In the past year I have been working with CRESMET on several of its professional development progress.  Here is a synopsis of some of my duties.

Help with rules of engagement

·        Helped refine the rules of engagement, particularly speaking with meaning

o       This has included writing papers and giving presentations to help describe speaking with meaning as both a norm and a tool and delineate how an instructor can foster this emergence

·        The impact of this intervention has been evident by viewing the way high school teachers interact with one another, and later how they interact with their class

o       They use the term speaking with meaning to help elicit meaningful student responses

o       Their students have also been observed using the phrase speaking with meaning when they deem a response inadequate

·        Speaking with meaning has undergone changes during the program

o       Initially the leader of the functions course and the class determined that when giving responses they should be meaningful

o       It became necessary to really parse out what constituted speaking with meaning

o       By using established literature we found speaking with meaning to be a sociomathematical norm by which mathematical responses were judged as well as a tool used to elicit mathematically sufficient responses

o       As we progress we continue to determine what kinds of teacher moves help enable this norm to better instruct future teachers and PLC leaders

PCA web site

·        Led team to create videos for PCA web site to be used for research and professional development

o       This included writing scripts for video based on research data, rehearsing and acting in videos, helping with editing and filming, participating in placing them on the web with explanations and justifications

·        The initial impact of this project has been in regards to professional development of secondary teachers, eventually the impact will spread to the research community to allow them to see what we are seeing in the data     

o       With respect to teacher development, teachers (both pre and in service) are able to view students working problems and speculate about what misconceptions they may be exhibiting

o       After they give their analysis of the scenario, they are given our explanation of what misconceptions are occurring

o       This type of activity will help teachers listen to students and build a model of their thinking (decenter) in order to help them

·        Originally we were using the original video for the PCA site.  What we found is the production made it difficult to hear students, see what they were writing and made it difficult to analyze

o       We decided to create our own videos to have control over their production

o       We now have a camera both on the student and student work

o       Student responses are audible

o       Camera cuts to student work when appropriate

o       Videos are a reasonable length

Help with FOP and LCOP sites

·        We began the creation of Facilitator Observation Protocol (FOP) and Learning Community Observation Protocol) web sites

o       These are sties built to aid in the training and assessing of learning communities and their facilitators

o       I helped select videos, determine useful setup of web site and began working on a scoring rubric for videos

·        In order to help teachers with their own professional development we had them create learning communities within their schools

o       These communities help facilitate a deeper understanding of their STEM concepts

o       In order to determine their effectiveness we need to develop a systematic way to gauge all learning communities

o       Also, the videos and scoring system can be used in training future facilitators to enable them to lead productive learning communities

o       These sites will also become transportable research based tools that will support our professional development and our rules of engagement

·        This site has undergone many changes since its inception

o       We have continuously modified our videos and our scoring system

o       In turn it has helped us develop deeper explanations of our rules of engagement

o       The videos have come from our cohorts as they work in PLC?s during the semester so we are able to judge the effectiveness of the videos by using them for training purposes with the facilitators

Conducted Interview with High School Administrators

Questions and overview were sent separately.