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1. Down the road: Teacher’s perceptions and uptake of PD after several years

   Koellner, Karen; Seago, Nanette; Placa, Nicora; Riske, Amanda; Carlson, David (July 2022, Proceedings of the 45th Conference of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education)

   Fernández, C; Llinares, S; Gutiérrez, A; Planas, N (Ed.)

   This study captured middle and high school teachers’ perceptions of what they learned from professional development 3-4 years after participating in one of three NSF funded year-long professional development (PD) projects. We surveyed teachers (n=66) from three different PD projects on the types of content, pedagogy, and resources that they remembered learning and continue to use when teaching mathematics. Results indicate that teachers remember and use many aspects from PD experiences 3-4 years down the road especially those they find relevant to their current teaching position. Most residual learnings from PD also appear to be highly aligned with the goals and intentions of the PD developers and researchers and these learnings have evolved through colleague collaboration and other PD opportunities. 

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2. Using Visual Representations: How using visual representations may provide teacher leaders with a tool for supporting sustained teacher learning

   Placa, Nicora; Koellner, Karen; Seago, Nanette (December 2023, NCSM journal of mathematics education leadership)

   This paper highlights two teachers that participated in two different professional development (PD) experiences who sustained new teaching practices and learning five years after participating. Both PD projects focused on visual representations (VRs) and encouraged and modeled ambitious teaching practices. Teachers provided video clips and participated in interviews to illustrate and describe changes that took place in their learning and practice. Our qualitative analysis showed that (1) the teachers’ use of VRs appears to be strongly connected to teachers' own active learning of VRs in PD, (2) VRs appears to be a key factor that supported the teachers’ use of other ambitious teaching practices in their classroom and (3) that the two teachers remembered and continued to use ambitious practices and VRs in their classrooms in ways that not only aligned to the goals and intention of the PD, but also adapted and extended representations to different mathematical domains and settings. Implications for mathematics education leaders suggest that a focus on VRs may be one tool to anchor learning to deepen teachers’ abilities to engage in ambitious teaching practices. 

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3. Wind River Elementary Computer Science Collaborative: Connecting Computer Science and Indigenous Identities and Knowledges on the Wind River Reservation

   https://doi.org/10.26716/jcsi.2023.9.21.42  

   Wilson, Joseph P.; Rich, Kathryn; O'Leary, Jared; Miller, Veronica (September 2023, Journal of Computer Science Integration)

   Three Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone–serving districts formed a researcher–practitioner partnership with the Wyoming Department of Education, the American Institutes for Research®, and BootUp Professional Development to advance the computer science (CS) education of their elementary students in ways that strengthen their Indigenous identities and knowledges. In this paper, we share experiences from 2019 to 2022 with our curriculum development, professional development (PD), and classroom implementation. The researcher–practitioner partnership developed student and teacher materials to support elementary CS lessons aligned to Wyoming’s CS standards and “Indian Education for All” social studies standards. Indigenous community members served as experts to codesign culturally relevant resources. Teachers explored the curriculum resources during three 4-hour virtual and in-person PD sessions. The sessions were designed to position the teachers as designers of CS projects they eventually implemented in their classrooms. Projects completed by students included simulated interviews with Indigenous heroes and animations of students introducing themselves in their Native languages. Teachers described several positive effects of the Scratch lessons on students, including high engagement, increased confidence, and successful application of several CS concepts. The teachers also provided enthusiastic positive reviews of the ways the CS lessons allowed students to explore their Indigenous identities while preparing to productively use technology in their futures. The Wind River Elementary CS Collaborative is one model for how a researcher–practitioner partnership can utilize diverse forms of expertise, ways of knowing, and Indigenous language to engage in curriculum design, PD, and classroom implementation that supports culturally sustaining CS pedagogies in Indigenous communities. 

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4. Understanding how context impacts teacher learning: Three PDs and three sites.

   Koellner, K. (January 2021, Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Psychology of Mathematics Education North America.)

   M. Inprasita, N. Changsri (Ed.)

   The study presented here utilized a cross case comparison of three different professional development programs to examine the contextual factors associated with uptake related to what teachers learned related to content, pedagogy and the resources used in their professional development (PD) workshops. From a theoretical perspective this study draws on a situative perspective to guide our analyses on how uptake across different PD projects located in different geographical contexts impacted teacher learning. Findings indicate that teachers’ perceptions of learning may be associated with explicit goals and intentions of the PD program and the relevance to their everyday work in mathematics classrooms. Differences were found to be related to where they fell on the adaptive-specified continuum. 

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5. Evaluation of Engineering Problem-framing Professional Development for K-12 Science Teachers

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--34604  

   West, Meg E; Hylton, J Blake; Herak, Patrick J; Wellman, Bruce; France, Todd (June 2020, 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference)

   As the importance to integrate engineering into K12 curricula grows so does the need to develop teachers’ engineering teaching capabilities and knowledge. One method that has been used to aid this development is engineering professional development programs. This evaluation paper presents the successes and challenges of an engineering professional development program for teachers focused around the use of engineering problem-framing design activities in high school science classrooms. These activities were designed to incorporate the cross-cutting ideas published in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and draw on best practices for instructional design of problem-framing activities from research on design and model-eliciting activities (MEAs). The professional development (PD) was designed to include the following researched-based effective PD key elements: (1) is content focused, (2) incorporates active learning, (3) supports collaboration, (4) uses models of effective practice, (5) provides coaching and expert support, (6) offers feedback and reflection, and (7) is of sustained duration. The engineering PD, including in-classroom deployment of activities and data collection, was designed as an iterative process to be conducted over a three-year period. This will allow for improvement and refinement of our approach. The first iteration, reported in this paper, consisted of seven high school science teachers who have agreed to participate in the PD, implement the problem-framing activities, and collect student data over a period of one year. The PD itself consisted of the teachers comparing science and engineering, participating in problem-framing training and activities, and developing a design challenge scenario for their own courses. The participating teachers completed a survey at the end of the PD that will be used to inform enhancement of the PD and our efforts to recruit additional participants in the following year. The qualitative survey consisted of open-ended questions asking for the most valuable takeaways from the PD, their reasoning for joining the PD, reasons they would or would not recommend the PD, and, in their opinion, what would inspire their colleagues to attend the PD. The responses to the survey along with observations from the team presenting the PD were analyzed to identify lessons learned and future steps for the following iteration of the PD. From the data, three themes emerged: Development of PD, Teacher Motivation, and Teacher Experience. 

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