Designing and Implementing Professional Development Summary

Friday, June 30, 2006

Discussion of SRI Big Ideas in Mathematics Framework: What would it take for such a framework to be useful to you? (Charlie Patton, SRI)

Content for professional development
Used as a poster in the classroom
When planning for teacher professional development
Considering how state standards align with big ideas
Curriculum developers as guide in their work

Simplified or structured in a user friendly format; used more than text to represent ideas, smaller chunks

Important for teaching
        Examples for different levels- hypertext, nested

Sharing from participants about things that worked for them in professional development.

  • Participate with teachers in classrooms
  • Strong administrative support, secondary math coordinator support
  • Develop teams of teachers- come to know how to work together and rely on each other
  • Teachers get to know each other; same district but different schools brought together
  • Problems they find they need to work on
  • Working in concentration with teachers- around what they want or need
  • Use of video - video club - look at what students are thinking
  • Teachers do presentations
  • Not to try to do too much
  • Content symposiums - mathematicians and high school teachers work together; mathematicians present math, follow up discussions about teaching
  • Consultant unpack the lesson, models the lesson and the teacher delivers the lesson
  • Do math
  • Using protocols
  • Math inquiry groups meet 6 times a year, discuss what the big math ideas are and talk about the math in the context of their curriculum and what they are doing next in ther classes
  • Require that teachers articulate the math that underlies what they are teaching
  • Structure the discourse so students get into the action
  • Reflection on practice, talk about it right after they have taught, the focus on math stops the complaining
  • Ongoing and not mandatory, good food (chocolate)
  • Support from the university
  • Good lessons that tie into curriculum- modeling them.

Back to Journal Index