Early in the program, we lay a strong foundation for lesson/video analysis by helping participants connect to some key pieces of research (e.g., findings from How Students Learn Science in the Classroom and from the TIMSS video study) as they deepen their understanding of the two lenses and associated strategies. The lenses and strategies (along with important science ideas or common student ideas) become the focus on the lesson/video analysis. The lenses/strategies are what we expect teachers to notice (or not!). Initially, teachers analyze video of other teachers, then eventually analyze video of one another—all in a study group setting. This progression helps build a community where they can safely analyze video of their one another. The video they analyze of one another is taken/captured when they implement “STeLLA Lesson Plans” that serve as initial supports for learning the lenses/strategies. The lesson plans are specifically designed to call out the strategies, possible teacher questions, and student responses. As for specific challenges that teachers experience initially—the challenges are as different as the teachers. Commonly teachers struggle in two main areas: 1) most struggle in deepening their content knowledge and 2) some struggle with how the program challenges their beliefs about teacher and learning (i.e., some teachers really struggle too develop a student thinking lens). As you may be able to tell, the program is transformative and that involves cognitive dissonance and time to resolve and develop a new repertoire of classroom practice.

Thank you for sharing! I see this a lot in my mathematics pre-service teacher education courses (i.e., deepening of content knowledge and beliefs about what it means to teach – and learn – mathematics). It is interesting that you are also experiencing these challenges. Do you find these challenges dissipate over time?

Hi Zenaida. We measured PCK using an instrument in which teachers watch short segments (3-5 minutes) of carefully selected classroom video, and are asked to write about what they see in the video. On pretests we see teachers writing about things like classroom management and the ways in which the classroom is similar or dissimilar to their own. On posttests teachers move to providing detailed accounts of student thinking and the teacher’s pedagogical moves. A quite detailed and time-consuming rubric is used to score the teacher’s responses, and so we are working in another grant to use lexical analysis and machine learning to train computers to do the scoring (http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID...). PCK is a tricky construct to measure though, and we’ve benefited greatly by the work done at the BSCS PCK Summit (http://pcksummit.bscs.org/).
Classroom practice is being measured by collecting classroom video of the teachers before and after participation in the professional development. A similarly resource intensive process is involved in scoring these data, but we have no measurement solution to that issue, yet!

Hi Meredith. We continue to work with some of the STeLLA teachers, but we’re currently looking into ways to formalize ongoing collaborations, potentially through researcher-practitioner partnerships. It’s always frustrating to get to the end of grants like this and not be able to continue to support and work with people who have benefited so greatly from the collaboration. We’re hoping we can leverage the research data in that regard. We also have an MSP project in California in collaboration with Cal Poly Pomoma that has district-wide scaling and sustainability of STeLLA PD as a primary goal from the onset.