Thank you for your interest! We have developed other tools, including what we call our RMT Planning and Coaching Protocol, which breaks down each of the components of our instructional model into much more detail, along with examples. We also have a Lesson Planning tool and a Task Bank. These tools are used extensively in professional development for planning, reflection, decomposition, and rehearsal and we find that they provide a common language and vision to help support classroom implementation. You can find links to these tools on our project website: https://www.gse.upenn.edu/academics/research/re.... and we welcome any feedback. One area we are continually working on improving is the focus on equity (specifically dimensions of identity and power).

Thank you Eric! You are right that it is hard to narrow it down to one or two things, and we are in the midst of analyzing 3 yrs of data, but one thing that stands out is that teachers develop new views of what it means to be a learner and doer of math, and this has a lot of impact on how they think about their own classroom practice (their instructional vision) and how they think about the experiences of their own students and their students identities as math learners. The "experience" professional development has turned out to be a very important foundation, and teachers reference it even two or more years down the road.

Thank you for your comments Myriam. We are trying to make sure we are continually focusing on and making sense of students' experience of math, rather than only focusing on teaching practices. We've built some of that into our tools, and we are also experimenting with having teachers collect short student surveys at the end of a math lesson. The survey asks students to indicate how they felt as a learner during the lesson (confused, frustrated, proud, excited) and to explain why. Teachers look at this data as part of the collaborative reflection on lessons.

Thanks, Caroline. I imagine it's very interesting to read students' explanations for why they feel they way they do. Have you thought of including "what have you learned (today or through this activity)? 

Great minds think alike, Myriam. In an earlier iteration of these surveys, we did have a question revolving around "what did you learn today/over the course of this activity". We ended up not including that question this year - we wanted to keep the surveys as short as possible and really wanted to focus on how kids were feeling after an RMT lesson. But, as Caroline mentioned, we're still experimenting and may find that a question like the one you're suggesting would provide useful feedback for our teachers.

Again, hard to pin it down to one thing, but I would say we are continually learning the importance of being responsive--to students, to teachers, but most of all to different school contexts. We've had to continually adjust our model for different circumstances, particularly in this last year when we shifted everything to be virtual and shifted our focus to help teachers prepare for virtual instruction. Our schools have different strengths and needs--some have released math lead teachers, and some do not, so we've built a lot of flexibility into our model and created different pathways to math instructional leadership.

Thank you for watching and yes, we built sustainability in from the start in the hopes that this initiative will continue after the grant funding ends. In the beginning, our project team facilitated all the professional development. But each year, a group of experienced teacher leaders who have gone through the PD work with our team to learn to lead the PDs and/or collaborative lesson design groups. By the next year they are independently providing the PD at their schools or for the network. So in essence we are gradually replacing our project team with our experienced teacher leaders. We don't just expect them to jump right in and lead though---at first we provide a lot of support in the form of collaborative planning and rehearsals. They also come together after the PDs to watch video clips and reflect on their facilitation. It has really been neat to see them taking on a leadership role for their schools and across the network.

This sounds like a great model to prepare teacher leaders to continue this work after the project ends.

Yes, Paola - there seems to be an interesting overlap between RMT and Project AIM! I particularly enjoyed looking at the Discourse Matrix and thinking about how our understandings of responsiveness speak to each other. Feel free to look at our Planning and Coaching Protocol (a tool to help teachers and leaders plan and reflect on their own responsive facilitation). I appreciated hearing your teachers discuss how they've adapted high quality math discourse for online teaching. We've seen a lot of flexibility and growth in our teachers' implementation of RMT lessons in their virtual classrooms. This has had a lot to do with our Collaborative Lesson Planning and Reflection PDs. Can you tell us a little bit more about how your teachers learn about, plan for, and reflect on their own high-quality discourse?

Thanks for this input, Toby! We agree - self-reflection, ongoing PD, and collaboration are an important part of being an educator. We are honored to be able to offer this space for our partners, but we realize that we will not always be around to provide this support. This is one of the reasons why we are working hard to build instructional math leadership and cohorts in our partnering schools and across the network. We'd love for all teachers to have access to a math leader so that they then have ongoing access to collaboration, reflection, and growth.

Thank you DeLene! In the final year of this project, we will continue to investigate the development of instructional leadership both in classroom teachers and teacher leaders. We are excited to see our current leaders continue to grow and become more independent as well as welcoming a new cohort of leaders who will learn to lead professional development and collaborative lesson planning groups within their schools and across the network. As Caroline mentioned above, we have found responsive teaching to be a way to bring equity into classrooms as it centers students' learning experiences and values different ways of knowing and understanding mathematics. We are looking to study that connection more deeply as we support teachers in creating safe, equitable learning spaces. 

Thank you so much! What a wonderful series of next steps!

No problem DeLene. We really appreciate your interest in our project!

Thanks for sharing your first-hand experiences, Riel! We are so glad to have you and the Hamilton crew in RMT. Now that you're almost done with the first year of PD - solving problems and engaging in RMT as a learner - you can look forward to next year when we will focus more on learning about how to teach responsively. This will involve being a part collaborative lesson planning sessions with folks at your grade level from across the network.

What a great question, Margaret. We, too, have found that it takes some effort to get teachers to think about exploring as opposed to orchestrating. RMT educators spend their entire first year of PD experiencing responsive facilitation from the learner's perspective. Over the course of the year, we reflect on that facilitation and gradually reveal the RMT instructional model. We constantly remind teachers that RMT is a long-term investment in their practice. We work hard to build trust and create a safe space in these PDs. And we really try to make these math circles fun and educational! Ultimately, we've found that most teachers are willing to take time to be a learner before jumping to what it looks like in practice. Again, this takes time, but in the long run it has lasting effects on teachers' practices and students' experiences.