Hi. A very ambitious teacher development project. How did you obtain school administration support for the time involved by teachers? What teacher incentives were there and what proportion of teachers saw it through all five years? What measures of student success did you use?

Indeed it has been!

We had some substantive discussions with administrators at both the site level and the district level before submitting the proposal. Administrators supported the idea of teachers applying as site teams, so they could support one another in implementation of changes at their schools. There was a great deal of district support for the project, even to the extent of holding recruiting meetings before being awarded the grant. Quite a few of the project teachers are now in leadership positions, and continue to support project approaches.

Teachers were paid generous stipends in the summer institutes, self-facilitated collaboration time, and seminars, and the lesson study took place during the work day (substitute teachers’ salaries were paid in full by the grant for one year, then the district took over slowly until the district paid 80% of the cost in the last year.)

About half the teachers completed the full five years, but the vast majority completed at least three years of the project. The slots that were vacated were filled easily, as the project had developed a very positive reputation in the district. We continue to receive emails from teachers who left the project about how they still use what they learned.

Student success measures have had to change over time. We originally intended to use the CA Standards Tests (CSTs) to measure growth and to compare grades of students of project teachers with students whose teachers did not participate in the project. But with the advent of CCSS, the CSTs were discontinued so we have scores for only two years + baseline there (and our analyses showed that the more the teachers participated in ACES, the better their students did, even after only 2 years). We are now working on comparing project students with whole district scores on SBAC tests. Anecdotally, based on unofficial comparisons, the teachers and administrators are very happy with the results in terms of student learning.

Davida,
Your video made me want to be a math teacher. Very exciting, and it’s because of the richness and depth of the PD system that these teachers experienced.
I have to say that I don’t care much about student score effects — but I would like to know if you have done any study of changes in teachers’ practice, how that evolved over the years, and maybe something about which elements in the system had the most impact. Or maybe there are some parts (e.g summer institute) that open doors/provide insight that the others then amplify/build upon?

Thanks for sharing your project! I’m impressed by the multi-pronged approach and sustained PD plan. How many teachers over what grade levels were involved? Also, what would you say was the biggest challenge? What are you most proud of?

How did the lesson study component work for your team? Did you find that teachers learned to conduct their own investigations of the lessons, with varying ways of looking at the student learning in classrooms? It can be challenging to get teachers to grasp this key idea in lesson study!

Hi Davida, What an impressive project! It shares similar structures to the “Nebraska Math,” a NSF project at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Wendy Smith presented this project in the 2015 video showcase.

This is exciting work! Given the long-term committment of ACES teachers, I wonder how you recruit teachers to participate in this program.