MSP LNC 2013

In this interactive presentation we will examine the entailments of taking a distributed perspective to leading and managing instruction, especially in diagnosis and design work that is essential for instructional improvement. We will discuss essential elements of a distributed perspective and examine some common myths about the perspective. We will explore how a distributed perspective presses for attention to both formal and informal sources of leadership in school organizations. We will pay particular attention to the practice-aspect of a distributed perspective and in particular examine how aspects of the organizational situation, such as organizational routines and tools, shape the practice of leading and managing instruction. Threaded throughout our discussion will be a consideration of how a distributed perspective can inform school leaders' efforts to improve instruction.

Although most MSP project teams were not thinking about NGSS when their proposal was submitted and approved for funding, the proposed standards have implications for many of the current projects. This session is designed to answer the following questions in addition to creating a network of NGSS resources for MSP projects:

1. Why is NGSS different from other standards?
2. What does NGSS mean for your MSP?
3. What will it take to make what was intended as a framework to actually make it into the classroom and translate to better teaching?
4. How can stakeholders be empowered to see themselves as actors in successful implementation of NGSS?

This interactive session includes active discussions within teams, across projects, and within both heterogeneous and homogeneous stakeholder groups. It is designed to leverage the richness of experiences of teacher leaders, K-12 administrators, faculty, and evaluators who are encouraged to participate in this session with their teams.

In this session, participants will engage in activities to help MSP teams come to agreement on how best to address the root causes of important problems of practice. The activities will illustrate one way to integrate insights from research with the wisdom of practice. As part of the session, we will create diagrams of key drivers for transformation in four key areas of STEM teaching and learning: learning through STEM practices, formative assessment, cyberlearning, and relating everyday, informal, and formal learning. As part of the session, participants will hear how this set of activities fits into a broader effort aimed at supporting research-practice partnerships, the Research+Practice Collaboratory, a newly funded project of the Exploratorium, EDC, TERC, the University of Washington, and the University of Colorado.

Are the Mathematics and Science Partnerships an expenditure or an investment of federal dollars? Seen as an expenditure, the MSP grants buy services and short term outcomes. In this view MSP are funds used to enhance student achievement, in particular. An investment differs from an expenditure in that it produces capital enduring assets that can be used for future improvement efforts. Too often we believe MSP projects do not see themselves as long-term investments. And evaluators do not carefully document the different forms of educational capital the MSP projects create.

This session will explore the need for documenting and communicating the total return on investment that accrues from the MSP investment. Discussions will focus on the ways in which evaluators can broaden their lens and capture long term capital creation as well as short term activities and contributions.

Jim Dearing and Chris Dede present two frameworks for designing MSP models so that they achieve widespread use and impact. Jim Dearing shares eight fundamental components for knowledge diffusion; this framework has been widely adopted by the health care industry. Chris Dede discusses five dimensions for scaling up an innovation; this framework has been successfully applied in numerous settings. These dimensions and components can be applied to the Math Science Partnerships models as ways to increase the number of educators who implement these models and take them to scale. The session will present each of these frameworks and will be followed by interaction with attendees.

The session examines challenges, interpretations, and substantive recommendations to engage students in the Standards for Mathematical Practice. Presenters will present a focus on supporting teachers to bring the “practice of mathematics” into their K-12 teaching of mathematics. Building on the early work leading to the NCTM Standards and decades of work on clarifying habits of mind, we will examine share professional development examples from our work with teachers. Recommendations will be discussed for keeping the Standards for Mathematical Practice at the forefront of Common Core implementation and assessment.

STEM teacher leadership takes many forms in many contexts. This session is organized around exploring those forms and contexts. We begin by introducing several definitions of teacher leadership to ground our discussion in common language and that illustrate the complexity of teacher leadership. Next, we identify four dimensions of teacher leadership: length of time as a teacher leader, amount of professional time committed to teacher leadership, level of formality of leadership, and the size of the audience. The majority of the session will be spent with the attendees learning from each in small groups through facilitated discussions of the unique challenges and successes associated with various combinations of these dimensions. We will conclude the session by analyzing the usefulness of characterizing STEM teacher leadership by these dimensions with questions like: Are there missing dimensions? Are these dimensions useful in analyzing types of teacher leadership? What are some good exemplars for various combinations of these dimensions? How might you use these in your work?

A major goal of the Math Science Partnership program is the accomplishment of “institutional change” at core partner universities and schools. Institutional change requires transformation of the culture of an organization that is ideally supported by formal articulation of shared values and an aligned reward system. The culture of higher education is notoriously resistant to change, making it necessary to work toward goals in a systematic way over significant period of time. In this session the moderators will guide a discussion among participants regarding specific goals that should be pursued in order to ensure that universities become more supportive of and involved with pre-college education in the future. We will also explore actions that can be taken to begin to make progress toward those goals and share information about strategies that have been effective.