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1. Shifting Pedagogical Beliefs into Action Through Teaching for Mathematical Creativity

   Tang, G.; Savić, M.; El Turkey, H.; Cilli-Turner, E.; Karakok, G.; Regier, P. (January 2020, Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference on Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education)

   null; null; null (Ed.)

   Through participation in a research project on fostering creativity in calculus, two instructors showed shifts in their beliefs on teaching. Participation in the project entailed creating mathematical tasks designed to elicit creative responses from students. Support for task development included participation in weekly online professional development sessions. In this paper, we share one instructor’s shifts in beliefs as well as alignment of her pre-existing beliefs with pedagogical actions. Preliminary analysis of her entrance tickets to the professional development sessions and her exit interview indicates that this instructor a) shifted her previous beliefs about a perceived time pressure and b) manifested her existing beliefs into actions regarding multiple-approach tasks. 

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2. Decentering and interconnecting as professional skills in the preparation of new college mathematics instructors

   Hauk, S.; Speer, N. (January 2023, Proceedings of the Annual Conference on Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education)

   Cook, S.; Katz B.; Moore-Russo D. (Ed.)

   Making progress in justice, equity, and diversity in post-secondary teaching and learning requires systemic change. The development of novice instructor professional knowledge is a critical subsystem of the undergraduate mathematics education system. Novices play key roles in instruction and have the potential to play key roles in change efforts later in their careers. Yet,there is little in the way of theory to support research and development in this area. In other fields, professional development that engages novices in building skill at self-sustaining, generative change as professionals is the ground in which agency for change is seeded and nurtured. We describe two dimensions of professional skills for interacting with ideas and people: decentering and interconnecting. In this report, we explore and illustrate the role of these dimensions in professional development for novice college mathematics instructors. 

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3. User-centered personas for PhysPort

   https://doi.org/10.1119/perc.2019.pr.Madsen  

   Madsen, Adrian M.; McKagan, Sarah B.; Strubbe, Linda E.; Sayre, Eleanor C.; Zohrabi Alaee, Dina; Huynh, Tra (January 2020, Proceedings of the Physics Education Research Conference 2019)

   null (Ed.)

   PhysPort is a professional development website for physics faculty to develop their teaching through research-based resources. As part of PhysPort's ongoing research efforts, we conducted interviews with 23 physics faculty from diverse instructional and institutional contexts in the US. From our interviews, we sought common experiences, motivations, and pain points to develop personas--person-like constructs--of physics faculty in the US. Our research focuses on the perspectives of the key users of our site, and thus we take a user-centered perspective rather than a researcher-centered perspective. We developed personas, which are person-like constructs that are developed based on salient characteristics of actual users, that enable designers to create resources to meet actual user needs without designing for the idiosyncrasies of specific users. We present our set of six personas of physics faculty members: a faculty member who is new to improving his teaching; one who takes up his department's practices; one who wants her teaching to feel good; one who is comfortable in her teaching; one who is continuously improving; and one who solves big problems in her department. These personas of physics faculty making changes to their teaching can be used more broadly to improve the design and development of professional development resources and activities for physics faculty. 

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4. Investigating the linkage between professional development and mathematics instructors’ use of teaching practices using the theory of planned behavior

   https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0267097  

   Archie, Tim; Hayward, Charles N.; Yoshinobu, Stan; Laursen, Sandra L. (April 2022, PLOS ONE)

   Zou, Di (Ed.)

   Professional development has been identified as an effective way to increase college STEM instructors’ use of research-based instructional strategies (RBIS) known to benefit student learning and persistence in STEM. Yet only a few studies relate professional development experiences to later teaching behaviors of higher education instructors. This study of 361 undergraduate mathematics instructors, all of whom participated in multi-day, discipline-based workshops on teaching held in 2010–2019, examined the relationship between such participation and later use of RBIS. We found that instructors’ RBIS attitudes, knowledge, and skills strengthened after participating in professional development, and their self-reported use of RBIS became more frequent in the first year after the workshop. Applying the Theory of Planned Behavior as a conceptual framework, we used a structural equation model to test whether this theory could explain the roles of workshop participation and other personal, professional and contextual factors in fostering RBIS use. Findings indicated that, along with workshop participation, prior RBIS experience, class size, and course coordination affected RBIS use. That is, both targeted professional development and elements of the local context for implementation were important in supporting instructors’ uptake of RBIS—but, remarkably, both immediate and longer-term outcomes of professional development did not depend on other individual or institutional characteristics. In this study, the large sample size, longitudinal measurement approach, and consistency of the form and quality of professional development make it possible to distinguish the importance of multiple possible influences on instructors’ uptake of RBIS. We discuss implications for professional development and for institutional structures that support instructors as they apply what they learned, and we offer suggestions for the use of theory in future research on this topic. 

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5. Constructing Instructors’ Classroom Practices from Students’ Survey Responses

   Adiredja, A P; Kale; B; Jarnutowski, B (August 2025, Proceedings of the 27th Annual Conference on Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education, SIGMAA on RUME.)

   Cook, S; Katz, B P; Melhuish, K (Ed.)

   This preliminary report shares an outcome from a summer professional development (PD) activity with university instructors. Instructors participated in four PD meetings, then immediately taught a five-day summer workshop using inquiry, working primarily with first-generation minoritized students. While instructor participants’ exit interviews of the project identified their experience in the summer PD as pivotal to their development, we know little of how students experienced the instructors’ teaching during the workshop. Our analysis focuses on two items from student post-workshop survey wherein students shared their feedback of their instructor and their experiences more broadly. This analysis allowed us to get a good sense of the instructors’ individual practices and revealed convergence in their practices. Pedagogically, instructors utilized group work and deemphasized direct instructions, while prioritizing students’ engagement in discussions and struggling through conceptual ideas. Relationally, instructors were responsive to students’ mathematical needs and created a respectful, safe, and welcoming classroom environment. 

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