Professional Development

Designed to be integrated with any curriculum, each grade level includes 18-20 one-hour lessons to be conducted throughout the school year. Each LEAP lesson lasts about an hour is designed to fit within a typical daily math instructional period.

LEAP early algebra curriculum for Grades K-5. Grades 3 and 4 currently available, with the remaining books for Grades K-2, 5 in press.

Blanton, M., Gardiner, A., Stephens, A., & Knuth, E. (2020). LEAP: Learning through an early algebra progression. Didax: Rowley, MA.

Instruments designed to measure teachers’ knowledge for teaching mathematics have been widely used to evaluate the impact of professional development and to investigate the role of teachers’ knowledge in teaching and student learning. These instruments assess a mixture of content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge. However, little attention has been given to the content alignment between such instruments and curricular standards, particularly in regard to how content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge items are distributed across mathematical topics.

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.

Background
Elementary educators are increasingly asked to teach engineering design, motivating study of how they learn to teach this discipline. In particular, there is a need to examine how teachers reason about pedagogical situations and dilemmas in engineering—how they draw on their disciplinary understandings, attention to students' thinking, and pedagogical practices to support students' learning.

Numerous studies have reported positive outcomes of noticing interventions on the development of prospective mathematics teachers’ (PMTs) noticing of a range of important aspects of classroom instruction. Less is known, however, about whether noticing skills that are developed during an intervention transfer to support PMTs’ in-the-moment noticing during their own teaching practice.

Online collaborative and content-focused professional development (PD) is becoming an increasingly important setting for supporting mathematics teachers’ professional learning. The purpose of this study was to better understand the process by which a community emerges in such a PD setting by examining how the cohesiveness of 21 mathematics teachers’ social network evolves and associated shifts in the quality of mathematics teachers’ mathematical discourse.

Teachers’ knowledge of proportional reasoning is important, particularly in the middle grades in the USA. This exploratory study investigated 32 teachers’ use of knowledge resources in two mathematically similar tasks (one a paper and pencil task, the other a dynamic task) around proportional reasoning. The two tasks invoked different knowledge resources by the same teachers. Results suggest questions to the field around how we access or invoke teacher knowledge and the need to more purposefully explore the potential benefits of using a dynamic task to invoke knowledge resources.

This research investigates a design and development approach to improving science teachers’ access to effective professional development (PD) in a fully online, asynchronous environment. Working with a small number of teachers, this study explores how a design combining social capital mechanisms with essential teacher learning and PD characteristics supported teachers’ abilities to participate in the online course and collaboratively build knowledge.

This research investigates a design and development approach to improving science teachers’ access to effective professional development (PD) in a fully online, asynchronous environment. Working with a small number of teachers, this study explores how a design combining social capital mechanisms with essential teacher learning and PD characteristics supported teachers’ abilities to participate in the online course and collaboratively build knowledge.