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This study captured middle and high school teachers’ perceptions of what they learned from professional development (PD) 3–4 years after participating in one of three National Science Foundation funded year-long PD projects. We surveyed 66 teachers 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 their PD experiences 3–4 years down the road. Most residual learnings from PD also appear to be highly aligned with the goals and intentions of the PD developers and researchers and may be related to the kind of PD design on the adaptive-specified continuum.Inter 

Providing opportunities for students to talk directly with their peers is a critical dimension to facilitating discussions in mathematics and science, including argumentation‐focused discussions in which students construct arguments and critique others' arguments. Research suggests that supporting student‐to‐student talk and facilitating argumentation discussions are complex and challenging practices for preservice teachers (PSTs). Elementary PSTs from two mathematics and two science methods courses practiced facilitating student‐to‐student talk within the context of an argumentation‐focused discussion. This study's main purpose was to explore the prompts that 29 PSTs used to encourage student‐to‐student talk in a simulated classroom. Findings show the PSTs were able to use direct prompts that encourage student‐to‐student talk but were just as likely to use prompts that may discourage students from talking to each other. Most direct prompts PSTs used to encourage student‐to‐student talk were for the purpose of argumentation construction and/or critique. PSTs were more likely to use indirect prompts, much like Talk Moves, that encourage students to consider others' ideas rather than requesting that students talk with each other. These findings have important implications for future research, as well as for teacher educators and professional learning facilitators who support teachers learning to encourage student‐to‐student talk during argumentation‐focused discussions. 

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. 

Abstract This paper examines a professional learning (PL) context to understand what one teacher took up and learned and how this impacted her classroom instruction five years after participating in a specified professional learning (PL) program. Understanding teachers’ perceptions about specific design features of a program that they believe impacted their learning brings an important new voice to PL literature. Findings show that the teacher’s learning of targeted content and pedagogical strategies was consonant with the PL program’s goals and intentions. We highlight five assertions that connect PL design features to teacher learning in four categories - content, pedagogy, resources, and collaboration. Our study provides more granular evidence about the design elements of high-quality PL and contributes new understandings about the connections between PL design features and teacher uptake related to the following: aligned beliefs about teaching and learning, a knowledgeable facilitator, bounded routines, representations, and a community of learners to anchor learning from PL. This study shines light on the necessity of studying teacher learning from PL over time in an intentional and in-depth manner, as it takes time for teachers to incorporate new ideas into their teaching practice and make observable changes. More research is needed to continue the study of how and why PL design elements impact teachers’ experiences for corroboration and extending of assertions and theories about teacher professional learning. 

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. 

This study examined one teacher’s perspectives of effective professional development (PD) four years after attending PD workshops to better understand her uptake and what content, instructional practices, and resources she continues to use, why and how she interprets and implements these practices in her classroom today. We also examined her perspective on the design features of PD that she attributes to her learning. We used a survey and collected video data from the teacher’s classroom, and we also conducted think aloud interviews to better understand her teaching and learning overtime and her perception of her own learning and how it is currently evidenced in her classroom today. Through triangulation of data and analyses, we identified six assertions that capture her perspectives on effective features of PD design as well as providing evidence of her sustained learning four years post PD.