Samples from Awardees

These resources can be used for PD that focuses on formative assessment lessons and associated video cases of those lessons in action. The materials have been carefully crafted to help teachers learn about the lessons and how the lessons support students’ understanding of big mathematical ideas.

The resources include the following materials:

• A set of video cases of mathematics lessons in action
  • Within each case, we have the video transcript, information about the school and mathematics lesson, a link to the lesson and remote versions of activities within the lesson
• Facilitation guides and slide decks for both remote and in-person PD sessions
• Orientation materials, including facilitation guides and slide decks for both remote and in-person contexts

All of these PD resources are accessible on the website, requires creating an account, but it is 100% free.

This project and materials are supported in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF) through (awards 1908185, 1908311, 1908319).

Assistant Professors Eileen Murray and Joseph DiNapoli will be leading a team of researchers on a project funded by a four-year $1.7 million National Science Foundation (NSF) Discovery Research PreK-12 (DRK-12) grant.

Each year, the NSF awards a small number of DRK-12 grants to projects that have the potential to transform the education system. Montclair State researchers have received $532,224 for the project “Building a Teacher Knowledge Base for the Implementation of High-quality Instructional Resources through the Collaborative Investigation of Video Cases.”

The prestigious DRK-12 grant was awarded to researchers at Montclair State, the State University of New York at Buffalo and DePaul University, who will collaborate with Math for America, the New York State Master Teacher Program and the DePaul University STEM Center, on a Math of America teachers-based project.

Established in 2004, Math for America is committed to improving teacher retention by building and supporting communities of outstanding STEM educators. Its innovative video library, which features Math for America teachers using high-quality math lesson plans in their classrooms, is central to the team’s project.

The researchers will address the pressing national need to generate shared, classroom-based knowledge about how to implement freely available, quality instructional resources that can improve student learning outcomes.

The funding will also give teachers a unique window into one another’s classrooms by supporting teacher-leaders in different U.S. cities as they execute lesson plans, create new videos for the Math for America video library and seek to understand how to teach more effectively.

“In this innovative professional development model, teachers use videos to break down complex teaching situations and think about what can be improved,” says Murray. “It’s similar to how professional athletes use video to review what worked and what didn’t in games.”

By studying what teachers learn and how they share that knowledge with others, the Montclair State team aims to learn how the model might ultimately be scaled nationwide.

In this project, we have iteratively refined an approach to professional development that is innovative because it is practice-based, incorporates video, and focuses on an open, high-quality instructional resource. Our project is called Analyzing Instruction in Mathematics Using the Teaching for Robust Understanding Framework (AIM-TRU).

In AIM-TRU, teachers collaboratively analyze video cases showing other teachers implementing lessons called Classroom Challenges. Classroom Challenges are 100 free, high-quality math lesson plans developed by the Shell Center for Mathematical Education to support teaching aligned to the Teaching for Robust Understanding (TRU) framework. A crucial element of these lessons is that they are built to foster rich classroom conversations on deep mathematical ideas, making them an ideal vehicle for video cases.

In order to create these video cases, our research team solicits teacher volunteers from the affiliated leadership programs to videotape Classroom Challenge lessons in their classrooms. Next, we identify episodes showing students engaged in rich mathematical activity, which we cut into a video case with associated case materials including the lesson plan, transcripts and context. These video cases form the backbone of our PD model, where teachers use these materials as well as sets of reflective questions based on the TRU framework. In developing the PD model, members of our research team have facilitated workshops based on the video cases with eight different groups of teachers in New York City, Buffalo, Chicago, Washington DC, and Los Angeles. We collected video data and/or field notes for these sessions to continue to refine the video cases and PD model.

While some work has been done to understand the benefits of supports for part-time instructors at the undergraduate level, this work has focused mostly on graduate teaching assistants rather than adjunct instructors. The proposed project will extend this work to adjunct instructors and will contribute to the research base regarding the adjunct instructor population. By building a model of adjunct instructor resources and support, the project will contribute to deeper understanding of how such efforts impact (1) adjunct instructor knowledge and instructional practices, (2) adjunct instructor job satisfaction, and (3) student academic success and retention in STEM majors. This understanding will help other departments and institutions with similar instructor populations to better support their adjunct faculty, with the goal of improving student learning and persistence in precalculus and beyond.