Rebekah Elliott

Professional Development: A Key to Kentucky's Educational Reform Effort.

Abstract Despite its essential role in educational reform, professional development typically does not receive adequate support in systemic reform efforts. This article presents an exception—a state that incorporated professional development as a central priority in its reform effort and four schools that used state resources to build their capacity for enacting the reform agenda. We describe central features of Kentuckys approach to professional development, characterize elements of professional development within the four schools, and discuss how these elements promoted three dimensions of school capacity: individual teachers’ knowledge, skills, and dispositions; professional community; and program coherence. Based on this “image of the possible,” we offer recommendations for professional development that supports systemic, standards-based educational reform.

Conceptualizing the Work of Leading Mathematical Tasks in Professional Development

Filling the knowledge gap in the limited research on professional development leaders is an urgent issue if teacher learning is to be improved. This research and development project is studying how leaders learn to cultivate mathematically rich professional development environments. The authors adapted two frameworks from classroom-based research—sociomathematical norms and practices for orchestrating productive discussion—to support leaders’ understanding of facilitation of mathematics professional development. In this article, the authors describe the use of these frameworks in their work and argue for a third framework—the mathematical knowledge for teaching. Based on the analysis of their work, they believe that mathematics professional development leaders need to cultivate particular sociomathematical norms for teacher explanation and employ practices for orchestrating discussions to achieve the purposeful development of teachers’ specialized knowledge of mathematics for teaching.