External Evaluation: Professional Learning in New Mexico
Math-Focused Professional Learning Series
In the Spring of 2021, Teaching Lab led a 6-week virtual math-focused professional learning series with over 50 educators across the state of New Mexico, focused on supporting teachers to:
Attend to rigor aligned to core mathematical practices and standards;
Strengthen students’ conceptual understanding;
Affirm students’ diverse (mathematical) identities and center instruction on student knowledge;
Use high-quality curricular materials (i.e., EngageNY, Illustrative Math) to facilitate high-quality instruction.
“Math teachers who participated showed substantively meaningful changes in their knowledge of math pedagogy, self-efficacy at delivering high-quality instruction, and self-reported practices.”
The Content Was Phenomenal
Dr. David Blazar from the University of Maryland conducted an external evaluation of Teaching Lab’s elementary and middle school math professional learning series in New Mexico.
Results were overwhelmingly positive and statistically significant: Math teachers who participated showed substantively meaningful changes in their knowledge of math pedagogy, self-efficacy at delivering high-quality instruction, and self-reported practices related to high expectations for student learning and promoting strong working relationships with parents and students.
Teachers in focus groups said, “the content was phenomenal” and loved the opportunities for cross-school collaboration, pointing to the unexpected benefits of virtual professional learning.
For such a short engagement, it was great to see that the largest effect observed was in the category of teacher knowledge, which generated an effect size of 0.7 SD, equivalent to the median teacher moving to approximately the 76th percentile in the distribution of their knowledge of math pedagogy.
For teacher-reported self-efficacy, high expectations, and building strong working relationships, the standardized change was approximately 0.35 SD, which means the average teacher moved from the 50th to the 63rd/64th percentile in the distribution of effectiveness.
Standardized differences ranged from 0.4 to 1 standard deviation (SD), which are similar to or larger than differences between novice versus veteran teachers. This means that over a very short professional learning engagement, teachers advanced as much as a novice teacher would over the course of accumulating years of teaching experience.
