Search for: All records

Classroom-based teacher leaders assume a variety of roles includ- ing being a model of effective instruction and supporting others to improve instruction. However, some teachers may be reluctant to engage in novel pedagogies. In working with 34 experienced tea- chers in their final year of a teacher leadership fellowship, we developed a rehearsal activity toward the co-creation of principles for supporting reticent colleagues. Using thematic content analysis, we analyzed rehearsal scripts and subsequent discussion. We exam- ined what their rehearsals revealed about their perspectives on supporting reticent colleagues and how rehearsals can be used to build knowledge for leadership practice. We found evidence that considering realistic scenarios through scripting and rich discussion was a useful approach for supporting emerging leaders. Teacher leaders drew on their expertise to collectively develop three guid- ing principles for supporting reticent colleagues. We re-envisioned rehearsals to leverage the knowledge of experienced teachers and identified four components of effective rehearsal for building net- worked expertise. 

Much of the research on the development of professional noticing expertise has focused on prospective teachers. We contend that we must investigate practicing teachers as well, and in particular practicing secondary teachers, because they bring with them years of teaching experience and are situated in unique contexts. Hence we studied the longitudinal growth of the professional- noticing expertise of a group of practicing secondary teachers (N=10) as they progressed through a 5-year professional development (PD) about being responsive to students’ mathematical thinking. Results indicated that the first half of the PD supported their interpreting and deciding-how-to- respond skills, and the second half of the PD supported their attending skills, which were already strong even before the PD. We compare these results with the activities that occurred in the PD and discuss implications for future research and PD programs. 

In this article we describe secondary school practising teachers’ professional noticing expertise, which includes (a) attending to the details of students' written or verbal responses, (b) interpreting students' mathematical understandings, and (c) deciding how to respond to students based on their understandings, with a focus on algebraic-pattern generalisation. Quantitative results indicated that the majority of teachers in our study provided evidence that they could attend to the mathematical details of students' thinking. However, the practising secondary school teachers provided less evidence of interpreting students' understandings, and even less of deciding how to respond to students based on those understandings. We present qualitative trends to help mathematics professional developers prepare for the teachers they will support and discuss how these trends might influence work with secondary school practising teachers on noticing student thinking in pattern-generalisation tasks. 

Teachers’ situated knowledge of the class- room and teaching suggests that they can play an important role in promoting and supporting change in teaching practice even if they are not formally designated as leaders. We selected 32 secondary mathematics and science teachers and supported them in enriching their instructional practice and in becoming in structionally-focused teacher leaders. We describe the qualities we sought in teachers who were to become effective teacher leaders, and we share the ways in which we assessed those characteristics. We explain our rationale, instruments, and interview questions used in the selection of the teacher leaders. After four years, our teachers have served and continue to serve in numerous formal and informal leadership roles. We offer three recommendations to administrators for nurturing teacher leaders. 

An important decision that professional development (PD) facilitators must make when preparing for activities with teachers is to select an appropriate tool for the intended learning goals of the PD (Sztajn, Borko, & Smith, 2017). One important and prevalent tool is artifacts of student thinking (e.g. Jacobs & Philipp, 2004). In this paper we add to the literature on artifact selection for professional development by discussing the affordances and constraints of different written artifacts of student thinking. Through a professional noticing assessment, we examine the interpretive frames (Sherin & Russ, 2014) that were invoked by 72 secondary teachers regarding 6 students’ written strategies to proportional reasoning tasks. We characterize different ways teachers might make sense of different artifacts of student thinking, and discuss for what purposes PD facilitators might select particular written solutions.