Practice-Driven PD

Why Incremental PD is Worth Trying

Part 1: Mathematics Teacher PD: A Paradox and a Contradiction Walk into the Classroom
Part 2: Why Transformational PD Hasn’t Worked at Scale
Podcast Episode Discussing These Ideas

In our view, most PD efforts in mathematics education have been of the transformational variety. We are not the first to notice this trend, nor the first to call for incremental approaches. Goldsmith and colleagues (2014) pointed out that, when research has looked in detail at teachers’ learning from PD, it seems to be incremental:

The studies that offer detailed accounts of teacher learning reveal that it is often incremental, nonlinear, and iterative, proceeding through repeated cycles of inquiry outside the classroom and experimentation inside the classroom (e.g., Clarke and Hollingsworth 2002; Fennema et al. 1996; Jaberg et al. 2002). Changes in teachers’ mathematical knowledge, beliefs, dispositions, and opportunities to learn from colleagues often occur in sequential increments, with small advances in any one of them depending on advances in the others (Clarke and Hollingsworth 2002; Kazemi and Franke 2004). (Goldsmith et al., 2014, p. 20)

Star (2016), though not laying out a PD approach per se, did call for a focus on small changes in instruction, emphasizing the value of a 10% improvement for 90% of teachers rather than a 90% change for 10% of teachers. Litke (2020) has been pursuing some of these ideas about instructional improvement in algebra. More recently, Cortina and colleagues (2023) found greater success in the spread of their PD efforts when they shifted to more incremental principles.

Our own project, Practice-Driven PD for math teachers, is seeking to gather evidence about the mechanisms at play with incremental PD designed around instructional nudges (hypothesized to be high-uptake practices). Here are a few reasons we think this incremental PD is worth pursuing, at least by a substantial subset of the math ed PD community, to complement (not replace) the transformational efforts.¹

Why Transformational PD Hasn’t Worked at Scale

Part 1: Mathematics Teacher PD: A Paradox and a Contradiction Walk into the Classroom
Part 3: Why Incremental PD is Worth Trying
Podcast Episode Discussing These Ideas

We are certainly not alone in grappling with the fact that instructional PD efforts have had difficulty sustaining past a project’s funded period and difficulty spreading widely (e.g., Coburn, 2003; Heck et al., 2019; Koichu et al., 2021; Wilkie, 2019). But it seems to us that scholars have faced this challenge by striving for new insights on how to make transformational PD successful. We, instead, have been trying to diagnose why transformational PD is unsuccessful, which has led us to try a different approach with incremental PD.¹

Here are 4 main reasons we believe transformational PD—that is, PD which centers notions of reform-oriented instruction that are significant departures from the current instruction of the teachers involved in the PD—has not led to widespread change in mathematics instruction. The first reason was already alluded to in our Paradox and Contradiction Post, but it’s worth mentioning again in more detail.

Mathematics Teacher PD: A Paradox and a Contradiction Walk into the Classroom

Having worked in professional development (PD) with math teachers for a collective 40+ years, we’ve detected a possible paradox and a concerning contradiction in our field. The paradox is that there are many excellent PD efforts going on and have been for decades, with many reports of success in the literature, but math instruction itself is largely unchanged (at least in the U.S.). For decades math instruction has remained rooted in procedural-focused, teacher-centered patterns. From a broad view, the many specific PD successes have not accumulated into general success.

The contradiction is that professional developers and teacher educators often emphasize to teachers that it is important to honor and build upon the knowledge and experiences, as well as the community and culture, that students bring with them into their learning. Yet, those same professional developers (including ourselves in the past) tend to center our own goals and visions for what we think instruction should be, and it is often quite distinct from conventional instruction. We put in a lot of effort—building relationships, leveraging resources, showing demonstrations, leading simulations, etc.—all to try to replace aspects of the teacher’s pedagogy (or their entire pedagogical model) with our own. Teachers’ current practice, their school’s traditional curriculum materials, the student and parent expectations, and the assessment regime all tend to be viewed as barriers to overcome.

It’s possible that the contradiction partially explains the paradox. Because we have not built on teachers’ and schools’ current realities, we have been unsuccessful in spurring widespread instructional change. Said another way, if we build on teachers’ visions of instruction rather than our own, and if we aim toward modestly improving each teacher’s instruction rather than promoting a profoundly different form of instruction, then our specific PD successes may be able to sustain with teachers and spread to others.¹

A paradox of many PD successes but no widespread success and a contradiction of expecting teachers to base teaching on students’ current understandings but basing PD on the developers’ goals and desires (generated with ChatGPT 4.0)

Introducing the Practice-Driven PD (PDPD) Study

Dr. Zandra de Araujo (PI), along with co-PIs Dr. Samuel Otten (University of Missouri – Columbia) and Dr. Amber Candela (University of Missouri – St. Louis), is leading a National Science Foundation (NSF) funded project (#2206774) that will provide 2.5 million dollars in funds over the next four years to design and study an innovative form of professional development.

Professional development (PD) is a direct attempt to improve the quality of instruction for teachers already in the classroom. Traditional PD is typically costly in terms of time and money, and efforts tend to be delivered as a one-size-fits-all approach. Furthermore, for teachers who adopt novel techniques such as flipped instruction, there may be few resources to support their efforts. This project seeks to develop a personalized, scalable PD approach that centers on and builds from algebra teachers’ practices and individual strengths. The project will focus its PD efforts on instructional actions that are tailored to teachers’ existing practice, can be readily adopted, and are easily accessible. The project team have termed such instructional actions high-uptake practices. The project will develop and field test PD materials to support algebra teachers at scale via these high-uptake practices.

In addition to developing the PD materials, the project team will research the efficacy of this PD model in terms of student learning outcomes and teacher instructional practices in approximately 60 algebra classrooms. The main data sources will include teacher observation data, teacher interviews and surveys, student pre/posttests, student surveys, and PD analytics. The research will characterize the immediate and longer term impacts of the PD on teachers’ instructional practices; and characterize the impact of teachers’ participation in the PD on students’ learning outcomes and engagement. The research questions include: 1) In what ways does teachers’ participation in the PD impact their instructional practices? 2) Do students of teachers who participate in the PD demonstrate differential growth in learning outcomes? 3) Do students of teachers who participate in the PD have increased rates of homework completion?; and 4) Do students of teachers who participate in the PD have increased engagement during individual work time? In meeting both our PD development and research aims, this project will contribute knowledge about the effectiveness of an incremental, practice-driven approach to PD and instructional change.