Karen Koellner

Arizona State University | ASU · Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College

We posit that professional development (PD) models fall on a continuum from highly adaptive to highly specified, and that these constructs provide a productive way to characterize and distinguish among models. The study reported here examines the impact of an adaptive mathematics PD model on teachers' knowledge and instructional practices as well a...

This article focuses on current trends, tensions and unresolved issues related to teacher professional learning during a time of considerable change around the world. Rather than write an exhaustive literature review we identified four topics that have played a critical role in the field over the past decade. This article reviews literature on the...

This set of tasks progressively engages students in geometric proportional reasoning.

This research study explored teachers’ self-reported uptake as well as observed instructional change after participating in a year-long professional development (PD) program focused on supporting the learning and teaching of transformations-based geometry. Analyses illuminate the degree and nature of the pedagogical shifts made by teachers who part...

What do teachers take up and use from mathematicsprofessional development (PD) focused around video cases as representations of practice? In this chapter we explore what teachers took back to their classrooms based on a video case-based PD experience. Data gathered from focus group interviews and a set of reflection questions on teachers’ learning...

Background Determining whether a professional development program can be enacted with integrity in different settings and by different facilitators is critical to understanding efficacy. In this paper, we describe the two-stage preparation process of a facilitator as she prepared to use and adapt the highly specified Learning and Teaching Geometry...

Probability has recently made its way into many textbook series and standards documents (NCTM, 2000; NGA, 2010). When students engage in probability problem solving many unexpected situations can arise due to the counterintuitive nature of probability concepts. These situations can be difficult for students and challenging for teachers to analyze i...

Breaking traditional instructional patterns is a notoriously challenging endeavor, particularly on a broad scale. However, a number of professional development (PD) efforts in mathematics have produced promising results, even within a relatively short time frame. In this chapter, we focus on the impact of one such effort and report on teachers’ ins...

The Problem-Solving Cycle (PSC) model of mathematics Professional Development (PD) seeks to enhance teachers’ knowledge and skills in a variety of domains. In this paper we consider how participating in the PSC program, with a specific focus on algebra, impacted one teachers’ instructional practice. We explore the nature of change in the teacher’s...

This article explores how video can be used in practice-based professional development (PD) programs to serve as a focal point for teachers’ collaborative exploration of the central activities of teaching. We argue that by choosing video clips, posing substantive questions, and facilitating productive conversations, professional developers can guid...

Teacher professional development (PD) has been in high demand during the last decade, and the design and dissemination of new PD models have been the impetus for discussion among educators around the world. Previously called teacher in-service training, the preferred label by scholars and practitioners is now teacher professional development. In th...

While reading and language arts are typically easy to integrate with other subjects, some have cautioned that integrating mathematics with other subjects may be difficult to do in ways that lead to deep understanding of mathematics content (Klein, 1996; Shanahan, 1997) In particular, new research supports integrative approaches that use literature...

Integrating mathematics and literacy creates opportunities to introduce new vocabulary, make connections among abstract concepts, and showcase ways that mathematics applies across curriculum. In addition, integrating multicultural literature in the mathematics classroom can provide familiar contexts for culturally diverse students and it can presen...

Listening to students while they problem solve can produce valuable results.

This article focuses on the Problem-Solving Cycle (PSC), a model of professional development designed to assist teachers in supporting their students' mathematical reasoning. Each PSC is a series of three interrelated workshops in which teachers share a common mathematical and pedagogical experience, organized around a rich mathematical task. Throu...

With the recent call for teachers to foster reading across the content areas (Bean 2000; NCTM 2000), mathematics teachers are looking for sources that both support complex mathematical content and are rich in literacy. These sources are often difficult to find, especially for middle-grades teachers. One rich source is found everyday in our mailboxe...

The purpose of this article is to share the conceptual framework and beginning analyses of data from a teacher professional development program that focuses on cultivating teachers' understanding of algebraic thinking, learning, and teaching. Specifically, in this paper we share: (1) the conceptual framework that has guided the structure of the pro...

Using rich problem activities that require modeling can be engaging for students who struggle to understand the content in entrylevel courses. Further, they provide students with a forum in which communication and problem solving are expected. According to Principles and Standards for School Mathematics , “Interacting with others offers opportuniti...

This paper describes a proportional reasoning problem set within a real-life context and a complete analysis of one small group discussion of this problem over the course of a 90-minute block. The seventh-grade students' discourse is described to provide insights into typical mathematical interpretations of this problem, as well as some generalizat...

Stephanie and Quavis gestured animatedly as they stood in front of the graphs, shown in figure 1 , that had been drawn on the board. Tara and Laura were speaking from their desks, and the rest of their second-year algebra class watched intently. We will subsequently share more of their discussion as we discuss an example of a Socratic seminar, but...

The paper examines how community was established in a professional development institute that focused on algebra content knowledge for middle school mathematics teachers. This qualitative study was framed within a situative perspective. We analyzed multiple data sources to identify the ways in which community was established. Results indicate that...