Teacher professional development is essential to efforts to improve our schools. This article maps the terrain of research on this important topic. It first provides an overview of what we have learned as a field, about effective professional development programs and their impact on teacher learning. It then suggests some important directions and strategies for extending our knowledge into new territory of questions not yet explored.

Professional Development and Teacher Learning: Mapping the Terrain

The author suggests that we apply recent research knowledge to improve our conceptualization, measures, and methodology for studying the effects of teachers’ professional development on teachers and students. She makes the case that there is a research consensus to support the use of a set of core features and a common conceptual framework in professional development impact studies. She urges us to move away from automatic biases either for or against observation, interviews, or surveys in such studies. She argues that the use of a common conceptual framework would elevate the quality of professional development studies and subsequently the general understanding of how best to shape and implement teacher learning opportunities for the maximum benefit of both teachers and students.

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Improving Impact Studies of Teachers’ Professional Development: Toward Better Conceptualizations and Measures

No part of this may be reproduced in any form — except for brief quotation (not to exceed 1,000 words) in a review or professional work — without prior written permission from NSDC or the authors. D ecades of standards-based school reform have helped identify what students need to know and be able to do. In the words of former IBM CEO Louis V. Gerstner, Jr., these efforts were meant to " drive standards [and accountability] through the schoolhouse door. " But educators and policymakers are recognizing that it is time for Standards-Based Reform 2.0. We need to place a greater priority on strengthening the capacity of educators and building learning communities to deliver higher standards for every child. Enabling educational systems to achieve on a wide scale the kind of teaching that has a substantial impact on student learning requires much more intensive and effective professional learning than has traditionally been available. If we want all young people to possess the higher-order thinking skills they need to succeed in the 21st century, we need educators who possess higher-order teaching skills and deep content knowledge. There are many ways to improve the quality and performance of the nation's education workforce, and many are being tested. States and districts have restructured the staffs at thousands of failing schools. They are seeking to lure better talent into classrooms by recruiting career changers and liberal-arts graduates with rich content knowledge and a willingness to teach. They are revamping their personnel departments, launching new teacher academies, and working to exert greater control over who will teach and in which schools. But these efforts, essential as they are, influence only a small portion of educators. And no matter what states and districts do to bolster the education workforce, they will need to do more and better with the talent they have. This will require a more effective and systematic approach to supporting, developing, and mobilizing the more than three million educators who will teach in and lead our schools. Other fields, from medicine and management to the military, do a far better job of providing ongoing learning opportunities and support for their professionals. But as this report shows, in education, professional learning in its current state is poorly conceived and deeply flawed. Teachers lack time and opportunities to view each other's classrooms, learn from mentors, and work collaboratively. The support and training they receive is …

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Professional learning in the learning profession: A status report on teacher development in the United States and abroad.

Studies of teachers’ use of mathematics curriculum materials are particularly timely given the current availability of reform-inspired curriculum materials and the increasingly widespread practice of mandating the use of a single curriculum to regulate mathematics teaching. A review of the research on mathematics curriculum use over the last 25 years reveals significant variation in findings and in theoretical foundations. The aim of this review is to examine the ways that central constructs of this body of research—such as curriculum use, teaching, and curriculum materials—are conceptualized and to consider the impact of various conceptualizations on knowledge in the field. Drawing on the literature, the author offers a framework for characterizing and studying teachers’ interactions with curriculum materials.

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Examining Key Concepts in Research on Teachers’ Use of Mathematics Curricula

Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics(SIAM)

Teachers who attempt to use inquiry-based, student-centered instructional tasks face challenges that go beyond identifying well-designed tasks and setting them up appropriately in the classroom. Because solution paths are usually not specified for these kinds of tasks, students tend to approach them in unique and sometimes unanticipated ways. Teachers must not only strive to understand how students are making sense of the task but also begin to align students' disparate ideas and approaches with canonical understandings about the nature of mathematics. Research suggests that this is difficult for most teachers (Ball, 1993, 2001; Leinhardt & Steele, 2005; Schoenfeld, 1998; Sherin, 2002). In this article, we present a pedagogical model that specifies five key practices teachers can learn to use student responses to such tasks more effectively in discussions: anticipating, monitoring, selecting, sequencing, and making connections between student responses. We first define each practice, showing how a typical...

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Orchestrating Productive Mathematical Discussions: Five Practices for Helping Teachers Move Beyond Show and Tell

Teachers and teacher educators interested in synthesizing their current practice with new mathematics standards will welcome this highly useful volume. Presented are cases of mathematics instruction drawn from research of nearly 500 classroom lessons. Readers will gain insight about how to foster a challenging, cognitively rich, and exciting classroom climate that propels students toward a richer understanding of mathematics.

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Implementing Standards-Based Mathematics Instruction: A Casebook for Professional Development

In this article, Mary Kay Stein, Margaret Schwan Smith, and Edward A. Silver identify and describe the challenges that practicing teacher educators and professional developers are likely to encounter as they design and implement new programs to help teachers learn new paradigms of teaching and learning amidst current educational reforms. The authors call attention to the fact that, just as teachers will need to relearn their teaching practice, so will experienced professional developers need to relearn their craft, which traditionally has been defined as providing courses, workshops, and seminars. This article focuses on two professional developers who engaged in long-term efforts to work with teachers in new ways, identifying the tensions that each actually faced. The cases illustrate the challenges that professional developers may encounter in supporting the transformation of teachers, including learning how to work with groups of teachers in school settings, expanding their repertoires beyond workshops...

The Development of Professional Developers: Learning to Assist Teachers in New Settings in New Ways

A to the Professional Standards for Teaching Mathematics (NCTM 1991), a primary factor in teachers’ professional growth is the extent to which they “refl ect on learning and teaching individually and with colleagues” (p. 168). Refl ecting on their classroom experiences is a way to make teachers aware of how they teach (Hart et al. 1992) and how their students are thriving within the learning environment that has been provided. Although all teachers think informally about their classroom experiences, cultivating a habit of systematic and deliberate refl ection may hold the key to improving one’s teaching as well as to sustaining lifelong professional development. One of the most diffi cult aspects of refl ection is fi guring out on what to focus (Hart et al. 1992). In our fi ve years of experience with middle school teachers in the QUASAR Project (see Silver and Stein [1996]), we have seen how focusing on mathematical tasks and their phases of classroom use can assist teachers in the refl ection process. QUASAR (Quantitative Understanding: Amplifying Student Achievement and Reasoning) is a national reform project aimed at fostering and studying the development and implementation of enhanced mathematics instructional programs in six urban middle schools. It is housed at the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh and is directed by Edward A. Silver. In this article, we describe a framework for refl ection based on the mathematical tasks used during classroom instruction and the ways in which it has been used by teachers. In the framework, a task is defi ned as a segment of classroom activity that is devoted to the development of a particular mathematical idea. A task can involve several related problems or extended work, up to an entire class period, on a single complex problem. Defi ned in this way, most tasks are from twenty to thirty minutes long.

https://www.nctm.org/Handlers/AttachmentHandler.ashx?attachmentID=wTjgEy0K1jw%3d

Margaret S. Smith

Papers

Orchestrating Productive Mathematical Discussions: Five Practices for Helping Teachers Move Beyond Show and Tell

Implementing Standards-Based Mathematics Instruction: A Casebook for Professional Development

The Development of Professional Developers: Learning to Assist Teachers in New Settings in New Ways

Mathematical Tasks as a Framework for Reflection: From Research To Practice.

Selecting and Creating Mathematical Tasks: From Research To Practice.