Sustaining at Scale: District Mathematics Specialists’ Adaptations to a Teacher Leadership Preparation Program

ABSTRACT

A common approach to scaling up a professional development program is for the researchers who designed the program to prepare teacher leaders to facilitate it at their schools. When researchers eventually leave, however, teacher leaders may receive less support. To ensure that teacher leaders continue receiving support, researchers can prepare district mathematics specialists to assume responsibility for preparing the teacher leaders. Little is known, however, about district mathematics specialists’ role in sustaining, and potentially adapting, professional development programs. We examined district mathematics specialists’ facilitation of an adaptive teacher leadership preparation program. Program sessions were originally facilitated by researchers then by the specialists. We analyzed the adaptations specialists made to the sessions over four years and the rationales underlying these adaptations. Specialists maintained the program’s overall structure, continuing to model the facilitation of core program activities that teacher leaders would then facilitate in their site-based professional development workshops. However, they modified the thematic focus of these activities to address district goals, interests, and priorities. Adaptations were informed by specialists’ intimate knowledge of what was occurring in district schools. This approach maintained activities supportive of teacher learning, but also demonstrated that the specialists took increasing ownership over the program by adapting it.

KEYWORDS:

• Facilitator preparation
• mathematics education
• professional development
• teacher leader
• scale

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No DRL-1417261. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF. This study was granted ethics approval by the Stanford University Institutional Review Board under protocol number 31369. All study participants consented to participate in this study by reading then signing a consent form shared with them by a member of our research team. The authors would like to thank the district mathematics specialists who so generously shared and described their facilitation practice with us for this study. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers and editors for their thoughtful feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ TLP 2–3 in year 4 was canceled due to COVID. Video-recordings were ~7 hours long except for TLP 1–3 and 2–3 in year 3, which were ~2 hours long. We examined field notes, content logs, and slide-decks for all TLP sessions.

² For example, the first author thought the teacher analysis task required an examination of student work, but the third author said it could involve examination of multiple strategies and representations. We settled on the latter.

³ Quotes have been lightly edited for readability. Phrases that were repeated and certain words (e.g., like, um) were removed. Numbers (e.g., DMS 4) reflect the order in which district mathematics specialists began to facilitate TLP sessions.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation [1417261].