Structured Follow-up

The committee formed to structure the Structured Follow-up decided that SFU must be

required for each course. To manage that, the following recommendations were made:

  • Participants can take only two SummerAcademy courses.
  • SFU will be offered in both the Fall and Spring semesters for all 7 courses.
  • There will be four eight hour sessions followed by individual coaching supervised by the math/science coordinators in each district.
  • Missing a session will result in forfeiting $250 of the stipend.
  • Participant must commit during the summer which SFU they will be in.
  • To successfully complete SFU, three of the four sessions must be attended.
  • Ideally the same staff for SummerAcademy will do the SFU.

The guidelines for the Development Teams in designing the SFU were as follows:

  • There must be consistent products the participants are responsible for.
  • There must be structured time for looking at student work including small group protocols.(See below)*
  • There must be opportunity to consult with content and ed staff.
  • There must be a system for communicating which products the participants will bring.
  • There must be a system for communicating (email or Blackboard)
  • They should establish assessment methods for driving instruction.
  • SFU should be incorporated into plans for Fall/spring courses.

Dates were set: Fall: Sept. 17, Oct. 8, Nov. 5, Dec. 3

Spring: Jan. 21, Feb. 4, Mar. 4, April 8

In summary, each SummerAcademy participant will be expected to complete the SFU. $500 will be withheld from the stipend until it is completed. The question of withholding credit is unresolved. The Individual Coaching Models will be developed by the coordinators in the districts.

*From the Evaluation Plan:

Analysis of Student Records of Practice

Records of practice are examples of student work resulting from participation in a particular class. Ball and Cohen (1999) suggest that analyzing such records provide insight into student thinking as well as classroom practices. It is anticipated that this project will provide traditional and innovative records of practice from both teachers and students that upon analysis will enrich the information available to the evaluator. Records of practice available to the evaluator will include both teacher and student items such as lesson plans, lab reports, graphs, and assessments

The records of practice will be an assignment during Structured Follow-Up, thereby providing a data pool that represents each participant teacher and district. The assignment will be negotiated with the education faculty, so as to be mutually beneficial to course instructors and the Evaluation Team.

Greater detail:

The purpose of the records of practice is to collect an additional set of data that can be used to determine the impact of the professional development courses on the teachers’ content knowledge and pedagogy. The minimum data set would be two submissions of work during the teachers 15 months with the project. The work would reflect a participant’s classroom attempt at a new teaching method or content lesson. For example, a participant may write a description or provide a lesson plan of the class activities, then after presenting the lesson, they collect student work and write a reflection on the lesson based on their students’ performance and their perception of the lesson. The participant submits a copy of the original lesson plan, a few examples of student work, and their reflection. This will be my data pool. If I could get a few of these during a participant’s tenure with the RM-MSMSP, then we would have additional data to support our professional development efforts.

Questions:

Is this a reasonable request? Does the Development Team have strong objections to including an assignment such as this? What portions of this do we need to negotiate? Can we have parallel assignments both between sections and math/science?