Mathematics Teacher Educator Podcast

Episode 53: Building Mathematics Professional Development With an Explicit Attention to Concepts and Student Opportunities to Struggle Framework

August 31st, 2023  |  Season 13  |  35 mins 38 secs

teacher professional development; instructional practice; productive struggle; conceptual understanding

Two broad categories of instructional practices, (a) explicitly attending to concepts and (b) fostering students’ opportunities to struggle, have been consistently linked to improving students’ mathematical learning and achievement. In this article, we describe an effort to build these practices into a framework that is useful for a diverse set of professional development (PD) offerings. We describe three examples of how the framework is used to support teacher learning and classroom instructional practice: a state-mandated course, lesson studies, and a large-scale teacher–researcher alliance. Initial findings suggest that consistently emphasizing this framework provides both content and structural guidance during PD development and gives coherence and focus to teachers’ PD experiences.