1. Contexts and Methods
Placing Teachers’ Career Development in Context: Revisioning STEM Professional Development
Darnella Davis, Ed.D.
AEA Annual Conference
Orlando, FL
November 14, 2009

2. Updating STEM Teachers’ Skills
The Role of Summer Institutes
Improving STEM content knowledge
Integrating new STEM knowledge
Enabling career development among STEM teachers
Talking Points:
As part of the National Science Foundation’s Math and Science Partnership Program Evaluation (MSP-PE), COSMOS Corporation has led a number of substudies examining the program’s many efforts to draw on K-12 and IHE partnerships to improve science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education.
A key feature of that effort is improving professional development.
This study considered the role of summer institutes in updating teachers’ skills.

3. Professional Development Trends
Elements of reform:
Professionalism
Empowerment
Collaboration
Job-Embedded Learning
Distributed Leadership
In the mid-1950s NSF launched a program designed to update teacher knowledge through intensive summer institutes.
Since then, professional training programs have grappled with a number of reform elements summarized here:
Today’s STEM teachers are being held to a higher standard of professionalism, are expected to show greater authority or mastery of content as well as pedagogy, and to work effectively within a network of colleagues.
These trends have led to an occupation with on-the-job training and learning and with distributing leadership among all members of each education system.

4. An Ambitious Objective
“ Institute Partnerships are designed to meet national needs for teachers who have deep knowledge of disciplinary content and are school-based intellectual leaders in mathematics and science.”
These trends are echoed in NSF”s objectives for its Teacher Institute’s for the 21st Century (Institute Partnerships).
The National Science Foundation (NSF )

5. The Evaluation Context
Policy Issue: Strong institutes must keep teachers updated on new knowledge and relevant pedagogy, and support leadership development and deployment.
Evaluation Questions: Do institutes enable teachers to teach rich STEM content and shape curriculum within learning communities? How do STEM faculty contribute?
Data Sources: Field notes, MSPs’ reports, MSP-MIS data, and other extant documents.
Evaluation Approach: Assessing MSP institutes within a historical trajectory.
To examine the unique contributions of the Institute Partnerships meant considering the policy issues in terms of building teacher capacity, with help from STEM faculty.
The evaluation team had access to a variety of data sources for conducting a mixed method assessment of Institute Partnerships, which, based on a review of relevant literature, could be placed in a historical trajectory.

6. Characteristics of the Institute Awards
Content Focus: 6 math, 1 science, 1 math and science
Grade Level: 5 secondary, 1 K-5, 1 K-8, 1 5-8
Range of Configurations for Institutes’ Professional Development:
Concentrated on small number of districts and aligned with their curricula, standards, and assessments to geographically-distant, covering disparate and dissimilar districts (e.g., testing a professional PD concept across states that transcends local conditions)
5-day to 4-week summer institutes
Academic year follow-up from mentoring to 13-week graduate-level science content course of study
Here, we see some of the varied characteristics of the Institute awards, which exhibit a range of capacity and contexts.

7. Findings Institutes may be organized in two contrasting modes:
Patterns found among 8 MSP Institute Awards include:
Building teacher leaders or content specialists (n=7)
Engaging teacher/administration teams (n=3)
Training administrators to support learning communities (n=4)
Training IHE faculty to work with K-12 teachers (n=3)
Traditional
Reform-Oriented
Participants
Individual teachers from any school or district
Teachers as leaders within learning communities that include administrators and/or IHE faculty
Impacts
Assess content knowledge gains
Assess array of learning community outputs within K-20 systems
What we found were a mix of approaches to professional development which reflected the various levels of capacity and maturation among the eight partnerships, ranging from more traditional to more reform-oriented modes of operation.

8. Teacher Training Approaches
Career Development Professional Development
 Long-term Progression  Competence
 Greater Responsibility  Fulfills Service Requirement
 Professional Commitment  Minimum Compliance
A additional dimension to the Institute Partnerships’ varied activities provides an opportunity to reflect on two contrasting approaches to teacher training.

9. A Larger Context Global arena of STEM-related jobs
National standards and policies
Cross-Site initiatives such as MSP
State and regional supports and constraints
Municipal and district receptivity or resistance
Schools’ environment and climate in alignment with the above
Also to be considered is a larger context in which any assessment of professional development progress must be situated.

10. A Larger Context
For those more visually oriented, we see the nested quality of this larger context.

11. An Evaluative Framework
Assertive Selection/Recruitment process
Appropriate level of Content/Leadership Skills Training
Sound design for Knowledge Flow throughout the system
Valid Measures of:
TCK
PLC effectiveness (cascading system, access to expertise, administrative support)
Implementation in classroom practices
Impacts on student achievement
Links of teacher implementation to student achievement
The interplay of all of the above
These considerations lead to the delineation of an evaluative framework that is especially sensitive to local context.

12. Challenges
Addressing: Demographic disparities between teachers and students.
Creating: And sustaining a critical mass of competent classroom and lead STEM teachers.
Ensuring: Classroom and lead teachers are empowered to implement reforms as intended or to develop, design, and test alternative approaches based on sound evidence.
Bridging Distance: Adapting training to align with local conditions and contexts.
Some of the challenges that remain for career or professional development programs include the following.

13. Contact Information
Darnella Davis
COSMOS Corporation
3 Bethesda Metro Center, Suite 420
Bethesda, MD
(240)
Thank you.
Web site: