Research

Decades of education reforms have aimed to uplift the professional status and health of the K-12 teaching profession and have frequently called for restructuring teachers’ roles around professional career ladders. Despite the shortcomings of previous waves of teacher professional career ladder reforms, the underlying logics guiding these earlier waves of reform may continue to deeply inform the ways in which teachers’ roles are structured through state-level policies related to teacher development, licensure, and certification. This study investigates the extent to which professional career ladders have become institutionalized across state-level teacher policies, and the ways in which political and organizational conditions shape contemporary state-level professional career ladder reforms. To address these questions, this study involves two stages of analysis: (1) a 50-state landscape scan of teachers’ roles as articulated in state-level policy, and (2) a multiple case study of the implementation of teacher professional career ladders across multiple states. As more states turn to policies restructuring teacher roles, this study will provide timely implementation lessons to guide policy and practice, to help the field avoid the pitfalls of previous reform efforts.

This practitioner research project is an exploration of our evolving approach to teacher education, which we call justice-centered reflective practice. Our pedagogy centers joy, imagination, vulnerability, and uncertainty, which we conceptualize as mediating six foundational principles that guide our practice as teacher educators. Through ongoing study of the Independent School Teaching Residency (ISTR) program, this research aims to reimagine teacher preparation with justice and care at its core, reflecting on how the key tenets of our approach are expressed in our curriculum, culture, and structure and taken up by ISTR students, faculty, and partner schools.

This design-based inquiry study seeks to understand how learning about responsive mathematics teaching practices begun in university teacher preparation can be extended to the early years of teaching through online video-feedback inquiry groups. Through a series of inquiry cycles, participants submit videos of brief number sense routines along with focusing questions about their practice and then comment on the videos of others in the group. The project is developing a deeper understanding of early career teachers' learning of responsive teaching practices and testing and improving a low-cost and sustainable model for supporting K–8 mathematics teachers. This approach is also being used in a professional learning program for K–8 teachers and leaders around teaching math routines for computational fluency.

This project is exploring the efficacy of a 3-year intervention designed to build teachers' capacity to use research on student learning trajectories in early mathematics learning to elicit and respond to student thinking and tailor instruction to student needs. The study uses a mixed methods quasi-experimental design to explore the impacts on teacher's use of curriculum, Pre-K–3 student learning outcomes, the barriers and supports for school-level implementation, and the effects of variation in implementation on student outcomes over multiple years.

The Responsive Math Teaching project focuses on improving mathematics instruction in a network of elementary schools through a research-practice partnership between Penn GSE and the School District of Philadelphia. The project, funded by the National Science Foundation, is developing tools and resources to help translate district instructional vision into classroom practice, including: (1)  an instructional model that is responsive to both students’ developing understanding and to mathematical goals, (2) professional development for teachers to experience, teach, and lead Responsive Math Teaching lessons, and (3) mentoring for school-based Math Lead Teachers in instructional coaching. The project team is studying how teachers learn to take on leadership roles by tracing their development over time along several dimensions of leadership capacity and analyzing the extent to which dimensions of the instructional model are being translated into coaching and teacher practice.