Hi Amanda, We are delighted to hear about a similar model! How has the TORSH platform worked for you?

As far as working with rural teachers virtually, we have found the experience to be beneficial for the teachers. Many of the teachers we work with would not have access to professional development if it were not for our project because of geographical challenges. These teachers often face issues with isolation, as they are commonly the only teacher of a certain grade level in a given school or district. Some challenges with this model have been keeping the teachers engaged in the work, specifically the coaching aspect. We have found that the more the teachers are connected to other teachers in the project, the more likely they are to continue their work with us. For example, in our original version, we had coaching cycles after they had completed the online course and there were no opportunities for them to discuss their coaching experience in the course, or with others that were being coached. Now, with our revised model, we are integrating the coaching and online course so there is increased accountability and increased opportunities for them to connect with other teachers about their experiences.

We have had approximately 25 teachers engage in the project, mostly all at different schools and different districts--both in Idaho and New York. As an example, in Idaho, we have teachers that are several hours away working in the same cohort. For our next cohort, we are considering recruiting from even greater distances. We have worked to overcome differences in timezone (offering 4:00pm PST; 7:00pm EST to teachers) and have found this to work well!

I'd love to hear more about your similar model. Are the teachers in rural areas? Are they in the same school?

 

Julie

Great to hear from you, Amy! Thanks for watching the video and please feel free to reach out with questions at any point!

Julie

Amanda,

It sounds like we have a quite a few similarities to you. We have had issues with bandwith/connectivity. Some teachers purposely stay at school late so they can connect because the internet is better there than at home. We also have experiences with the teachers wearing multiple hats. They are often pulled in many directions because there are so few people in the school. So, very similar situations with the rural context.

Thanks for the input about the TORSH platform. I will have to look at that. You mentioned the teachers are using iPads to record the lessons. We are using iPads too, but coupled with Swivl technology. Are you using anything in addition to the iPads? What are you using to capture audio?

Our coaches are all experienced professional development providers. We have not discussed expanding into other content areas, but have discussed how we could involve a larger quantity of teachers and from other areas (i.e. other states). We have found that the coaching cycle aspect of our project is the most time intensive because of the one-on-one interactions. So, we are open to ideas about scaling up, if you have any!

Thanks for the clarification around the smaller group size you are using. It sounds like our projects have so many similarities. Do you have plans to present at any future in-person conferences? It would be wonderful to meet you and learn more about what you are doing!

Julie

Julie, 

I definitely see some overlap in the work our teams are doing. We don't have the coaching aspect included in ours like you do, though we do have professors from some state universities do sessions at our in-person summer institutes each year. Have your teachers ever met in person or have all introductions and interactions been online? I'm definitely interested in learning more about how your coaching cycle!

At the moment, we are solely utilizing the iPads and we have been fortunate to have minimal issues with audio. Your use of Swivl technology is just phenomenal! Our teachers are often utilizing lesson plans that require movement within their classroom, but we are only able to capture what is directly in front of the iPad camera unless the teacher moves it on their own. 

I will definitely talk to my team about scaling up options. We face similar questions in that regard, especially when considering technology training for teachers wishing to participate in the network. 

Our last presentation was at the Carnegie Foundation Summit on Improvement in Education in April, but unfortunately we don't have any presentations lined up in the near future. How about you? 

Amanda,

Our teachers have never met in person. I know of some projects where they meet in person once and then the remainder of the project is online in an attempt to build community. We have worked to build community virtually. We have found that using small breakout rooms for discussions supports the development of community because the teachers have the opportunity to talk more freely, frequently, and openly. The community aspect of learning has been something we have considered because the teachers are in rural locations and often don't have access to other teachers. Consequently, we have worked to provide those opportunities for them, but are always welcoming new ideas and thoughts about this.

Thanks for the update on the presentations. We are presenting this summer at the Computer Supported Collaborative Learning Conference in Lyon, France. We will be presenting at PMENA in St. Louis and have submitted proposals to AMTE for 2020. We will watch for presentations on your work or opportunities to learn more!

Hello Amanda,

I wanted to add on to Julie's comments about our use of Swivl in our project.  One, of several, reasons we chose Swivl was because of the ease of recording, uploading, and sharing of the teacher-created videos.  The Swivl system automatically uploads the videos to a shared library with their coach within a few minutes of the recording.  Both the teacher and the coach are then able to view the videos and leave time-stamped comments at their own convenience.  

It sounds like both of our projects incorporate the use of a commenting/annotating feature with the videos.  I am curious as to what you have found related to these comments such as; what are teachers commenting on; how frequently do they comment, are your staff leaving comments as well; how do the comments from staff and teachers differ; how have these comments driven discussions in the weekly meetings?  Currently, we are working on analysis of the comments that our coaches and teachers use and would love to hear more about your insights on this feature of you program.

Hi all,

So interesting to learn about Swivl!  And we are also working on a project that is exploring and comparing teachers' responses when they annotate a video directly vs. reflect on the video and lesson more broadly.  It would be interesting to compare notes and schemes for characterizing teachers' responses!

Jen, Your project sounds interesting! What software are you using for the annotations?

Julie

Currently we are working in the Teaching Channel Teams platform!  What are different dimensions you're considering in characterizing comments?

Thanks, Jen

Hi Jen-

Do you mean our coding schema for the data? I might call in our PI JEff Choppin to talk about how we created and used a conjecture map to drive our inquiry. Right now, we are coding the teacher and coach interactions during the OMD online courses for social presence, cognitive presence, teaching presence, and learning environment. This is applied to the video data we recorded via Zoom over the past two years. Is that what you were looking for?

-Kristana

Jen,

We have different coding schemes depending on the data source. For the online coaching cycles we have a codebook that categorizes the discursive moves of the coach and the teacher as well as goals and content of the interactions. For the discursive moves of the coaches, we look at whether the coach invited or elicited information from the teacher or whether the coach explained or suggested something to the teacher. For the online course sessions, we use a different coding scheme based on the Community of Inquiry framework. Is there more information you would like about these coding schemes?

 

Jeff

Thanks Jeff and Kristana!  It's interesting to hear about the different lenses you're bringing to different datasets.  I was mostly thinking about the online written data (rather than video), as we're also in a space of seeking to characterize teachers' written comments to each other in an online learning space.  That feels different from the nature of coach-teacher interactions though — I'll think more as we explore our datasets and reach out for possible intersections in the future!

Thanks, Jen

Hi Dave-

Great questions, and thanks for taking a look! You're right; we have a massive data set. We've recorded all OMD online course sessions via the video conferencing software Zoom, as well the small group breakout room sessions and artifacts from each class. It's hours (and hours) of video, taken over two years. We also have interviews with participants and coaches. We've transcribed much of this, and are applying our coding schema to look more deeply at social presence, teaching presence, cognitive presence, and learning environment. The PD team has ideas for iteration based on observations from our two cohorts, but we are waiting to make claims directly from the data. As for scaling, I'll let PI's Jeff Choppin and Julie Amador talk more about this. 

-Kristana

Hello Dave and thank you for watching our video! 

Scaling this project has been a large part of our conversation of late.  Currently, we are preparing for a third cohort of teachers with some modifications to our model.  These modifications are based on what we have learned so far as well as our goal of providing the same high-quality PD experiences for more teachers.

Another effort to scale this project has been bringing on more coaches/facilitators to shadow more experienced coaches/facilitators as they engage in this work. We have established mentoring relationships as well as provided time for all (novice and experienced) coaches/facilitators to gather and discussions their work.

Thanks again for your interest!

Hi Teruni -

Thanks for watching the video! We've got a team member coming on shortly with more details for you. I took a look at your video as well, and really enjoyed all the photographs you included. It looks like you documented your project extensively!

-Kristana

Hello Teruni and thank you for watching our video!

The teachers in our model participate in our project for two years.  During this time they participate in a two-part online course, each part involves synchronous weekly sessions for six weeks. The first part of the course occurs during Year 1 and the second part in Year 2 for a total of 12 weeks.  In addition, we have 5 teaching labs, and 4-5 coaching cycles spread across two years.  The order of these experiences has been different for each cohort as we are exploring the best design. 

The individual online course sessions and teaching labs each last for two hours.  As we are working with teachers located on both coasts, we had to be very thoughtful about timing of these events.  We found that the 4-6pm (PST) and 7-9pm (EST) timeframe worked best for our teachers.  

Our coaches are located in different locations, Idaho, Georgia, and New York.  A critical aspect of our project is that all features are fully online, therefore there is no need for any of us to be in the same location.  Initially, we started the project with four coaches that had extensive experience with face-to-face coaching in the area of mathematics.  Several of those coaches also had experience coaching online.  As we prepared for our second cohort of teachers, we brought in five other coaches, also all experienced in face-to-face mathematics coaching, but new to online.  These new coaches were assigned to a mentor coach to shadow our current coaches.  This mentoring relationship continued as the new coaches took on teachers of their own in our second cohort of teachers.

To minimize our technology challenges, we established a support member of the project staff to work with all teachers, coaches, and facilitators with any challenges.  We scheduled training and practice sessions for teachers, coaches, and facilitators for all of the technology used.  All of these sessions were held using Zoom, a video conferencing platform.  During the online course and teaching lab sessions, our support member was present to help with any challenges that arose.  Additionally, all teachers and coaches were encouraged to call, text, or email this support member, anytime they needed help.

I hope this answers some of your questions!

How many teachers were assigned to a coach? 

Coaches were assigned 1-3 teachers.  This varied based on the coaches workload.  We have a total of 9 nine coaches that have supported teachers in this project.

Hello Kristen and thank you for your interest in our project!

Building a community in a project that is fully online was concern for us at the beginning of this project.  Therefore, we specifically designed several features of the project to address this topic.  For example, at the start of each cohort and each school year, we start with a "Kickoff" meeting.  During this kickoff meeting we have all project coaches, facilitators, and teachers attend and engage in ice breaker activities and talking circles.  These activities are held in a Zoom video conference, which enables us to utilize large group and small group discussions and activities to help foster relationships amongst the group. We also encourage the coaches to begin communicating via emails and video conferences before their coaching begins to build these relationships.  In the online course and teaching labs, we strategically designed small group learning activities to help the teachers interact and build relationships with each other.  

We have not specified that participants have a colleague, locally, to work with.  While I think this is a great idea, this was not feasible for some of our teachers, given that our PD is specific to mathematics and some of our participating teachers are the only mathematics teacher in their building.  Despite this, we do have two co-teaching pairs of teachers that participating in our project.  I can see that this would be an interesting aspect of their experience to explore.

 

Hello Hannah!  Thank you for sharing about your work!  I am very interested in learning more about your peer-coaching groups.  How did you develop these groups?  What does a typical group meeting look like?  Or is this work all asynchronous?

For recruitment we have created flyers with the project details and distributed them through our own professional connections and district/schools/teachers we have done previous work with.  As we have presented on our project at several large national conferences, we have shared information with those attendees and this has opened our project up to a larger audience of teachers as well.

You are correct, that our coaching is a one-to-one model, but some teachers do initially express concern about recording their own instruction.  One way we address this challenge is through the teaching labs.  Our teaching labs are based on lessons, taught by one of our coaches in a participants classroom.  The recording of this lesson is used for the teaching lab with all the teachers.  We highlight that this experience is a critical piece of the model for us to make our own practice public.  We see the teaching labs as a place to model putting our own practice out there for people to see, to analyze, and discuss.  This goes a long way for building a safe and trusting space in our project as we model how to use classroom video, not to judge instructional practices, but to use them for discussing evidence of student thinking and pedagogical decisions.

Thanks, Cathy! We appreciate you watching the video. Please let us know if you have any further thoughts or questions about the project!
Julie

Thanks, Angela! We appreciate the positive feedback.

Thank you Rachel for the feedback and questions.

Pertaining to your questions about accommodating teachers working with different curricula, all of our teachers are from either New York or Idaho and are using Common Core State Standards.  As such, we have not had to do much differentiation around differences in curricula.  However, what has been interesting is supporting teachers with this type of professional learning who are using very different types of curriculum materials.  We have teachers using more task-based curriculum materials and those using much more procedural practice driven materials.  Because coaching is one-on-one and highly-differentiated based on the needs and interests of the teachers, accommodating differences around curriculum materials is a natural focus.  For example, for a teacher using task-based materials, the coaching cycles might focus on implementing a lesson or task as provided or with small modifications.  For teachers who do not have such materials, the coaching cycles might focus on locating or developing high cognitive demand tasks.  

For assessing impact, we do not have measures in place to examine changes in student learning.  To assess the impact of the PD on teaching practices, we are analyzing the lesson videos from the coaching cycles using the TRU framework (https://www.map.mathshell.org/trumath.php).  Additionally, we are combining the lesson video analysis with the qualitative analysis of coaching cycle conversation transcripts for evidence of teaching learning and changes to practice.

Hopefully this provides the information you are looking for but feel free to respond with any additional questions.

Thank you again for your interest in our project! 

Thanks for the extra detail to understand your work better. That makes good sense that coaches working with teachers individually can differentiate based on a given teacher's instructional materials. And I can imagine that the defining feature is often being task/conceptually based vs. procedurally based!

This actually connects with another question that I think many of us grapple with, which is about the benefits or need to provide content-specific PD that is tied to the curriculum a teacher uses. What are your thoughts on whether grounding PD in a teacher's curriculum is useful or perhaps even required to effectively support teachers in developing content specific instruction?

Thank you for your question about content-specific PD, this is a question that we grapple with as PD providers across different contexts and experiences. For this project, we engaged teachers in three connected components (an online course, teaching labs, and personalized coaching).  All of the experiences across these components utilized high cognitive demand tasks that provided opportunities to develop images and engage in mathematical discourse.  The tasks chosen for each of these experiences differed based on the purpose of each component.  In the course, tasks were primarily chosen and designed to engage in experiences as learners,  analysis, and reflection.  For the teaching labs, we chose tasks based on grade-level standards after consulting with the teacher who volunteered their classroom for video recording. These tasks often related to the topic being taught, however they were typically not the next lesson in their current unit of study.  During the coaching experiences, tasks were curriculum-specific. Here the coach and teacher discussed the goals of the lesson, analyzed the task, re-designed the task as needed, and planned the lesson in order to provide opportunities for discourse. Across these three components we were able to engage teachers in content that was both directly connected and broadly related to their curriculum resources.

Thank Kathy for the interest in our project.  

For your first question, we have two cohorts that each contain 10 teachers.  We have 9 coaches on the project who have worked with varying numbers of teachers based on their availability.  For the coach, each coaching cycle takes about 2-4 hours for the planning discussion, debrief discussion, lesson video viewing and annotation, plus some extra time to review notes, shared documents, etc.  This would be similar on the teachers end but they also are planning the lesson initially.  The goal is over a teacher's two years in the program, they would complete 5 coaching cycles.  I'm not sure how this would convert into FTE but hopefully it provides a sense of the time commitment for coaching.

For your second question, there is a course teachers take prior to any coaching cycles.  The course focuses on orchestrating mathematical discourse and implementing high cognitive demand tasks.  It utilizes the Smith and Stein (2011) book 5 Practices for Orchestrating Productive Mathematics Discussions. Briefly, the course engages teachers in mathematical tasks with the facilitators using/modeling the 5 practices.  The course occurs synchronously using Zoom video-conferencing technology but teachers also are asked to complete a few tasks outside of the synchronous time.  When you mention "lesson-learned", we do not have any papers specifically on the topic but certainly have many!  Is there a specific part or aspect of the course you'd like to hear more about in terms of our lesson learned?  We certainly would be happy to share.

Thank you again for the questions.

Thanks Heather for the feedback and questions.  

Since the coaching cycles are intended to support the implementation of the learning generated during the Orchestrating Mathematical Discussion online course, all coaches and teachers are working towards the broad goals of implementing high cognitive demand tasks and generating rich mathematical discourse.  However, during each coaching cycle, teachers select a specific personal goal for their practice from a list generated by the professional development team.  This personal goal then becomes a major focus of both the planning and debriefing conversations.  Each of the personal goals in our list connect back to the overarching goals of the online course.  For some teachers, they have kept the same personal goal for multiple coaching cycles.  Others have selected new ones during each cycle.  This has ensured a certain level of consistency or uniformity across coaches and coaching cycles but part of our research work is to examine the potential variability within the coaching cycles and its impact on teacher learning.

As far as training for coaches, the project has four mentor coaches and five apprentice coaches.  Apprentice coaches have prior experience with in-person coaching but are new to online coaching.  The apprentice coaches partnered with a mentor coach during their work with Cohort 1 teachers.  This involved the apprentice coach watching the videos of a mentor coach during the planning conversation, the debriefing conversations, and the lesson implementation video and then debriefing the cycle with the mentor coach.  Apprentice coaches then began coaching teachers in Cohort 2.

Hope this provides you with the information you were looking for.  Feel free to ask more if not.

Thanks again! 

 

 

Hi Cyndi-

We're still looking at the data - but one thing that has stood out as potentially valuable for further study is the transition into and out of small group discussions. In the Zoom video conferencing platform, we have the capability to divide participants into "breakout rooms" where they can have a discussion between 2-4 colleagues and a coach that "enters" the room. Coaches can move from room to room to observe and facilitate discussions.

It's too early to claim anything quite yet, but we have seen collegial discussion and social interaction between teachers who aren't geographically close. Even though they are online, and haven't met each other face to face, teachers share stories from their own classrooms, laugh, support each other, and build community. I hope to look more deeply at the trust that manifests in these small group discussions, and see what happens during points of transition during the online course. That's just one small piece of the puzzle! Others?

-Kristana

 

Thank you for sharing, Kristana.  Interesting insights.  I will be anxious to follow your findings as you continue to analyze your large amounts of data!

Hello Elizabeth.  Thanks for your questions and interesting in the project.  Teachers were not using a common curriculum or curriculum materials as they were located in various parts of New York and Idaho.  The online course component of the PD model utilized Smith and Stein's (2011): 5 Practices for Orchestrating Productive Mathematical Discussion as a text to develop a common language and pedagogical foundation among teachers and coaches.  The course used the pedagogical content from this book as well as the mathematical tasks.  So while the different curricula and materials did come up from time to time in discussions, it never became a hindrance for the group as a whole.  

It is also worth noting that the one-on-one coaching cycles, while connected to the learning in the course, naturally differentiates based on the needs and interests of the teacher.  Therefore, issues around varying curriculum materials become a natural part of the coaching conversations. 

Hopefully this help answer your question.  Feel free to ask more.

Thanks again! 

Hi Terri -

Glad you found us! It looks like we have some alignment in our projects. I'd love to hear more about how you use the webinar feature; it looks like you are streaming classroom observations to a group of teachers during your MathLab PD, correct? We use Zoom as an online classroom, and like you saw in the thread above the breakout room feature has been especially useful for us. Do you have an online component for the MC2 professional development? Do you have a sense from your rural teachers if online training might be useful to them, or have they expressed any concerns about it? Looking forward to your perspective!

-Kristana