Video Professional Development to Explore and Support Video Club Facilitator Learning and Practice

About This Grant

Mathematics education research has emphasized instruction that asks teachers to use approaches that center students’ mathematical thinking. A significant part of this is how teachers notice, or focus on, analyze, and decide how to respond to, mathematics thinking. One common professional development method is to use videos of mathematics teaching to help teachers understand what is possible for students' learning. However, professional development facilitators need to develop skills and practices to support teacher learning using classroom video. This exploratory project aims to understand how facilitators of video-based teacher professional development learn to help mathematics teachers of middle and high school students notice student mathematical thinking. The work uses an online context because it provides more opportunities for facilitators who might be limited by location or resources to participate. The project consists of two strands of work. The first strand is focused on the design and enactment of an online video-based professional development for video club facilitators of mathematics teachers. The second investigates facilitator learning and ways to support it. The project will iteratively design resources for facilitator educators that can guide and support the future development and enactment of learning experiences for facilitators of video clubs and video-based professional development, something that is currently missing in the field. The research questions are: (1) How can an online, video-based professional development support facilitators in learning to lead teachers in a video club? (2) In a facilitator professional development, how do facilitators learn to support teachers’ noticing? An important part of the facilitator professional development design includes helping facilitators learn to use teacher video annotations as a window into teacher thinking during video clubs. The project will use a design-based research framework to qualitatively analyze facilitators' tagging of videos, recorded professional development sessions, interviews, and other artifacts of the facilitators' work. The Discovery Research preK-12 program (DRK-12) is an applied research program that seeks to significantly enhance the learning and teaching of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) by preK-12 students and teachers. Projects in the DRK-12 program build on fundamental research in STEM education and prior research and development efforts that provide theoretical and empirical justification for funded projects. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.