Highlighted Session: What do math teachers need to help their learners succeed? Research and insight on teacher professional development

Group Submission Type: Highlighted Paper Session

Proposal

In early-grade classrooms in many low and middle-income countries, teachers struggle to teach math effectively, relying on techniques such as memorization and lecture to teach foundational skills. Children in these classrooms leave primary school with a shallow understanding of basic math concepts like addition and subtraction and often cannot solve problems beyond simple calculations. Teachers’ limited training, a lack of resources – and often teachers’ own struggles with core math concepts – compound contextual and systemic issues such as overcrowding, insufficient resources, and language complexities, leading to many students who are unable to do math at grade level and widening gaps between children from high versus low-economic backgrounds. In 2017, pre-pandemic, 86% of girls and 80% of boys did not reach minimum proficiency levels in Sub-Saharan Africa and 75% girls and 78% boys did not reach them in south Asia - compared with 9% of girls and 11% of boys in high-income country contexts (UIS, 2017).
While any strategy to address these gaps will need to involve a holistic approach – including provision of supportive materials, effective assessment systems, and systemic support – children and their teachers will need to be at the center of any solution. Given the existing gaps in teacher content and pedagogical content knowledge – for example, - teacher professional development will be the cornerstone for improving math outcomes, and inequities, in Africa and elsewhere. This panel will include four examples of efforts to understand how teachers can be supported to develop a higher level of understanding of the knowledge needed for teaching math – including teachers’ own conceptual understanding and knowledge of how to help children learn math and succeed.
The first two papers will focus on the important issue of language in mathematics teaching and how teachers can be better supported to address this issue. The first paper will provide a broad view of multilingualism and mathematics instruction, pulling from research and experience from across Africa, and exploring how multilingualism can create barriers for students to succeed in math – or, if harnessed positively, could be a benefit. The presentation will discuss how teacher professional development might ensure the latter. The second paper will also focus on the issue of language, within the context of South Africa. It will explore how an intervention in this context is seeking to help teachers navigate the complexities of multilingualism in mathematics teaching and share evidence of the teacher professional development programs’ impact on instruction.
The second set of papers provide a more international lens. The first of these will present findings from the a cross-country study on mathematics education, which examined 6 primary-level mathematics programs that had shown statistically significant impact on learning outcomes at scale. The presentation will explore the findings from this study, focused on the pedagogical strategies that contributed to the programs’ success and the approaches used in teacher professional development that supported teachers to adopt these successful strategies. The final paper will present on an effort being undertaken to develop a set of public goods that will be available to governments and practitioners seeking to provide teacher professional development in Africa and other low-and-middle income contexts. This paper will describe a set of mini-modules that draw on curated resources that have been compiled from numerous interventions and instructional programs, and which (by the time of the conference) will have been tested in 2-3 teacher training interventions in African contexts. Possible uses for these modules, as well as findings from the field tests, will be shared.

Sub Unit

• Global Mathematics Education SIG

Chair

• Yasmin Sitabkhan, RTI International

Individual Presentations

• Teaching for meaning making in mathematics teacher education multilingual contexts: What does it entail? - Anthony Essien, University of The Witwatersrand

• Teacher professional development in the multilingual context - the quest for best practice in numeracy teaching in the early grades - Ingrid Marta Sapire, School of Education, Wits University

• Learning from Successful early-grade math programs: Lessons for teacher professional development - Wendi Ralaingita, RTI International; Yasmin Sitabkhan, RTI International; Rachel G Jordan, RTI International; Jonathan Stern, RTI International

• Opening access to numeracy: Public goods to support mathematics teacher professional development - Annie Savard, McGill University; Brittany Meredith