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The adoption of the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics in Michigan (CCSS-M) has been a consequential education policy event. Beyond indicating necessary mathematical content, the CCSS-M include the Standards for Mathematical Practice. These Standards for Mathematical Practice (SMP) establish expectations about how students will carry out mathematical activity in classrooms and beyond, with a focus on sense-making and perseverance in problem solving, abstraction and quantification in reasoning, argumentation, use of mathematical models and tools, attention to precision, use of structure and regularities in reasoning.
While the CCSS-M arguably provide an opportunity to focus efforts to improve schools, they also require teachers to make substantial changes to their instructional practices. To that end, we have developed an online, practice-based professional development program to help teams of teachers adapt their instructional practices to help their students enact the SMP. In this professional development program, we offer eight online, practice-based modules designed to support teams of teachers as they develop the capacity to support students’ enactment of the SMPs.
Each module supports the learning of one of the eight SMPs and consists of 3 parts (of 20-40 min duration each). Built on theories of practice-based professional development, every module includes opportunities to engage with representations of instructional practice, collectively learn to notice critical moves for supporting the SMP within such representations, practice critical moves with their own students in their own classrooms, and ultimately share their practice with peers and facilitators in order to receive feedback for improvement.
Part 1: Studying Scenarios of Practice
Part 2: Decomposing Instructional Practice
Part 3: Sharing Instructional Practice
The first part of each module is built on the notion that practice can be learned from studying scenarios of practice and profits from what we have learned about the importance of teachers learning to notice critical aspects of classroom interactions such as students ideas, teaching practices, and the mathematics at play.
In the first part of each module, participants interact with the target SMP by marking, comparing and reflecting on key moments from a video of a lesson where the SMP could be enacted (e.g., a lesson where the class is working on a problem that might require sensemaking and perseverance).
Between the first and second part of each modules, participants engage with peers and an online facilitator in a forum seeded with comments each participant has made about the lesson.
The second part of each module is built on the notion that instruction can be learned through the process of breakingpractice down into smaller core practices. In other words, by grappling to identify and name moves critical for supporting a particular SMP, teachers learn something essential to enacting the SMP themselves.
In the second part of each module, participants decompose the representation of the target SMP by revisiting the annotations they and others made in the previous experience and creating a storyboard demonstrating how the teacher in the scenario could better students' enactment of the target SMP.
Between the second and third parts of each module, participants are asked to teach and record (field notes, audio, or video) a lesson to share with peers.
The third part of each modules is built on the argument that teachers learn new instructional practices by engaging in approximations of practice. By rehearsing these practices in their classroom, sharing and getting feedback from peers and mentors, teachers deepen their learning from practice.
In the third part of each module, participants share a representation of their own lesson aimed at the target SMP by uploading a recording or creating a storyboard (using a tool embedded in LessonSketch for easily creating classroom representations) into a private forum to receive feedback and ideas for improvement from peers and experts.
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