MICHIGAN

MATHEMATICS AND SCIENCE

TEACHER
LEADERSHIP
COLLABORATIVE

What is the MMSTLC?

The Michigan Mathematics and Science Teacher Leadership Collaborative (MMSTLC) is a statewide program to develop
educational leadership around mathematics and science teaching and learning. Michigan has a problem: many of
the instructional leaders in these fields around the state are nearing retirement, while younger generations of
educators in our state have not developed a strong network of leaders to support these issues in our schools. The
MMSTLC was created from a number of smaller, successful instructional leadership initiatives in science, along with a
strong, research-based set of content and curricular programs in middle grades science and mathematics. All of
these efforts, working together, form the core of the MMSTLC program.
This group of partners not only manages and leads the professional
learning program for the project, but also mentors individual local Partner Institutions and Investigators:
teams and handles administrative functions for the project.
Saginaw Valley State University
(Walt Rathkamp - rathkamp@svsu.edu)
Local Teams and Partnerships: Grand Valley State University
(Karen Meyers - meyersk@gvsu.edu and
Within the program, implementation occurs locally. From the statewide
Mary Ann Sheline - shelinem@gvsu.edu
network of Mathematics and Science Centers (MSCs) that provide University of Michigan - Dearborn
support for teachers in their region, an initial cadre of 8 teams was (Judith Flowers - jflowers@umich.edu)
University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
developed to participate in the pilot effort of the program, with (Stephen Best - sdbest@umich.edu)
another cadre of 11 additional teams joining the effort this past year. Michigan Mathematics and Science
In order to ensure that these teams would be able to support educators Center Network (http://mscenters.org)

locally on a variety of issues, teams were composed of representatives

from the centers (who acted as directors of the local team efforts), teachers from high needs schools who showed
promise and interest in instructional leadership roles (designated as “teacher specialist/leaders” or TSLs), higher
education faculty (STEM) from local institutions, and building or district administrators from the participating
schools. These partnerships within the local area were rarely in place before the program, and are intended to
provide initial support and encourage further collaborations to sustain reform efforts.

Local Professional Development and Implementation

These local teams participated in the various statewide professional development provided by the partners, and had
opportunities to apply their learnings and develop skills through local implementation. Depending on needs and
context, teacher leaders may take a semester sabbatical from teaching to work in the local MSC to learn about
leadership and support local teachers, or teams of teachers from larger school districts may work on developing a PD
series for teachers throughout their district. For more information about the MMSTLC, visit: http://mmstlc.net
LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT

Challenges
Good leaders are not born, but they can be developed. Good leaders NEED TO have a set of experiences, skills,
attitudes, and knowledge to be able to help guide others in addressing the challenges around them while striving to
achieve the goals they set for themselves and, in our case, their students. However, very little professional
development addresses instructional leadership in the content areas. In order to ensure that the participants in this
program have the ability to address some of the instructional challenges within their schools or regions, they need to
have a set of skills, understandings, contacts, and experiences to help lead their schools toward academic
achievement in mathematics and science.

Professional Development for Leadership

The MMSTLC developed a leadership development component to our statewide and local efforts that addresses a
number of issues, including:

• Reviewing local data and situational contexts to develop strategic plans to support learning needs.
• Understanding strategies and considerations for designing and facilitating professional development.
• Recognizing and responding to one’s own and others’ leadership styles.
• Managing the process of change for individuals and schools, and addressing conflict with appropriate,
productive responses during this process.
• Facilitating learning communities and engaging in partnering efforts to promote such professional learning.

We are not a “trainer of trainers” program for leaders. We don’t have a common set of resources that everyone
would implement in their schools. Instead, we focus on the basic skills and concepts that all leaders need, and leave
the decision-making and implementation to those who can best address these issues in their own schools.

Leadership Skills and Experiences

Because the teams contain people in a variety of roles, it is critical to provide a core set of understandings of
leadership skills while also addressing the roles individual participants have on their team. The leadership sessions
at MMSTLC workshops provide some customized opportunities for individual roles (such as observation strategies for
administrators) while exposing the main participants (teacher leaders, STEM faculty, and MSC staff) to leadership
knowledge and skills that would allow them to effectively support colleagues.

Instructional Leadership in Mathematics and Science

Leadership skills and strategies alone won’t help your colleague better teach her students. The MMSTLC also
incorporates content-specific leadership knowledge and skills to help participants improve the content knowledge,
pedagogical practices, and content-specific instructional practices of teachers. For instance, all teacher leaders
collaborate with peers to design and lead short professional development activities among their colleagues first to
get feedback before trying them with other teachers. Add to this curriculum alignment strategies, collaborative
lesson design, observation or video-recording their instruction, and the result is educational leaders with the specific
skills and knowledge to support colleagues and students for years to come, no matter what curriculum, policy, or
assessment practice they encounter.
MATHEMATICS CONTENT AND PEDAGOGY

Challenges
In 2000, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, created a vision and set of standards for what quality
instruction would look like in a mathematics classroom. The challenge of providing this quality instruction is that it
requires a deep level of pedagogical content knowledge – that is, a knowledge of both the mathematics content and
how to teach this content to all students. The goal is for mathematics teachers to be able to understand the
important “big ideas” in mathematics and then to teach these ideas to their students in meaningful ways. All too
often, though, mathematics instruction is perceived as based on computation, memorization, and algorithms instead
of engaging students in tasks that require mathematical thinking. And if studies like the TIMSS video studies are
indicative of typical middle grades mathematics instruction, even when using such tasks, teachers often remove the
rigor in favor of the use of a quick algorithm. Thus, in order to meet the challenges of rigorous mathematics for all
students, teachers would likely benefit from professional development opportunities that are designed to enhance
mathematics teaching and students’ learning.

Professional Development for Mathematics

In order to develop a deeper understanding of the pedagogical content knowledge required to get students to think
mathematically, the MMSTLC mathematics component uses three kinds of resources: cases based on actual
classroom incidents; tasks based on the core concepts in mathematics; and student work on these challenging tasks
(see figure below). The resources allow teachers to grow in their own understanding of mathematics and to see how
their instruction and task selection can foster student understanding. Rather that trying to address a wide variety of
content strands, the focus is on ratio and proportional reasoning, one of the core concepts required for
understanding other concepts in algebra and geometry. Workshop sessions center around these resources and how
they could be used both in the teachers’ own instruction, and then in supporting the learning of other teachers that
they will lead.

Cases Tasks Student Work

The cases involve accounts of
instruction from actual
classrooms and show the
interactions that occur when
teachers use complex
mathematical tasks in the
classroom, and also reflect the
student thinking taking place
during instruction. MMSTLC uses
cases from the NSF sponsored
QUASAR project to help teachers
reflect on their own instruction.
Mathematics instruction is
generally organized around tasks,
and so, the quality and nature of
the task is critical in determining
the mathematics that students
must understand. How the
teacher addresses the task
instructionally will determine how
the students learn. Teachers in
the MMSTLC are working with
Vermont Project’s OGAP tasks to
identify both mathematical and
pedagogical goals.
In order to properly assess the
understandings students have about
various concepts, workshop participants
analyze various examples of student work
to recognize what misconceptions
students have, and how they might
respond to these challenges
instructionally. Workshop participants not
only analyze student work from the OGAP
project, but they are also encouraged to
give the tasks to their own students and
share that work during future workshop
sessions.

Along with the focus on these resources, participants bring in examples of their own artifacts of instruction to help
evaluate how the tasks and resources they use can be improved. These experiences can then help shape the
professional development they provide to colleagues, raising the instructional bar for all involved.
SCIENCE CONTENT AND PEDAGOGY

Challenges
There are a number of unique challenges for middle grades science educators. First and foremost, many lack a solid
science background in the wide array of content strands that comprise the middle school science curriculum. Often,
teachers also have limited time and poor instructional materials that focus on factual material or concepts, but do
not address the investigation and communication skills required for students to “do science” in an authentic manner.
Also, just like our mathematics teacher counterparts, research suggests that even when challenging tasks are
presented to students to engage them in higher-order thinking, too often teachers step in and simplify the task to
“help” the student. We address these challenges by helping teachers better understand the content, common
student misconceptions, and instructional strategies to promote deeper understanding through inquiry.

Professional Development for Science

To address these challenges, the science sessions of MMSTLC focus on developing content and pedagogical content
knowledge for the participating science educators. All of the work focuses on a broad theme of moving toward
authentic, inquiry-based investigations and learning, while examining four specific areas that research shows are
problematic for both students and teachers at this level:

• Student designed investigations - how to move from pre-planned experiments and demonstrations to student-
designed and conducted investigations, focusing on structuring activities and contextual inquiry (Edelson et al,
1999; Reiser et al, 2004; Singer et al, 2000)
• Using scientific models to build understanding - addressing how to introduce physical, visual, conceptual,
and mathematical models to develop conceptual understanding and limit misconceptions (AAAS, 1993)
• Engaging students in collecting, analyzing, and communicating data - using practices to encourage and
support analysis of data gained through experimentation and research (Hug, 2005)
• Assessing student understanding of content - including evaluating performance assessments and artifacts to
provide ongoing feedback (Smith and Reiser, 1998) and supporting students’ construction of scientific
explanation, definition, and description (McNeill et al, 2006; Kuhn, 1993)

During workshops, the focus for each session is typically centered around the pedagogical content theme from the
items above, incorporating an activity, lesson analysis, or review of student work or instruction from one or two of
the many content strands in middle grades science. The content for these is selected by identifying known problem
topics and aligning them to a specific, appropriate challenge. For example, we know students have misconceptions
about the effects of gravity and mass on motion. In our PD, we examined and modeled strategies for the use of
student designed investigations to explore this content with different variations of “ramp and cart” experiments.
However, we also provided resource examples for student investigations on a variety of other topics, including,
water quality, communicable diseases, density, pendulum movement, and others, so that participants could apply
these to other content for themselves and their fellow teachers in their local schools.

Because of the “leadership” nature of the professional development, participants also explore strategies for how the
concepts would be addressed with these different content foci, and present these during practice sessions with other
future leaders. Along the way, participants explore other topics through online discussion, book reviews, sharing of
student work, and curriculum or assessment development work during the leadership release time at their local
mathematics and science center. As they assist other teachers in their own schools, they also share experiences,
lessons, and resources created to support others in the program.
RESOURCES AND PRODUCTS

Existing Resources
MMSTLC was fortunate to be able to draw upon a
variety of resources to support the leadership and
instructional needs of our participants. This
included:

• Mathematics case studies from the NSF

sponsored QUASAR project and related
books and tasks.
• Inquiry-based science curriculum
resources, lessons, and sample student
work from the University of Michigan and
the Center for Highly Interactive
Computing in Education.
• Leadership development resources from
leading authors such as Marzano, DuFour,
and the NSDC.
• Curricular and other resource documents
from the Michigan Department of Education.

PD Materials
The resources we create serve dual
purposes - both to support the
participants in their own learning, and to
guide the participants in using these
resources with local teachers as a shared
PD tool. This involves creating and
modifying samples of participant work, research findings, facilitator notes,
readings, lessons, tasks, and other resources to support math and science educators.

Online Resources and Professional Development

To share resources and provide opportunities for networking and communication, MMSTLC
created an online professional development platform for our participants. This site,
which will eventually host all of the project’s
resources, allows small groups or all participants
to collaborate and share ideas on their own time.
These tools will eventually include individual sites
for all local teams to use to facilitate learning and
sharing of resources and ideas using a number of
cutting edge collaborative online tools. For more
information, visit http://mmstlc.net
MMSTLC ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Participants and Resources

• Established 8 core Math/Science Center-based teams for Cadre I and began capacity-building in 2007-08,
continuing into 2008-09
• Established 11 core Math/Science Center-based teams for Cadre II and began capacity-building in 2008-09
• Prepared 58 mathematics and science Teacher Specialist Leaders in Cadres I and II to serve more than 200 of
their math/science colleagues in about 35 schools and more than 20,000 students
• Distributed $1.6 and $2.0 million respectively to Cadres I and II to support their work in improving
mathematics and science teaching and learning
• Offered competitive grants to Cadre I teams totaling $320,000
• Created a website (www.mmstlc.net) for general audiences, with links to sites for MMSTLC teams to access
resource materials, as well as a “participant-only” site with extended functionality and resources
• Provided more than 125 hours of state-level professional development over 1.5 years to Cadre I teams,
including about 60 hours devoted to math and science content and pedagogy* and ~40 hours to building
leadership skills
• Provided 78 hours of professional development to Cadre II teams in their first eight months, including about 27
hours of math and science content and pedagogy* and ~20 hours building leadership skills
• Supported four-month sabbaticals for 9 Cadre I Teacher Leaders and release time for 19 (working in teams in
their schools) to enhance their capacities to help colleagues improve math/science teaching and learning
• Implemented by Cadre I Teacher Leaders and other Core Team Members a total of 319 PD, student, and other
MMSTLC activities at the Center/school level July 2007-June 2008; a total of 1436 hours provided; attendance
of 4388 across all activities
• Prepared a variety of MMSTLC math/science content and pedagogical instructional, professional development,
and leadership materials for Teacher Leaders and other core team members

Impacts on Cadre I Teacher Leaders

• Results of a Science Teacher Leader pre- and post-program content test show total mean scores increased 5.5
points (out of 62), a statistically significant change.*
• Results of a Mathematics Teacher Leader pre- and post-program content test show total mean scores increased
0.6 points (out of 45), not a statistically significant change.*
• Science Teacher Leaders’ perceptions of their preparedness to use inquiry-focused instructional strategies in
their science classrooms increased for selected items, including “Develop students’ conceptual understanding
in science,” “Lead a class of students in using investigative strategies,” and “Assess students’ science content
knowledge and skills through open-ended verbal or written responses.”*
• Mathematics Teacher Leaders’ perceptions of their preparedness to use inquiry-focused instructional strategies
in their math classrooms increased for selected items, including “Develop students’ conceptual understanding
of mathematics,” and “Assess students’ mathematical content knowledge and process skills through open-
ended verbal or written responses.”*
• In the same surveys, both science and mathematics Teacher Leaders indicated an increase in their
preparedness to work with their teacher colleagues on inquiry-focused instructional strategies.

This summary was prepared by Science and Mathematics Program Improvement (SAMPI), Western Michigan University 269-387-3791
Data in items with an asterisk (*) were supplied by Moore and Associates, Inc., Southfield, MI MMSTLC External Evaluators

For more information about the MMSTLC, visit: http://mmstlc.net