Episode 41: Centering Professional Development Around the Instructional Quality Assessment Rubrics

10/03/22 • 31 min

In this article we detail a research study using the Instructional Quality Assessment (IQA) Rubrics (Boston, 2012) as the frame for a professional development with mathematics teachers in grades 3-8. We wanted to create a professional development around a tool that was typically used in research as a way to observe teachers,
as a tool to use with teachers on their reflection of instruction. In this study we share both the researchers’ and teachers’ perspectives of affordances and constraints of the professional development and observational rubrics.

Special Guests: Amber Candella and Melissa Boston.

Special Guests: Amber Candella and Melissa Boston.

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Episode 40: Conversation with MTE editors: Vision, Submission Advice, Etc.

Special Guests: Kate Johnson and Michael Steele .

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Episode 43: Developing Preservice Teachers’ Understanding of Area Through a Units Intervention

Preservice elementary teachers (PSTs) often enter their teacher preparation programs with procedural and underdeveloped understandings of area measurement and its applications. This is problematic given that area and the area model are used throughout K–Grade 12 to develop flexibility in students’ mathematical understanding and to provide them with a visual interpretation of numerical ideas. This study describes an intervention aimed at bolstering PSTs’ understanding of area and area units with respect to measurement and number and operations. Following the intervention, results indicate that PSTs had both an improved ability to solve area tiling tasks as well as increased flexibility in the strategies they implemented. The results indicate that PSTs, similar to elementary students, develop a conceptual understanding of area from the use of tangible tools and are able to leverage visualizations to make sense of multiplicative structure across different strategies.

Special Guest: Megan Wickstrom.