Partnership Development for Career-Long Teacher Learning in Elementary Mathematics and Science

Providing mathematics and science teachers with professional development to enhance their teaching is a key focus across U.S. schools and districts. However, several factors make it difficult for school districts to meet the growing and varied learning needs of their teachers. These factors include offering only in-person PD at restricted times and limiting teachers’ opportunities to rehearse or practice specific and important teaching skills. Such limitations in teachers’ learning opportunities tend to especially impact elementary teachers who are expected to be teaching experts in multiple subject areas. While more accessible online learning opportunities that reflect everyday teaching challenges are becoming more available, most of these more flexible PD experiences are being offered by colleges and universities to teachers who are not yet in the classroom. This situation provides an opportunity to explore how innovations in teacher professional development can be woven into school districts’ regular professional development work with its teachers. This partnership development project will create a shared vision and plan for making digitally-based teaching tasks available to elementary math and science teachers so they can learn at any time and from anywhere.

This project draws upon the joint expertise of a team of teachers, teacher leaders, and educational researchers to collaboratively reimagine how teacher learning opportunities could be designed to support personalized, on-demand professional development learning for elementary mathematics and science teachers. During this yearlong partnership, the team will collaborate via monthly strategic planning meetings to co-design a shared vision by identifying the key components of a current personalized, online platform and determine how they will work together to support the learning needs of elementary mathematics and science teachers in the diverse partner school districts. Feedback on the plan will be gathered through a focus group with external stakeholder groups and from the project advisory board. The lessons learned from this partnership development project may be valuable to the larger teacher education community given the broad range of backgrounds and experiences in the partnership team, including teachers in states with different student demographics, learning standards, and other district characteristics.