Providing On-going Support
for STEM Teachers
Joan D. Pasley
Horizon Research, Inc.
Successful K-12 STEM Education: Identifying
Effective Approaches in Science, Technology,
Engineering, and Mathematics
Recommendations for schools and districts:
• Enhance the capacity of K-12 teachers.
• Create school conditions that appear to
support student achievement.
Purpose of this Session
1. What do we know about effective
professional development to enhance
the capacity of K-12 STEM teachers?
2. What “conditions” support effective
STEM teaching and learning?
MSP Knowledge Management
and Dissemination Project
Goal: To synthesize knowledge generated
through the Math and Science Partnerships
and integrate it into the broader knowledge
base for education reform
–
–
–
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Deepening Teacher Content Knowledge
Teachers as Intellectual Leaders
Involvement of STEM faculty
Professional Learning Communities
• What do we know about effective
professional development to enhance
the capacity of K-12 STEM teachers?
• Think about the most effective
professional development you’ve
offered or attended. What were the
factors that made the experience
effective?
• Discuss with others at your table.
How many of you discussed the
following?
• On-going, sustains focus over time
• Content-focused
• Models effective practice, including active
learning experiences
• Provides opportunities for teachers to apply
what they are learning to their own practice
• Engages teachers in communities of learners
What do we know?
• Professional development design and
implementation is complex, with many
decisions to make.
• Decisions are interrelated.
• Our eyes are always bigger than our
stomachs – we always want to do more
in professional development than we
are able to do.
Simplified Logic Model for
Professional Development
Professional
Development
Teacher
Knowledge
and Skills
Teaching
Practice
Student
Outcomes
Teacher content knowledge
matters…
Professional
Development
Teacher
Content
Knowledge
Teaching
Practice
For teaching practice:
•Selecting content to emphasize
•Selecting instructional strategies and sequence
•Selecting assessment tasks
•Implementing curriculum materials
Student
Outcomes
Teacher content knowledge
matters…
Professional
Development
Teacher
Content
Knowledge
Teaching
Practice
Students of teachers with stronger content
knowledge have higher achievement scores than
other students, in particular on measures of
conceptual understanding.
Student
Outcomes
So if TCK matters…
What do we know about
deepening teacher content
knowledge?
Facets of
Teacher Content Knowledge
• Disciplinary content knowledge
• Pedagogical content knowledge
• Ways of knowing content
MSP KMD Review of Research
• Identified more than 1000 “studies” on PD
to deepen teacher content-related
knowledge
MSP KMD Review of Research
• However, approximately 90% of the
studies were screened out because:
– They were advocacy or opinion pieces, not
research, and/or
– They were studies of pre-service teachers only,
and/or
– They did not include a measure (quantitative
or qualitative) of teacher content knowledge.
MSP KMD Review of Research
• Applied standards of evidence to 65
studies of professional development,
those that were not simply opinion or
advocacy pieces and actually measured
teacher content knowledge.
Based on the Evidence:
An Effective PD Program…
• Duration: Multi-year, ongoing, with substantial number of
contact hours
• Collective participation: Involves all teachers within each
school
• Job-embedded with active learning opportunities, with
evaluation/assessment feedback.
• Focus on content, student-learning, and instruction:
– Disciplinary content
– How students learn
– Specific teaching practices
• Research studies typically looked at the
effectiveness of multiple professional
development elements as a set, so we
don’t know how much particular
components of an intervention
contributed to the gains.
An Emerging Consensus
Effective PD:
• Focuses on content knowledge and how
students learn content
• Involves a substantial number of hours
• Sustains focus over time
• Models effective practice, including active
learning experiences
• Engages teachers in communities of learning
• Involves active participation of school leaders
Recent Study
A randomized controlled trial tested
characteristics of PD, including…
• Substantial number of contact hours over a full-year
duration, including summer institutes, academic year
seminars and in-school coaching
• Focus on developing teachers’ mathematics content
and pedagogical content knowledge
• Collective participation of teachers in a school
The study findings indicated no
statistically significant impact on student
achievement after two years.
What research tells us
• Available research points to some
elements of effective PD, but does not
provide sufficient guidance about how to
design and implement PD for particular
purposes in particular kinds of situations.
Filling the gap
• “Sensible propositions” can provide
additional guidance and serve as
hypotheses for research.
• MSP-KMD project developed a
methodology for collecting and vetting
practice-based insights.
Disciplinary Content Knowledge
Research suggests that:
 teachers can deepen their understanding
of disciplinary content by working on
challenging problems at an advanced
level.
Disciplinary Content Knowledge
Expert practitioners caution that:
 Teachers need to see the connection
between how they are encountering
the content at an advanced level, and
how the topic appears in the gradelevel content.
Disciplinary Content Knowledge
Expert practitioners caution that:
• Developing deep conceptual
understanding takes time; teachers need
multiple opportunities to explore new
ideas.
 Research suggests that teachers can
deepen their understanding of
disciplinary content and their
pedagogical content knowledge by
experiencing the student materials as
learners.
Expert practitioners highlight the need to:
• Be careful that the content doesn’t get
lost. Teachers need to learn the content
AND learn how the activities are
intended to help students develop their
understanding.
Expert practitioners highlight the need
to:
• Go beyond modeling effective
pedagogy; professional development
should allow time for facilitators to
explicitly discuss the pedagogy that
was modeled.
Research suggests that:
• teachers be encouraged to implement
student instructional materials as
intended.
Lesson Quality is Associated with
Adherence to District-Designated Materials
Percent of Lessons
Receiving High Ratings
100
80
55
60
46
40
20
11
0
Low
Medium
High
Adherence
39
Pedagogical Content Knowledge
Research suggests that:
 examining student work can help
teachers to understand student
thinking.
Expert practitioners suggest:
• Not any student work will do; student
work samples should be rich enough
to illustrate their thinking and include
the full range of student ideas about
the mathematics.
Expert practitioners highlight the need for:
• Teachers to first analyze a carefully
crafted set of student work before
analyzing their own students' work.
• Analysis of student work to focus on what
students understand, not just what they
do not understand.
• Research suggests the need for schoolbased and/or job-embedded professional
development for STEM teachers.
• Specifically, participation in PLCs has
been linked to increased teacher
confidence and positive changes in
teachers’ instructional practices.
Expert practitioners suggest:
• STEM PLCs should not be expected to
address all of the needs for teachers’
continuing education.
Expert practitioners suggest:
• STEM PLCs may be more amenable to
some professional development purposes
than others.
Expert practitioners suggest:
• Skilled facilitation is important to the
success of STEM PLCs.
Expert practitioners suggest:
• Protocols and tools can increase the
likelihood that a STEM PLC will be
successful.
Expert practitioners suggest:
• High quality PD materials save time and
effort in designing PD, and provide
scaffolding for novice PD providers.
• Expert practitioners (and common
sense) highlight:
– the need to select approaches that fit your
particular context
– the fact that no design will work without
good implementation
Simplified Logic Model for
Professional Development
Policies Aligned
with the Vision
Professional
Development
Teacher
Knowledge
and Skills
Principal
Support
Teaching
Practice
Appropriate
Instructional
Materials
Student
Outcomes
• As individuals, complete the reflection
form considering (1) whether the
system in a designated district reflects
each of the listed attributes and (2)
how easy/difficult the attribute would
be to fix if not in place.
• Discuss at your table
Lessons from the
MSP Case Studies
• Design and implement professional
development that is both feasible and
likely to be effective with the teachers in
the particular context.
Designing Feasible, Effective PD
• Choose interventions that both address perceived needs
explicitly and are likely to contribute to long-term
improvements by focusing on more entrenched issues.
• Recognize the pros and cons when considering
incentives for teacher participation in professional
development.
• Have a plan for addressing varying levels of teacher
knowledge and skills.
• Provide support for application of enhanced teacher
content knowledge to the classroom.
• Consider how to engage a range of
important stakeholders whose support is
important for efforts to deepen teacher
content knowledge.
Engaging Key Stakeholders
• Identify the stakeholders whose understanding
and support will be crucial for the work to be
sustained.
• Involve stakeholders in activities that help
develop a shared vision around deepening
teacher content knowledge.
• Anticipate that changes in stakeholders may
create new opportunities and/or barriers to
sustainability.
• Help ensure that key policies in the
system are aligned with the vision
underlying the reform efforts.
Aligning Key Policies
• Identify the most pertinent and influential
policies and align interventions with those
policies.
• Work to align institutional policies with the
program vision.
• Help teachers deal with unaligned policies.
Data-Driven Decision-making
• Use data to inform decisions about selecting,
implementing, and adapting interventions.
• Use data to ensure an acceptable level of
quality during implementation and scale-up,
and to encourage support for system change.
• Work to develop capacity and
infrastructure to strengthen teachers’
content knowledge and pedagogical
skills.
Developing Capacity and
Infrastructure
• Consider from the get-go how to develop
capacity for long-term sustainability.
• Plan for succession of program leaders.
• Identify and develop the infrastructure needed
for the work to be sustained.