Preparing Instructional Leaders to Facilitate Mathematics Professional Development

• In Event: Issues in the Facilitation of Video-Based Professional Development

Abstract

Toward a Scalable Model of Mathematics Professional Development: A Field Study of Preparing Facilitators to Implement the Problem-Solving Cycle is a 5-year program of design and research, aimed at preparing Instructional Leaders (ILs) to implement the Problem Solving Cycle (PSC) and investigating whether they develop the knowledge and skills to successfully facilitate PSC workshops. The PSC is an adaptive, flexible model of mathematics PD that can be shaped to meet the needs of teachers in a particular school site, with the goals of increasing their Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching (MKT) and supporting high leverage instructional practices. It is an iterative, long-term approach to PD; each iteration entails three interconnected workshops based around a rich mathematics problem. During Workshop 1 teachers collaboratively solve the problem and create individual lesson plans to meet the needs of their students. They then teach the problem and are videotaped. Video clips from their “PSC lessons” anchor discussions in Workshops 2 and 3, which focus on student reasoning and high leverage practices for problem-based mathematics teaching.
To prepare ILs, we provided on-going structured guidance as they facilitated multiple iterations of the PSC. Prior to facilitating each PSC workshop, ILs attended an Instructional Support Meeting (ISM) to assist them in planning and conducting all aspects of the workshop, including orchestrating mathematical discussions embedded in the PSC task, selecting appropriate video clips, and leading video-based discussions.
This presentation focuses on the PD ILs provided for teachers in their schools and asks the following questions:
1) To what extent did the PD workshops conducted by the ILs maintain integrity with key features of the Problem-Solving Cycle?
2) Which features of the PSC did the ILs enact particularly well? Which features were more problematic to enact?
Data for this presentation were videotapes of the ILs’ workshops for the first and last PSC cycles they conducted during the project. We rated these workshops using a protocol adapted from the Professional Development Observation Protocol (PDOP; Horizon Research, Inc.) to include indicators for selecting video and guiding video-based discussions.
We discuss patterns in the ILs’ enactment of the PSC in four categories: workshop culture, workshop design and structure, specialized content knowledge, and pedagogical content knowledge. For each category, we highlight specific aspects of the PSC that the ILs took up easily and aspects they found more problematic. For example, the ILs were more successful in engaging teachers in discussions of multiple representations and solution strategies than in discussions of relationships, affordances and constraints of representations and solution strategies. They were also rated more highly for selecting appropriate video clips than facilitating discussions to deeply analyze instructional practices or student thinking.
We compare these patterns to findings in mathematics education literature such as differences in teachers’ ability to engage students in low-press versus high-press exchanges (Kazemi & Stipek, 2001), and the instructional practices entailed in orchestrating discussions that extend students’ mathematical reasoning (Stein et al., 2008). We then consider types of support that might improve ILs’ ability to enact the more difficult PD practices.

Authors

• Hilda Borko, Stanford University

• Karen A. Koellner, Hunter College - CUNY

• Jennifer K. Jacobs, University of Colorado - Boulder