Tracking Changes in Mathematics Teachers' Instructional Quality in the Learning and Teaching Geometry PD Program

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

Abstract

While many practice-based PD programs have had a positive impact on classroom practice (Sztajin et al., 2017), few studies have been conducted on their longer-term impacts (Copur-Gencturk & Papakonstantinou, 2016). In this presentation, we will document the impact of a practice-based geometry PD program on teachers’ classroom instruction, both immediately after taking part in the program and one year after the program ended. We conclude by connecting our findings related to sustained instructional change to the practice-based and highly specified nature of the PD program.

The Learning and Teaching Geometry (LTG) program is a practice-based mathematics intervention that uses a “video in the middle design” (Seago et al., 2018) in which viewing video clips comes in-between problem solving and pedagogical reflection. The 54-hour PD program focuses on improving teaching and learning of mathematical similarity, following a specified learning trajectory that highlights the visual and dynamic nature of geometric transformations (Seago et al., 2017).

An efficacy study of the LTG PD program utilized a group-randomized experimental design in which the intervention was delivered by a trained facilitator to 103 secondary mathematics teachers. The workshops for treatment teachers (n=49) began in summer 2016 and continued throughout the 2016-17 academic year. Control teachers (n=54) were offered the opportunity to participate in the same workshops during the following school year.

Videotaped math lessons were collected from treatment and control teachers prior to the LTG PD and immediately after the PD. To investigate whether participation had a long-term impact on teachers’ instruction, videotaped lessons were again collected from the treatment teachers one year after the PD concluded (longitudinal treatment sample, n=37). At all time periods, teachers were filmed teaching any mathematical topic and class of their choosing.

The lessons were analyzed for their quality of instruction using the Math in Common observation protocol (Perry et al., 2015) which includes three dimensions: teacher work to support the richness of the mathematics, engaging students in mathematical practices, and actionable mathematics for students. For reasons that remain uncertain, the control teachers started significantly higher on all three dimensions at baseline. However, the treatment teachers made dramatic improvements in their instruction enabling them to catch up to the control teachers after participation in the PD. Furthermore, the post-post lessons from the longitudinal treatment sample showed continued significant improvement, indicating that teachers sustained their implementation of these practices for a year during which they received no further PD as part of this study.

Importantly, the videotaped observations were not limited to content areas covered by the PD; rather, teachers were filmed teaching whatever topic areas they would normally cover. Therefore, the impact on practice appears quite widespread and readily discernable by the observation instrument used in the research study. These findings underscore the potential of well-specified, videocase-based learning experiences to improve critical aspects of instructional practice (Santagata & Bray, 2016) as well as the need for measures that can reliably detect these gains (Boston et al., 2015).

Authors

• Jennifer Jacobs, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Nanette M. Seago, WestEd

• Karen A. Koellner, Arizona State University