Start PD with ready and willing teachers and scale up over time, using train-the-trainers models¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · no claims cited

Description¶

In districts where teachers view PD as optional, the report describes first offering PD to teachers who are willing and excited, to "build word of mouth about the benefits of the PD, and thus increase interest and participation." More than half of MiC districts used a train-the-trainers strategy in which teacher leaders attended centralized PD and shared learning with site colleagues. Garden Grove and Elk Grove piloted discourse cohorts with small groups and expanded in later years.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• District administrators able to identify and recruit willing early-adopter teachers
• A mechanism for teacher leaders to share learning with site colleagues

Constraints¶

• Teacher leaders often did not feel adequately prepared to guide colleagues and were not perceived as having requisite expertise; messages were sometimes diluted or translated inaccurately, as in a game of telephone

Target Learners¶

• K–8 mathematics teachers

Target Learning Goals¶

• Implementing CCSS-M-aligned instruction, including student academic discourse

Related Strategies¶

• Shift the locus of professional learning to school sites and classrooms, connected to teachers' everyday practice
• Train-the-Trainer professional development for attendance-intervention staff
• One-day teacher workshop plus optional training-of-trainers for implementing CSC
• Use a consortium training model to lower professional development costs to individual districts

Examples¶

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Key Sources¶

• Perry, R., Marple, S., & Reade, F. (2019). Roadblocks and routes: Professional development in Math in Common districts. San Francisco, CA: WestEd. https://www.wested.org/permissions