NSF Awards: 1813048
Over the last three years, the Responsive Math Teaching project has been developing and refining a model for the development of mathematics instructional leadership in a network of 14 urban under-resourced elementary schools. The RMT project is built around five core components:
- Developing a shared understanding of high-quality math instruction
- Ongoing professional development
- Support for classroom implementation
- Leadership development for sustainability
- Ongoing research for continual improvement
This is a research practice partnership with the School District of Philadelphia. We are studying the development of math instructional leadership at the school and network level.
Caroline Ebby
Senior Researcher
Welcome, and thank you for watching our video about the Responsive Math Teaching Project, a partnership between the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education and a network of urban public elementary schools.
As we near the end of Year 3 of our 4-year project, we are excited to share the model we have developed and refined for building and sustaining capacity for K-8 math instructional leadership. We’d love to hear your questions or learn about similar work you may be doing in different contexts. We are also happy to share more about what we are learning from our ongoing research on leadership development.
Jennifer Valerio
Annie Wilhelm
Your project is really interesting! I appreciate you sharing the instructional model that has evolved through your joint work! I'm wondering if there are areas of the model (or responsive teaching more generally) that you feel still need more work or detail? I'm also curious about whether there are other tools you've created to support teachers and leaders to take up the instructional model?
Jennifer Valerio
Caroline Ebby
Senior Researcher
Thank you for your interest! We have developed other tools, including what we call our RMT Planning and Coaching Protocol, which breaks down each of the components of our instructional model into much more detail, along with examples. We also have a Lesson Planning tool and a Task Bank. These tools are used extensively in professional development for planning, reflection, decomposition, and rehearsal and we find that they provide a common language and vision to help support classroom implementation. You can find links to these tools on our project website: https://www.gse.upenn.edu/academics/research/re.... and we welcome any feedback. One area we are continually working on improving is the focus on equity (specifically dimensions of identity and power).
Jennifer Valerio
Eric Hamilton
Caroline and team: nice! I want to compliment the clarity and crispness of this video. The music background was perfect, and all that set the stage for sharing with us how you developed a professional and research-based community. Can you identify the one or two things most prominent in professional development that these teachers experienced that was new to them? I know you have many possible responses, but what are the most prominent? Thank you!
Jennifer Valerio
Caroline Ebby
Senior Researcher
Thank you Eric! You are right that it is hard to narrow it down to one or two things, and we are in the midst of analyzing 3 yrs of data, but one thing that stands out is that teachers develop new views of what it means to be a learner and doer of math, and this has a lot of impact on how they think about their own classroom practice (their instructional vision) and how they think about the experiences of their own students and their students identities as math learners. The "experience" professional development has turned out to be a very important foundation, and teachers reference it even two or more years down the road.
Jennifer Valerio
Myriam Steinback
Independent Consultant
What a great project! It is very interesting and encouraging to see that you focus on sense making as students (and teachers) learn and work with math. You mention wanting to improve the focus on equity - can you say more about that? I wonder what are you specifically noticing in students' thinking and reasoning.
Jennifer Valerio
Caroline Ebby
Senior Researcher
Thank you for your comments Myriam. We are trying to make sure we are continually focusing on and making sense of students' experience of math, rather than only focusing on teaching practices. We've built some of that into our tools, and we are also experimenting with having teachers collect short student surveys at the end of a math lesson. The survey asks students to indicate how they felt as a learner during the lesson (confused, frustrated, proud, excited) and to explain why. Teachers look at this data as part of the collaborative reflection on lessons.
Jennifer Valerio
Myriam Steinback
Independent Consultant
Thanks, Caroline. I imagine it's very interesting to read students' explanations for why they feel they way they do. Have you thought of including "what have you learned (today or through this activity)?
Lizzy Pecora
Lizzy Pecora
Research Coordinator
Great minds think alike, Myriam. In an earlier iteration of these surveys, we did have a question revolving around "what did you learn today/over the course of this activity". We ended up not including that question this year - we wanted to keep the surveys as short as possible and really wanted to focus on how kids were feeling after an RMT lesson. But, as Caroline mentioned, we're still experimenting and may find that a question like the one you're suggesting would provide useful feedback for our teachers.
DeLene Hoffner
Lead Teacher
What is your greatest "lessons-learned" through your work?
Jennifer Valerio
Caroline Ebby
Senior Researcher
Again, hard to pin it down to one thing, but I would say we are continually learning the importance of being responsive--to students, to teachers, but most of all to different school contexts. We've had to continually adjust our model for different circumstances, particularly in this last year when we shifted everything to be virtual and shifted our focus to help teachers prepare for virtual instruction. Our schools have different strengths and needs--some have released math lead teachers, and some do not, so we've built a lot of flexibility into our model and created different pathways to math instructional leadership.
Jennifer Valerio
Josie Melton
Post-Doctoral Researcher and Senior Instructor
Thank you for sharing about your project! The video mentioned the importance of building capacity for the work to continue after project funding ends. Can you share more about how the teacher leaders are prepared and supported in their efforts to continue this work?
Jennifer Valerio
Caroline Ebby
Senior Researcher
Thank you for watching and yes, we built sustainability in from the start in the hopes that this initiative will continue after the grant funding ends. In the beginning, our project team facilitated all the professional development. But each year, a group of experienced teacher leaders who have gone through the PD work with our team to learn to lead the PDs and/or collaborative lesson design groups. By the next year they are independently providing the PD at their schools or for the network. So in essence we are gradually replacing our project team with our experienced teacher leaders. We don't just expect them to jump right in and lead though---at first we provide a lot of support in the form of collaborative planning and rehearsals. They also come together after the PDs to watch video clips and reflect on their facilitation. It has really been neat to see them taking on a leadership role for their schools and across the network.
Lizzy Pecora
Jennifer Valerio
Josie Melton
Post-Doctoral Researcher and Senior Instructor
This sounds like a great model to prepare teacher leaders to continue this work after the project ends.
Paola Sztajn
This is interesting. In our project, our PD includes three modes of engagement: experience as learner, see in action, and practice as teacher. These seem to align with some of the activities in the different years of your project. We also created a set of different discourse types for our project, you can see them here. One is called responsive discourse. Our project seem to have a lot in common.
Caroline Ebby
Lizzy Pecora
Lizzy Pecora
Research Coordinator
Toby Baker
As a teacher trainer and co-presenter, the three phase training program is fabulous for future math teachers. I appreciate the self-reflection that teachers must engage since it encourages teachers to have a growth mindset. Often teachers start teacher and remain stagnant in teacher to the state standards or assigned curriculum. I love how you teach them what to do. This will lead to higher quality math teachers in the classroom!
Lizzy Pecora
Lizzy Pecora
Research Coordinator
Thanks for this input, Toby! We agree - self-reflection, ongoing PD, and collaboration are an important part of being an educator. We are honored to be able to offer this space for our partners, but we realize that we will not always be around to provide this support. This is one of the reasons why we are working hard to build instructional math leadership and cohorts in our partnering schools and across the network. We'd love for all teachers to have access to a math leader so that they then have ongoing access to collaboration, reflection, and growth.
DeLene Hoffner
Lead Teacher
Bravo to all for this wonderful discussion! Thank you for viewing and adding your questions and expertise. Please share the STEM Showcase with others so they can participate in the discussion too. Let's get more educators involved in viewing these top projects. Voting and discussion ends on May 18th at 8PM EDT. (but viewing is open anytime) https://stemforall2021.videohall.com/
For presenters, what are your next steps going forward?
Brittany Hess
Research Specialist
Thank you DeLene! In the final year of this project, we will continue to investigate the development of instructional leadership both in classroom teachers and teacher leaders. We are excited to see our current leaders continue to grow and become more independent as well as welcoming a new cohort of leaders who will learn to lead professional development and collaborative lesson planning groups within their schools and across the network. As Caroline mentioned above, we have found responsive teaching to be a way to bring equity into classrooms as it centers students' learning experiences and values different ways of knowing and understanding mathematics. We are looking to study that connection more deeply as we support teachers in creating safe, equitable learning spaces.
Lizzy Pecora
DeLene Hoffner
Lead Teacher
Thank you so much! What a wonderful series of next steps!
Lindsay Goldsmith-Markey
Professional Development Director and Research Assistant
No problem DeLene. We really appreciate your interest in our project!
Riel Bilto
I am excited that I was invited to be part of this program. I noticed that RMT includes teaching strategies that I learned in the Masters of Ed program at Penn. This program has helped me think about how to implement the RMT strategy in the classroom. I am looking forward to being part of the RMT community next year. I want the opportunity to trouble shoot my pedagogy as I continue to implement RMT in the classroom.
Lizzy Pecora
Lizzy Pecora
Research Coordinator
Thanks for sharing your first-hand experiences, Riel! We are so glad to have you and the Hamilton crew in RMT. Now that you're almost done with the first year of PD - solving problems and engaging in RMT as a learner - you can look forward to next year when we will focus more on learning about how to teach responsively. This will involve being a part collaborative lesson planning sessions with folks at your grade level from across the network.
margaret smith
This is an exciting project. When delivering PD, I often struggle with getting teachers to be excited about doing work that students engage in. How do you hold their enthusiasm? How do you help teachers get beyond the need to orchestrate more than explore?
Lizzy Pecora
Lizzy Pecora
Research Coordinator
What a great question, Margaret. We, too, have found that it takes some effort to get teachers to think about exploring as opposed to orchestrating. RMT educators spend their entire first year of PD experiencing responsive facilitation from the learner's perspective. Over the course of the year, we reflect on that facilitation and gradually reveal the RMT instructional model. We constantly remind teachers that RMT is a long-term investment in their practice. We work hard to build trust and create a safe space in these PDs. And we really try to make these math circles fun and educational! Ultimately, we've found that most teachers are willing to take time to be a learner before jumping to what it looks like in practice. Again, this takes time, but in the long run it has lasting effects on teachers' practices and students' experiences.