Lessons Learned From an MSP: Invest in Teacher Leadership
In order to gather information the PI and PD - Drs. Judi Fonzi and Cindy Callard = interviewed key district personnel about each of the partner district's efforts to sustain and move forward on their mathematics reform agenda after the life of the project. This was in service to exploring the larger question "What happens when grant funding for reform ends?"
Throughout the 2007-2008 school year, Drs. Fonzi and Callard conducted 20, 2-hour interviews, interviewing 28 key district personnel in all 10 of the MSP partner districts. These key district leaders included teacher leaders from the project (14), classroom teachers (1), principals (5), district directors of mathematics (2), district professional development coordinators (3), assistant superintendents (1) and superintendents (2).
These semi-structured interviews were centered on 6 beliefs that had informed the project (see Table 1). Our purpose was to gather information about what efforts were being made in mathematics reform now that the grant funding was over, and how these key district leaders perceived the work that was taking place and the direction of the district without the explicit support of the MSP project.
Table 1
Beliefs informing project/interviews | |
|
|
Supportive context | Parents and community play a crucial role in teaching and supporting students to learn mathematics. |
Knowledgeable | Teachers' content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge plays a role in what and how mathematics is taught. |
Vision | Mission and vision are crucial to the development of a cohesive program. |
On-going learning | In order to maintain high quality, a school/district must be a "learning organization." |
Leader | All important work needs consistent and on-going leadership/sheparding/attention by someone. |
Math program | High quality K-12 mathematics programs foster knowledge of the big ideas of mathematics and mathematical habits of mind. |
We were able to have a second round of interviews with several of the district teams and in these interviews we primarily followed up with them in terms of what was going on in their district and also asked clarifying questions based on our early analysis of the first interview.
Each of the interviews was audio-taped and transcribed except for 1 that was done by phone. These transcriptions are then being coded based on each of the beliefs noted above. We are then conducting a cross-site analysis, where we have identified some early "emerging themes" of "lasting impacts" that will be further explored in the year 2 interviews.
