Professional learning opportunities for teachers of mathematics and science have increasingly focused on deepening teachers’ disciplinary and/or pedagogical content knowledge, but translating that content knowledge to improve classroom practice can prove challenging. Regardless of the goals and specific kinds of content knowledge targeted in professional development, considering ways to help teachers connect their new knowledge to the classroom is an essential step to take when designing a program.
Advice from experienced practitioners with diverse backgrounds and experiences in working with teachers offers guidance about ensuring that teacher disciplinary and/or pedagogical content knowledge leads to improved classroom practice. Insights included the following ideas:
- Applying what is learned—Consider where in the professional development sequence to address classroom practice.
- Make the connection—Use student instructional materials and classroom artifacts to help teachers connect their disciplinary mathematics/science content knowledge to its application in teaching practice.
- It’s all in the translation—Be explicit about classroom implications and assist teachers in applying what they are learning to their instruction.
- Check and see—Look to find out if classroom practice is improving.
Practitioner Insights
Professional development often engages teachers in experiences aimed at deepening their disciplinary and/or pedagogical content knowledge. However, enhanced knowledge does not automatically translate to improved classroom practice. Programs need to help teachers connect their new mathematics/science disciplinary content and/or pedagogical content knowledge to their work with students.
Experienced practitioners offered insights about increasing the likelihood of improving classroom practice through mathematics/science content-deepening experiences for teachers. After reviewing these insights, you will be provided with opportunities to share your own experiences with increasing the likelihood of improving classroom practice. The information you provide will be analyzed along with the insights and examples from other practitioners as the website is periodically updated.
Applying what is learned—Consider where in the professional development sequence to address classroom practice.
How should connections to the classroom be addressed in programs that are focused on deepening teacher content knowledge? The key idea stressed by experienced program leaders is that teachers need to understand the content in order to teach it. “The bottom line,” said one, “is if you don’t understand the ideas yourself, you have little hope of diagnosing student thinking.”
Some experienced program leaders argue that disciplinary content knowledge needs to be addressed prior to considering classroom implications; teachers cannot apply what they do not know, and it makes little sense to consider student learning of the content before the teachers themselves understand it. In the words of one proponent of this position, “expecting teachers to learn simultaneously the content and gain a better understanding of how the students learn the content is unreasonable.” Said another:
Due to the complexity of teaching and learning, if the goal is to support the development of conceptual understanding, I believe that including a focus on pedagogy will likely function more as side-tracking the conversation rather than supporting the attention to conceptual coherence and connections.
Other experienced program leaders argue that disciplinary content and classroom applications need to be addressed in an integrated fashion—to motivate teachers to engage in the work, to help them consider how to apply what they are learning to their instruction, and to make professional development most efficient.
Teachers often want to see the relevance of what and why they are learning particular content, and that has to do with what their students will be thinking and how their students will be making progress in their thinking. Sometimes, discussions of how we are making progress and what is difficult for us to understand lead naturally to “Well, how does this work for second graders, then?”
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While the focus should certainly be on the [mathematics/science] concepts if the goal is to deepen teacher content knowledge, teachers will learn more if content is not taught separately from pedagogy.
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I’m inclined to think that professional development targeted on a single goal – increasing teachers’ content knowledge – is not taking advantage of precious time. Rather, it seems to me that increasing teachers’ content knowledge should be in the service of some larger educational goal. So for me, enhancing teachers’ content knowledge ought to be connected to problems of practice – connecting to how the ideas appear in a particular K–12 curriculum, or what students find challenging about the ideas, or about ways to enhance existing curriculum to better reflect a more robust conceptual and procedural development.
These program leaders note that addressing teachers’ pedagogical questions can be used as a lead in to a focus on content issues, including conceptual coherence. For example, a program leader noted that “the question ‘what might a student say about this?’ has been a nice entry into talking about subtleties in the content, better than ‘what’s your answer?'”
Make the connection—Use student instructional materials and classroom artifacts to help teachers connect their disciplinary mathematics/science content knowledge to its application in teaching practice.
Regardless of the sequence you select, there are professional development practices that facilitate teachers’ transfer of enhanced content knowledge to the classroom. Many programs engage teachers with the student instructional materials they will be using in their classroom, helping them see where and how their knowledge of mathematics/science will come into play.
Using artifacts of student work is another approach to developing teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge, helping them focus on student thinking as a way of applying the disciplinary content knowledge they are learning to their classroom practice. When using student work, experienced program leaders recommended starting with an analysis of a prepared set of examples rather than samples teachers collect and bring into the professional development. Once teachers become more comfortable with the process of analyzing prepared student work samples, experienced program leaders suggest moving to an analysis of teachers’ own students’ work. Not only is their own students’ work likely to be intrinsically more interesting to teachers, but examining that work allows teachers to use the knowledge gained about student understanding of a concept to reflect on their own instructional practice.
People who have had experience with using classroom artifacts as a vehicle for deepening teacher content knowledge note the importance of keeping the focus on the mathematics/science content in those artifacts. For example, two program leaders provided a rationale for an approach of exploring the mathematics/science content of a particular task as a prelude to analyzing student work on that task:
In our work, we have teachers first work on a task and have a discussion about ways they reasoned about the task, and what they think are the core mathematical ideas in the task. The latter is often challenging as teachers tend to see the surface features of a task and not what is at the heart of the task mathematically. …Without a good sense of what is central to a task, examining student work is likely to be fairly superficial as well. So getting at the core mathematics first then facilitates the analysis of student work.
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I think that if you are going to have teachers analyze student work, they should first engage in doing and discussing the task themselves. That way they are experiencing it first as a learner. The discussion should highlight the key mathematical ideas that are central to the task. This gives them at least a beginning opportunity to explore the content. The analysis of student work can then proceed. One thing teachers often comment on is how students do or do not solve problems the way they do. (There is often considerable overlap.) I think that analyzing [student] work after doing the task yourself provides another opportunity to understand the content.
Similarly, practitioners with experience in professional development that focuses on classroom instructional materials suggested a need for some time that is primarily focused on content. One program leader proposed that this focus come alongside investigation of instructional materials:
In helping teachers implement reform-oriented, inquiry-based instructional materials, you are often faced with helping teachers understand the pedagogy of the materials as well as the science content on a conceptual level. Many of these materials address the science content differently than teachers learned it in college. So in addition to helping teachers become comfortable with using guided inquiry instruction, they also may struggle with conceptual understandings of the science content. Most professional development for new users focuses more on pedagogical aspects and the logistics of managing the new materials. It becomes more of a challenge to fit into the design a focus on the science content, although this is just as important to effectively teach using reform materials
Other experienced program leaders noted that revisiting the mathematics/science content after teachers have had some experience in using student instructional materials in the classroom helps ensure that the professional development will be applied to classroom practice as intended. Said one:
Although the opportunity to deepen teachers’ knowledge of science content presents itself in curriculum-based professional development, it may need to become a more central focus after teachers have had some initial experience using the new materials.
It’s all in the translation—Be explicit about classroom implications and assist teachers in applying what they are learning to their instruction.
Projects often experienced difficulty in achieving transfer to classroom practice, even when the professional development focused on “teacher realities” and seemed to have been well-received. One MSP PI reported that teachers seemed to have been developing their content knowledge, but that project leaders “don’t know for sure how to help teachers transfer this [personal transformation] to student learning.” Similarly, the PI of a project that based content-focused professional development on student instructional materials found in visiting schools that “classroom change was slow.”
Program leaders suggest that teachers need considerable guidance about the implications of what they are experiencing in professional development for their classroom practice; they note that the need to provide assistance to teachers is especially great when a classroom application is not an explicit focus of their professional development. Said one,
Most college courses and seminars offered by colleges and universities provide teachers access to challenging content, but these courses or learning experiences often do not help teachers link this new content information to the curricula teachers teach or even the standards they are accountable to teach. These types of learning experiences can be heavy on content and not provide much support at all for how to apply this knowledge in developmentally-appropriate curricula. Often experiences in research labs are not equipped to help a teacher translate their experiences into something appropriate for students that is student-centered and not a “lecture” or “show-and-tell” about a summer research experience.
When classroom application is a goal, teachers will benefit from explicit attention to what aspects are intended to translate directly to the classroom, and which are intended for their own support as adult learners. Said an MSP PI:
Content-focused professional development ought not to be the only item on the professional development menu; immersion experiences are but one part of a continuum of experiences. Teachers ought to have the opportunity to make connections between their content learning, their materials, and what students are expected to learn. This link will help them transfer their experiences from learning content, as well as their experiences in the pedagogy that furthered their learning, to the way they implement their [classroom instructional] materials.
Other program leaders agreed about the need for explicit connections, noting, for example, that you can’t assume that teachers who deepen their own content knowledge in professional development will readily be able to use that content knowledge in their classrooms, especially if the professional development addresses more advanced mathematics/science content. Said one program leader:
There is a potential problem with engaging teachers in high-level content that is new to them as adult learners and not showing the appropriateness for teaching the same content at a level for the students they teach. In other words, you can teach high-level content, but you need to bring it into alignment with the appropriate level for students or you are making the assumption that teachers can do this. Some will be able [to] and others may not, given the newness of the content for them.
Leaders in an MSP project expressed particular frustration that classroom practice was not changing more deeply, conjecturing that having teachers “discover those phenomena or relationships on their own, in the same way we want students to do, is probably not the most efficient” professional development strategy. They concluded that there needed to be more attention to helping participants understand how to translate these activities into learning experiences for their students.
Check and see—Look to find out if classroom practice is improving.
Experienced program leaders suggest that, no matter how carefully you design learning experiences to deepen teachers’ disciplinary and/or pedagogical content knowledge, you need to verify that your work with teachers is having the desired impact on their instructional practices. Incorporating feedback mechanisms allows program staff the opportunity to (1) make programmatic adjustments, and (2) address any school or district contextual factors that might be hindering transfer to classroom instruction.
Program leaders suggest a number of different strategies to track the extent to which their professional development programs are making a difference in classroom practice. In addition to observations conducted by external evaluators, some program leaders regularly visited teachers’ classrooms to observe the science/mathematics lessons. Some MSPs tapped into information provided within the existing program structure to get feedback on teachers’ instruction. For example, the program staff of one MSP engaged in discussions with teachers focused on artifacts of the teachers’ practice (e.g, student work, lesson plans). In another MSP, coaches documented lessons they observed so they could be discussed at subsequent training sessions for coaches.
Insight in Action
One MSP videotaped a sample of lessons taught by teachers who had attended and successfully completed the MSP’s university-based mathematics degree program. The project staff developed a protocol which operationalized what the MSP would consider indicators of successful transfer of teacher learning to their instructional practice. The results of the analysis are being used to inform the design of the degree program.
If you are interested in how these practitioner insights were collected and analyzed, a summary of the methodology can be found here.
Teacher Content Knowledge Matters
Empirical evidence demonstrates that teachers’ mathematics/science content knowledge makes a difference in their instructional practice and their students’ achievement. Consistent findings across studies include:
- Teachers’ mathematics/science content knowledge influences their professional practice.
- Teachers’ mathematics/science content knowledge is related to their students’ learning.
Learn more about research on why teachers’ mathematics/science content knowledge matters.