- Year 2023
- NSF Noyce Award # 1852822
- First Name Corey
- Last Name Webel
- Institution University of Missouri
- Role/Position PI
- Workshop Category Track 3: Master Teaching Fellowships
- Workshop Disciplines Audience Mathematics
- Target Audience Co-PIs, Noyce Master Teachers, Noyce Teaching Fellows, Other Faculty/Staff, Project PIs, Undergraduate and/or Graduate Noyce Scholars
- Topics Developing Teacher Leaders
- Session Length 45 minutes minutes
- Additional Presenter(s)
Phi Nguyen, phinguyen@mail.missouri.edu; Eric Partridge, egpbk6@missouri.edu
Goals
Participants will 1) learn about our efforts to document leadership development for participants who received a number of project-funded supports, including coursework leading to Elementary Mathematics Specialist (EMSs) certification, funding to engage in leadership activities, a school-based team approach to recruitment, and the cultivation of a supportive community within the program. We will 2) share the framework we used to characterize Fellows’ conceptions of themselves as leaders at three time points within the program, as well as 3) challenges and barriers they experienced in taking on leadership roles in their schools. Participants can use or adapt the framework for use with their own projects.
Evidence
The data will consist of interviews with participants and logs of leadership activities created by participants. We also will present our framework as an object of discussion and tool for further study. The framework consists of six categories in a trajectory of leadership development: reluctant, apprehensive, emerging, optimistic, cautiously confident, and established. We used the framework to categorize interviews with participants at the start of their program (2019), after one year of EMS coursework (2020), and then at the completion of the EMS coursework (2021). We will share the variation in how teachers in our program described leadership and their own conceptions of themselves as leaders, and how this evolved over the course of their experiences. The catalogs of leadership activities were created by participants in their 3rd and 4th year in the program. They reported the types of leadership activities they enacted, including facilitating professional development sessions within their district or at regional meetings, supporting new or preservice teachers, working on school curriculum or math teams, coordinating math-focused outreach events, among others. The participants also reported challenges in enacting their leadership activities, including managing time, developing trust with colleagues, and raising interest in learning more about mathematics instruction.
Proposal
In this presentation we share some findings from our Track 3 project which supported 24 elementary teachers to obtain masters degrees and certification as Elementary Mathematics Specialists and to provide mathematics leadership in their schools and districts. The research component of our project has investigated the development of our participants’ visions for high quality math instruction, their conceptions of themselves as leaders, their approaches to supporting school level improvements for mathematics teaching and learning, their mentoring practices, and how their efforts are received by their colleagues and administrators. In this presentation, we will focus on our work to understand our participants’ development as leaders over the first four years of the project. We will share and discuss a framework that we used to analyze interview data regarding participants’ evolving conceptions of themselves as mathematics leaders. We will also share an analysis of the self-reported descriptions of mathematics leadership activities and challenges that the participants faced in their efforts to enact leadership activities in their local contexts. Attendees will be invited to share their own related experiences with (or as) Track 3 Master Teacher Fellows and the ways that leadership development has been supported and documented in their projects.
