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Hello and thank you for listening to the teaching math teaching podcast teaching math teaching podcast is sponsored by the Association of mathematics teacher educators. Your hosts are Eva Sennheiser myself, dusty Jones and Joel amadon. Today we're talking with Ruth Heaton, who is the Chief Executive Officer of teachers development group. Teachers development group is a nonprofit organization that is dedicated to improving all students mathematical understandings, and achievement through meaningful, effective professional development for teachers and school leaders. We're excited to speak with us today to learn more about teachers development group and how they have adapted to the online professional development world that we find ourselves in. Welcome. Thank you. And thank you to dusty and Joel as well, I really welcome the opportunity to talk about the work of teachers development group and the rapid changes and learning we've had to do in the last couple of months. So we offer multiple forms of professional development. The various forms come first off in the form of seminars, and these room resemble what people might think about when they hear professional development, their multi day learning opportunities that look like a course. For example, we offer seminars for teachers about developing instructional practices that support justification and generalization of math ideas in K 12 classrooms, where we also offer seminars for leaders on developing leadership skills. Specifically in the area of math, there are four common elements to all of the seminars that we offer, the instructional and leadership practices that we teach are all research based, we've always had a focus on equity. And that focus continues to grow stronger, given the needs of our school partners, the interests of the Tdg consultants, and the times that we live in, we do mathematics in all of our seminars. All of the mathematics we do is in service of justification and generalization. And we use the doing of math as a context for considering instructional and leadership practices. A final product for each of the seminars is an action plan for implementing ideas from the course into one's own classroom, or school context. Another form of professional development we do is math studio. And math studio is a year long professional learning experience. Typically within a single school and tied to live work within a selected classroom. Something we call the studio classroom, and the teacher is referred to as the math studio teacher. So to get a picture of this, you could imagine a Tdg consultant, working with a group of teachers, instructional leaders, math coaches, and the building principal or there might be visiting principals there as well, from neighboring schools, all coming together to learn from working with a studio teacher to plan. Observe the enactment of a math lesson and debrief the students and teachers habits and routines that supported productive engagement during the lesson. And concluding the event would be an opportunity for the participants to consider how what they've learned during the studio generalizes to their own practices, and leads to next steps for them to work on until the next studio event. So the tenants are the sort of important components no matter what form studio might take, is live work with students. We either work with a classroom full of students during math or with students in small groups that have been pulled from classrooms. We do math that's focused on justification and generalization. We plan for instruction, we do some form of enactment, we debrief the enactment and in the process focus on what students did and appeared to be learning we generalize to practice, and we rehearse next steps for implementation of ideas from one studio to the next often

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So during a studio event, the tvg consultant does leadership coaching, which is another form of professional development we offer. The Tdg consultant works closely with principals and other instructional leaders to visit multiple classrooms for short periods of time, gathered data on teachers and students, what they're doing what they're saying, then analyze the data get together and help the administrators develop a leadership voice, and organize the school for math learning. We also do leadership coaching in the context of professional learning communities. Tdg consultants attend and facilitate PLC work in schools. They do this intermittently, it might be once a month, they help teachers use district curriculum materials to choose or redesign tasks. They may support the implementation of teachers action plans between studios. And in the past month. While we've been doing that work online Tdg consultants have been doing a lot of celebrating with teachers, teachers, having met the challenge of communicating and teaching online with their students, troubleshooting and brainstorming with teachers about supporting student learning in a distance learning environment. So Ruth, let me jump in, because that is a lot of information. Yeah, I'm trying to summarize a little bit what I heard you say, and since you and I work pretty closely, I'm hoping that I'm not too far off. So Tdg does a lot of different kinds of professional development. One of the things that sets Tdg apart is the combination of the summer workshops with the year long work in the schools. Were you detailed in your answer, like all the different pieces, when Tdg does, I think two main pieces that I think are so powerful is that Tdg focuses on community building in the school so that they the school can then continue to work on their own afterwards. Is that correct? Yes. So there's a long term goal of thinking about sustainability. Definitely. I was wondering if you could give us like, one example, we could wrap our head around like, so you gave us a really good big overview, could you pick one thing that teachers might work on, in either the summer or a session and just describe but like one smaller thing in my overview, I talked repeatedly about justification and generalization. So that's a major goal. And I can give a small example of both from the coursework and how that plays out in studio, for example, around the meaning of operations, we would in the in a summer seminar, people, participants would spend time doing mathematics and thinking deeply, for example, about the meaning of division. In doing so they begin to think about generalizations that might link the meaning of division to the meaning of multiplication, for example, and begin to think about mathematical ideas that would apply no matter what numbers you might be using in a particular problem. And then in the studio work, when participants would be observing a classroom, they'd be gathering data on discourse, and trying to capture in their own notes. what it is they hear students saying, because oftentimes the generally, justifications and generalizations that adults might make don't necessarily sound like what students would be saying. We take the opportunity during studio to think a lot about how do justifications and generalizations come across in the language and representations of students? Yeah, and then I just remembered the second example that I wanted to share that I thought was really powerful about teachers development group is that the work really fits on what teachers are

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interested in doing an interested in learning about. So it's not like you come in with a work and I tell you what to do, but you figure out what teachers are working on and then help them continue working on the right ideas, which is why I mentioned the tenants of our work and the guiding principles, in that we try to both individualize our work to the needs of teachers and school districts, but at the same time, adhere to a group of tenants that guide our work. I really liked that last part there, I read a, an article by Jeff Duncan and Rod a, I think I'm missing a name in there. But he talked about this idea of karenia with working with schools and I got this article early on from Vicki hand, in my doctoral career, and she just pointed out there within the article, it was pointed out about this idea of Kenya, that if you go into a school, or you're working with a school, and if when you leave everything you did leaves with you, like, that's not being caring, right, that's not an active karenia and Mike, and so I just like that, that is one of the central tenants of what you do. Because there's, you know, too often that what we know, like, there's too often where people come in, and they've got letters before and after their name, and they come in, and they say, Hey, here's what you should do, and you leave. And it's not, it doesn't happen anymore, versus like thinking about, Hey, what are you already doing? How can we help you do something sustainable? You know, that's continuous. And so I really like that, I really appreciate that. And it goes along with the idea that the way we envision our work is that we're working side by side, teachers and administrators and engaging in the work that they do, and helping them think deeply about it. That's awesome. This is dusty. And Ruth, I had a question about the scope of what you do geographically, I believe you're headquartered in Oregon, in the northwest part of the United States. But then you have professional development math specialist, it looks like scattered across the US, is it? Are you guys like everywhere in the US?

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So in the past year, we were in 100 different schools in 12 different states, and our consultants live all over the country. And the consultants come together four times a year in Portland, to participate in their own professional development. I think that's fantastic, because this is a nice resource, but I am really not close to Oregon at all, but maybe teachers in my area could have some access to that. And I guess, maybe Eva, this is leading to your next question about so what has happened recently? Are you taking over? Wow, yeah, no, but I thought that would be a good slide.

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All right. Let's go there. So the just that you want to hear about what's happened in the changes we've made to move to an online environment.

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So we've made the decision to offer primarily synchronous learning experiences. And we are offering the seminars that I spoke of earlier, in three hour chunks of time, using zoom Moodle, and Google Slides and Google Docs. In the last month, we have done PLCs with teachers supplying virtual support. Really, you can I interrupt you quickly. I'm not sure that everybody who's listening knows what a PLC is. So professional learning community and in the schools that we work in, they may be organized by teachers at a grade level, or a grade band, and they tend to be professional communities within a school. And some schools have them that meet weekly, some meet monthly. Our work has tended to be maybe twice a month over a period of multiple months, or it might be monthly across a school year. We've also experimented with doing virtual classroom observations with teachers online with their students over zoom and having having instructional leaders also observing and gathering data and then driving

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thing off zoom and reconnecting with people that observed with us, and debriefing what we're seeing and then offering the classroom teacher feedback as well, and getting their input. It's helping everyone grow in their understanding of the challenges that teachers are encountering and helping us all think about, how do we engage students in this virtual environment? So let me ask practically, how do you do this observing, we get on zoom. But then we turn off our video cameras and our microphones, and just observe, watch what's going on. Listen to the interactions note, who's participating who's not participating, just try to be another set of eyes as to what's going on. Okay, wow. And then we anticipate that come fall, where there's a lot of uncertainty about what classrooms are going to look like, whether they're things will be happening face to face, or online. whatever's going on, we're not certain that as professional development providers that we would be welcome in a school right off the bat, just given all of the issues of the spread of COVID-19. And so we are making plans now to use swivel camera technology. And combine that with zoom as a way to think about how we can piece together what might be the virtual work resembling our studio work, that's gonna lead to another podcast on how to use swivel cameras. Let me ask you a question. So you talked a little bit about how your professional development has changed, and you move to zoom meetings and those things. Has any of your content changed to help teachers with the move to online? Yes, and no. And let me start with the No. So basically, I would say much of the content that we taught face to face, we figured out ways to do it online, using a combination of the things I mentioned, zoom Moodle, and Google Docs, I think one main thing that has changed is we've had to think differently about what we can expect of teachers at during a given professional development session, we used to, in face to face meetings work, you know, six to eight hours a day with a teacher, that's much too long to be engaged virtually. And so we're now offering half day sessions spread out over, it could be four to six weeks, maybe every other day, rather than four full days in a row. So that's one major scheduling change that we've made. We also have developed a new seminar, entitled responding to students current understandings. And the intent of this seminar is to support teachers, as they try to address the unfinished learning and unfinished teaching that happened this spring when schools are closed in mid March. And we plan to offer this course beginning in August. One other thing that has been kind of an unexpected outcome of our online professional development is the learning opportunity that it's provided for our consultants. So moving this making this pivot to online work, has helped them take a new look at the content that they're really familiar with. And in doing so, and trying to think about how, for example, to do math in with participants in a virtual environment. It's had them pushed our consultants to think once again about the tasks and activities that they're engaged.

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Participants in and how they go about doing that. And as a result, I think our work will be stronger when we go back to face to face work. And I imagine that we will continue to keep an online component to the work. Another thing that's happened. So in addition to rethinking the content, and kind of having a reason to rethink and revise, that Tdg consultants have been collaborating with each other, even more than they've done in the past, we, you know, sort of given the urgency, we've had to move quickly. And that's really provided opportunities, new opportunities for that our consultants to work together. Also working in a virtual environment, it's been really easy for them to observe each other teaching in this virtual environment. So there's no expense involved. And that's always been a limitation for us in the past. If you're working in Connecticut, and you live in California, it's cost Tdg, to send a consultant to go and observe someone else. But it's made it very easy, and provided really wonderful new opportunities for our consultants to be talking about their own teaching with one another. So let me jump in and ask you imagine that somebody is starting out their career as a professional development provider, or is in their first few years? What advice would you give them right now in the current time that we find ourselves in? So I think one is have really clear goals for what you want people to get out of the experience, be relentless in your focus on those goals through whatever opportunities you provide them. Because in the end, the participants are going to be asking what's in it for me. And in the end, you want your goals to match what people are taking away. And I think having clear goals and sticking carefully to them throughout the opportunity will help accomplish that. Another thing that we're trying to do both face to face and virtually is model, the same kind of pedagogy that we're trying to teach. So we have a really talented set of consultants, who have been thinking very deeply about how it is you create discussions around mathematics, virtually, and how you use many of the instructional practices that we would have been that we promote, in face to face work with teachers, how can we do those virtually. So we're challenging ourselves to try to do the same kind of pedagogy that we've been doing face to face, and as a result, trying to offer models to teachers how they might go about it, Ruth, I think that new seminar that you have coming in August, sounds really interesting responding to this. I forget the exact way he described it, but responding to students understanding, particularly with the unfinished learning that happened, I think that's going to be really impactful. Because so many different contexts. So many different places have happened, but just helping teachers think through and helping teacher leaders think through how they work in that situation. It's different than just a typical August September with the summer slide that's happened. I think so. Right. And you know, a goal is to really help teachers think about how to accelerate learning rather than remediate it. Oh, yes, they need to keep moving forward with the curriculum at that grade level and how it is they can look across their curriculum, and think about what gaps might exist and work not all in September, but think about how they might work across the school year as they encounter different mathematical topics, and work on any unfinished teaching and learning

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That might have occurred around a particular topic or idea. That's great. I've got kind of a different question, Ruth. And I'm just curious if with your role in schools, and specifically working with teachers, I mean, there's just some other elements, I would assume that come into play during this time where the teachers are dealing with things that they've never had to deal with before. They're coming up with, you know, problems of practice they haven't seen before. On top of that, you know, there's just worried or they might have, you know, family members in their house when they're trying to teach online, you know, kids and whatnot, having those additional responsibilities or even dealing, I mean, just like the social emotional health of teachers. And I know, that's not explicitly what the teacher development group is about. But I'm assuming those come across, right, in these situations. And I don't know, do you have any? I mean, given all the different situations from across the country, then like, Is there any guidance, anything that you offer your professional developers on? Helping them in those situations or trying to? Yeah, I'm just curious. One big sort of message that we give ourselves is patience, patience with ourselves as professional developers, we have to recognize that we're not necessarily on people's radars at this point. And we really have to more than ever think about what are the needs of the people that we're working with? And how can our work support them. And we in these virtual professional development settings, we're constantly making adjustments. Because the Joel, the all of the stresses that you mentioned, we see those and we hear about them. And we just have to go in knowing that we have to adapt our work and think differently about it. I think a major pedagogical strategy that we use in math education is listening. And I think we have to do that more than ever now. And it's not just mathematics that we're listening for. And I would say that that's a message on multiple levels, it starts when we contact a school district, we listen really carefully to what's on the radar of the district right now, what are their most urgent needs, and then we hear it again, when we talk to principals. And when we talk with classroom teachers, and when we have been observing in classrooms, well, virtually in virtual classrooms, you know, we pay attention to both the students that are there, but a big issue that we know is happening is that there are many students that haven't been able to connect, and what kind of support do those students need? And, you know, they're, it's not a matter of having a discussion, it's, how are you going to get work to them, I appreciate those, the two messages you gave of having patience and listening, you know, because even just thinking about your, you're describing, like, you know, the meaning behind multiplication and how we connect that to division, and like, you know, if you don't listen, like you might go into with it, assuming like, oh, man, they're not going to want to talk about this, right? Now. They're gonna want to process through these things. Versus like, they might be like, you know, what, that's exactly what I want to talk about. Because there's so much going on that, I just want to talk about multiplication, and just focus in on that. And so without the listing, without the patience, you might come in with some expectations that, you know, have like that they're gonna want one thing or the other versus just listening and like, hey, they'll tell you, like, you know, just be there and say, like, what we're ready for is what I'm ready to prepare to give. So I appreciate that. Your comment also reminds me that in conversations with districts as they're trying to arrange professional development, we've really followed their lead as to when to offer it. So what we see as district leaders being really sensitive to their teachers, and thinking about when in relationship to the work they've been doing, is the best with that the work they've been doing virtually with kids, when is the best time to offer professional development for them, for example, and keeping an eye on when are things opening up in a particular state? And what does that mean for a teacher's life? both personally and professionally. All right. So to

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To close us out, we usually end with the question of whether you have any recommendations where people could turn for resources, what has helped you in the recent months or weeks? And do you have any suggestions or resources that you want to tell other people about? So we have been doing a lot of participating in other people's professional development, and online learning of all grain sizes. so happens that our pivot to online work coincided with the hundred days of learning for nctm. And we, across our organization, different people have participated in different webinars. And we have been both paying attention to the content. But we've also been paying attention to the presentation styles and the pedagogy that people are using, as they present ideas, we just jump in here that 100 days of learning that you refer to is 100 webinars put on by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. And that is available for free for this whole summer, and then will be available for nctm. Members afterwards, I believe. So anybody can currently go and check that out. And they're all recorded and available. Is that right? That sounds right to me. So another thing that I personally have drawn on is the work I did as a university faculty member offering online courses, and thinking about what it means to organize content virtually. And, you know, we have found Moodle, which is a free open source, sort of shell that you can use for online, any kind of online teaching and learning has been really wonderful. And once you get into it, it's not difficult to learn. And so I would strongly recommend for nonprofits like myself, to take advantage of something open source. What I was familiar with prior to take my work at teachers development group was Blackboard or canvas. And these are really expensive for a small nonprofit like teachers development group to invest in. So we've been really pleased with Moodle as a support for us. Our consultants are really good teachers. And they have thought about the strengths of their own practices, and then try to imagine how might they be able to recreate aspects of their practice within a virtual environment, I can offer a couple of examples. So we have one consultant who oftentimes would project student work as a point of a discussion for the participants within the professional development. And she has figured out a way to use her iPad as projector and combine that with zoom. And that's been really effective. We also teachers Development Group makes use of a series of posters that represent habits of mind and interaction for students. And we use this as a teaching tool. We've had consultants figure out how to post this behind them on like chart paper on zoom, and be able to point to it like they would during a professional development setting, modeling using these posters, as a classroom teacher to identify and be explicit about the kind of cognitive work that students are engaged in. One other thing I might add is that our consultants have done a lot of rehearsals with each other, over zoom, and done a lot of practicing and trying out things among themselves before going live with whoever they're working within professional development. So it sounds like what

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You're saying is bringing a few people together and brainstorming and trying things out is a really good way to practice and then attending other people's professional developments to kind of see what's going on there. Definitely.

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Well, thank you so much for talking to us. I'm going to give Joel and dusty one quick last chance before we close out. Ruth, I do want to thank you for coming on and sharing your expertise and know lots of good things are happening with the teachers development group, but then also just, you know, point out the obvious and like dusty pointed out, but, you know, he didn't know if the teachers development group was around him. And it's like, one of the silver linings of this time is that you know, what, is, uh, we're breaking down a lot of barriers with regards to location, right, but we can do some things and so that, it's nice to hear that the teacher development group is thinking creatively about how to offer high quality professional development no matter where people are at. So thank you for doing that. Thank you for sharing. Thank you. And I'll just echo Joel on with his thanks. I really think that you guys have done some good thinking about great ways to help teachers at many times, but especially right now, as we're trying to figure out what's happening in the fall in in our area. I'm glad that other people are also being really thoughtful and bringing their expertise to that to help not only in mathematics, but in in all areas of helping bring up a child. Okay, thank you again, for listening today teaching math teaching podcast, be sure to subscribe to the podcast, we hope that you're able to implement something that you just heard and take an opportunity to interact with other math teacher educators. Hello, listeners of the tg math teaching podcast, we have some big news. Are you ready? The teaching math teaching podcast is starting a summer book club. What better way to grow as teachers of math teachers than to engage in some professional learning together, and we would love for you to join us. In June we're going to be reading rough draft math revising to learn by Amanda Johnson. In July, we are reading high school mathematics lessons to explore, understand and respond to social injustice by Robert berry bazel Conway, Brian Lawler john Staley and colleagues. The plan for the book club is to read the book throughout the month and host weekly interactions on Twitter and Instagram around the chapters for the week. At the end of each month, we will have a podcast that discusses what we learned from the book and how we can apply what we learn to improve in how we teach math teachers. We also might be joined by some authors. In short, we're excited we hope you are as well. Follow us on social media, teach math teach on Twitter and at teaching math teaching on Instagram to stay up to date on how to participate in the teaching math teaching summer book club. Thanks again. As always, for listening to the teaching and teaching podcast, be sure to subscribe to the podcast follow us on Instagram and Twitter. And we hope that you're able to implement something that you hear in the podcast and take an opportunity like this summer book club to interact with other math teacher educators.