A common approach to scaling up a professional development program is for the researchers who designed the program to prepare teacher leaders to facilitate it at their schools. When researchers eventually leave, however, teacher leaders may receive less support. To ensure that teacher leaders continue receiving support, researchers can prepare…

Using evidence of student thinking and performance is crucial to enacting ambitious science teaching because intimate, formative data can be responsive to student ideas about science. However, narratives and policies about assessment and data use do not always position teachers to draw on the breadth and variety of evidence from the classroom to…

Classroom assessment and the use of student performance data to inform instructional decisions have significant potential to help students meet the learning goals of science education. Research has shown that process-oriented assessment practices are challenging and sometimes ignored aspects of teaching, partly because teachers' conceptions of…

This article reports an investigation of a professional development program to enhance elementary teachers' ability to engage their students in argument from evidence in science. Using a quasi-experimental approach, three versions were compared: Version A--a 1-week summer institute with a 2-week summer practicum experience and 8 follow-up days…

Background: This paper describes the Problem-Solving Cycle model of professional development and the Mathematics Leadership Preparation model of PD leader preparation. These models form the backbone of our current research-practice partnership project in which we are working with a large urban district to adapt these models to develop district…

This article focuses on three features of professional development (PD) programs that play an important role in developing leadership skills and building teachers' capacity: (1) fostering a professional learning community, (2) developing teachers' mathematical knowledge for teaching, and (3) adapting PD to support local needs and interests. We…

This document includes the final data collection and scoring tools created by the "Scoop" project, a five-year project funded through the Center for Evaluation, Standards,and Student Testing (CRESST), to develop an alternative approach for characterizing classroom practice. The goal of the project was to use artifacts and related materials to…

The paper examines how community was established in a professional development institute that focused on algebra content knowledge for middle school mathematics teachers. This qualitative study was framed within a situative perspective. We analyzed multiple data sources to identify the ways in which community was established. Results indicate…