purposefully cultivate their understanding of ways to attend, interpret and act on significant instructional moments (van Es et al., 2017). This oral communication focuses on the steps used to design, develop and pilot a reflection framework used with coaching support to enhance teachers’ ability to notice key aspects of high-quality mathematics discourse in the classroom.

Teacher reflection on the teaching and learning of mathematics is essential for driving instructional change. While teacher noticing is key to reflecting, this skill does not necessarily develop through teaching experience alone. Professional learning (PL) opportunities can play a critical role in supporting teachers’ use of reflection to purposefully cultivate their understanding of ways to attend, interpret and act on significant instructional moments (van Es et al., 2017). This oral communication focuses on the steps used to design, develop and pilot a reflection framework used with coaching support to enhance teachers’ ability to notice key aspects of high-quality mathematics discourse in the classroom.

Using social network analysis, we sought to characterize the professional collaboration and advice networks among rural science teachers. Furthermore, we explored how the characteristics of individual teachers and distance between teachers affected the likelihood of forming connections.

This paper describes the design of an innovative online platform that has over 50 hours of learning experiences to support educators in further advancing their understandings and pedagogical skills in teaching statistics and data science to learners age 11-18+.

Teachers’ professional learning often includes online components. This study examined how a case of 37 teachers utilized a specific online asynchronous professional learning platform designed to support teachers’ growth in learning to teach statistics and data science in secondary schools in the United States.

While peer-to-peer conversations can be beneficial for children’s linguistic and mathematical development, the specific conditions needed to support optimal conversations remain elusive. As part of a larger project to infuse peer-to-peer interactions into mathematics instruction for multilingual students, 8- to 11-year-old children in the U.S. were videotaped by their teachers interviewing one another about their solution strategies to equal sharing problems.