Visual Access to Mathematics: Findings About Professional Development for Teachers of Multilingual Learners

• In Event: The Impact of Professional Development: Then and Now

Abstract

The Visual Access to Mathematics (VAM) project developed and studied teacher professional development that focused on mathematics teaching and learning for students who are multilingual learners (MLs). VAM PD has a heavy emphasis on use of visual representations in mathematics lessons, understanding students’ mathematical thinking, and linguistically-responsive teaching, all to support middle grades mathematics teachers in their work to facilitate MLs’ participation in mathematical problem solving and discourse. It is a 60-hour blended face-to-face and online learning experience that spans several months. A four-day face-to-face summer institute is followed during the academic year with eight online sessions that each include asynchronous activities to be completed over a two-week period, two face-to-face workshops, and four synchronous online meetings. The VAM PD structure, format, and activities were designed to incorporate active, job-embedded, and ongoing professional learning; teacher collaboration; modeling of effective teaching practices; coaching and expert support; opportunities for feedback and reflection; and analysis of student thinking. All of these design features are hallmarks of effective PD in general and specifically for PD focused on mathematics teaching (e.g., Darling-Hammond et al., 2017; Goldsmith & Seago, 2011; Hill & Ball, 2004; Loucks-Horsley et al., 2010; Putnam & Borko, 2000) and were intentionally integrated in a complementary manner (e.g., Silver et al., 2006) to support teacher learning. VAM PD was set in the context of content related to proportional reasoning, ranging from foundational topics such as fraction magnitude and division by fractions to ratios, percent change, linear functions, and slope content. 
A field test of the VAM PD examined impacts on participating middle grades teachers, using a cluster randomized trial with 101 teacher participants from 47 schools. Teachers completed pre/post surveys about their self-efficacy related to teaching MLs in mathematics and related to use of diagrams in instruction, as well as a pre/post classroom video analysis measure. Results showed significant differences, compared to control group teachers, in treatment teachers’ ability to analyze student thinking (effect size of Hedges’ g = 0.41; p<.05) and in their self-efficacy for teaching ELs in mathematics and for using diagrams (Neumayer DePiper et al., 2019; Neumayer DePiper et al., 2021). These results demonstrate that participating middle grades mathematics teachers felt more confident in their practice with ML students and using diagrams in their practice, and that they were more skilled in identifying and interpreting students’ mathematical thinking after their participation. Additional analyses were conducted to expand on these results using qualitative data. Analyses of participants’ written reflections in PD notebooks suggest that supported implementation of language strategies with MLs in teachers’ own mathematics teaching contexts was a key PD component contributing to teacher self-efficacy outcomes (DePiper et al., 2021). In addition, further analyses of teachers’ responses on the classroom video analysis tool, where they identified mathematical thinking evident in video clips from classroom instruction, provided insight into the types of shifts in teachers’ analyses of students’ mathematical thinking that occurred during VAM PD, including more attention to students’ approaches, to students’ strengths, and to students’ specific mathematical ideas.

Author

• Johannah Nikula, Education Development Center, Inc.