- Year 2022
- NSF Noyce Award # 1950217
- First Name Matthew
- Last Name Campbell
- Institution West Virginia University
- Role/Position Associate Professor of Mathematics Education
- Workshop Category Track 3: Master Teaching Fellowships
- Workshop Disciplines Audience Mathematics
- Target Audience Co-PIs, Noyce Teaching Fellows, Other Faculty/Staff, Project PIs, School District Administrators
- Topics Developing Partnerships that Support Teachers and Students at High-Need School Districts, Developing Teacher Leaders
- Session Length 75 minutes minutes
- Additional Presenter(s)
Joanna Burt-Kinderman (jburtkinderman@k12.wv.us), Jami Packer (jpacker@k12.wv.us), & Adam Riazi (ariazi@k12.wv.us)
Goals
1. Participants will be able to utilize a set of networked improvement tools in communities relevant to their work2. Participants will reflect on how networked improvement tools structure and support teacher-led professional learning and instructional improvement
Evidence
M3T, and the ideas to be shared in this workshop, builds on a successful approach and philosophy from one West Virginia district (Pocahontas County, among the most rural counties east of the Mississippi River) giving teachers agency to define problems of mathematics teaching and learning and to direct their collective professional learning and instructional improvement. This success was evidenced by student test scores that rose to among the highest in the state, along with high levels of teacher retention and satisfaction. Furthermore, the project’s adoption and refinement of tools of improvement science build on work on networked improvement communities from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, which has been used in a variety of educational and other contexts. As a project, M3T conducts multiple research and evaluation efforts, including on the impact of its organization as a networked improvement community on student learning, teacher learning, teacher satisfaction, and teacher leadership development. While student data (particularly on end-of-year standardized tests) as a lagging indicator, we have seen promising gains on more practical forms of measurement used with students. We have also tracked the use and evolution of various new instructional strategies from across the network, high levels of teacher satisfaction, and increasing levels of collaboration, particularly across district lines.
Proposal
The “Mountaineer Mathematics Master Teachers” (M3T) Track 3 Noyce Master Teaching Fellowships project supports and leverages experienced middle and high school mathematics teachers from across West Virginia as a statewide, networked improvement community (NIC) aimed toward increasing the number of West Virginia students engaged in “doing mathematics” in meaningful ways and to support teacher agency and leadership in those improvement efforts. Through two years of the project, 33 M3T Noyce Fellows representing 25 school districts, plus more than 40 additional teachers participating in the first year of “local improvement teams” led by Fellows, have learned about and used various tools of improvement science to problematize and work to improve mathematics teaching and learning across the state. In this session, we engage participants in a range of tools and routines that have been developed and refined through the project’s work so far, from collective problematizing of the lack of students engaged in meaningful mathematical practices, to identifying and testing shared ideas for change, and using practical data to understand progress locally and across the network. Project staff and Fellows will share details on the development of these tools, their impact on classrooms and on teacher and teacher leader development, and their utility in structuring collaborative improvement. Participants will be invited to discuss potential use in other contexts and to consider next steps.
