Experiments in Teacher Professional Learning: Testing Design Features that Accelerate Instructional Improvement in Mathematics

Teacher professional learning is a critical part of the mathematics education landscape. For decades, professional learning has been the primary strategy for developing the skills of the teaching workforce and changing how teachers interact with students in classrooms around academic content. Professional learning also can be expensive for districts, both financially and in terms of teacher time. Given these investments, most school leaders wish to spend their professional development dollars efficiently, making decisions about professional learning design that maximize teacher and student learning. However, despite more than two decades of rigorous research on professional learning programs, practitioners have little causal evidence on which professional learning design features work to accelerate teacher learning. This project seeks to identify features of teacher professional learning experiences that lead to better mathematics outcomes for both teachers and students.

The project explores this central question through a series of randomized experiments in a range of districts across the country. The project leverages a research-practice partnership known as the Research Partnership for Professional Learning (RPPL) that brings together large-scale providers of math curriculum-focused professional development with researchers at Brown and Harvard Universities. Together, researchers and RPPL collaborators will conduct experimental A/B tests of professional learning features indicated as promising by both theory and, where available, prior evidence. Because these experiments will be housed within RPPL providers’ regularly-provided services to districts, experiments can be conducted efficiently and generate knowledge quickly. The project seeks to explore three critical topics and whether they make a difference in the efficacy of the teacher professional learning: whether to emphasize conceptual or concrete approaches to teacher change; ways to enhance teacher agency in professional learning settings; and ways to increase the persistence—or “stickiness”—of teacher learning. The project will model changes using data sources that include measures of teacher instructional practice, student learning, and artifacts from the professional learning enactments.