Introducing the PrimeD Framework: Teacher Practice and Professional Development through Shulman’s View of Professionalism

Abstract

This paper clarifies and expands the definition of teacher professional practice, grounded in the commonplaces of professionalism outlined by Lee Shulman. We present the Professional Development: Research, Implementation, and Evaluation (PrimeD) framework as a lens for transforming professional development into a practice that engages teachers as professionals. This discussion explores teachers’ roles in both their classrooms and the profession. The inclusion of PrimeD evaluation and research in the development and practice of mathematics teachers addresses Shulman’s professionalism commonplaces. PrimeD was tested as a lens for professionalism in mathematics teacher education programs at four universities. In the study, teachers collaborated as professionals on developing and testing novel ways to approach mathematics lessons. In general, teachers’ efforts to conduct structured experimentation in their lessons were disconnected from traditional views of the role of a teacher. As a result, teachers who did develop and test lesson trials in this PD program did not frequently continue experimentation. Typically, teachers wanted to collaborate on testing classroom activities but did not have resources to do so (e.g., time, collaborative planning). Systemic changes are needed to promote sustainable change, allowing teachers to collaborate and share the results of classroom research.

1. Introduction

Much of the corpus of the scholarship describing teacher professionalism flows from Lee Shulman. His central question persists today, “What are the sources of teacher knowledge? What does a teacher know and when did he or she come to know it? How is new knowledge acquired, old knowledge retrieved, and both combined to form a new knowledge base?” [1,2,3]. Shulman and colleagues called for reform in teacher professional development (PD) in ways that emphasize professionalism and practical knowledge [4]. Such reforms have largely been unrealized in practice [5,6].

We posit that PD emphasizing professionalism and practical knowledge is, while implemented well in pockets, not what many educators experience. For this reason, they understandably see PD as something being done to them rather than with them. Furthermore, teachers are often professionally isolated [7].

In this paper, we present the Professional Development: Research, Implementation, and Evaluation (PrimeD) framework [5,6] as a lens for transforming PD into a practice that engages teachers as professionals and examines the efforts of four longitudinal programs to carry out such a PD. The broad goal of the present study was to characterize the benefits and limitations of the PrimeD framework (Figure 1) as a structure to guide secondary mathematics teacher preparation. To address this broad goal, the study examined two overarching questions.

• How does the application of PrimeD to secondary mathematics teacher preparation serve as an action framework to guide program transformation?
• How does the application of PrimeD to secondary mathematics teacher preparation improve PST outcomes? What are the challenges? How can those challenges be addressed?

As a field, current PD often prevents, rather than promotes, teachers practicing as professionals [7]. We argue that these common conditions surround much of PD. That is, traditional views of the teaching profession do not include collaborative ways to systematically investigate and improve the practice of teaching. We specifically argue in this paper that teaching is a profession and viewing it as such can be transformative for PD and how teachers approach professional practice.

2. Background Rationale for Connecting PD to Professionalism

Copious research has identified diverse elements related to successful PD for teachers. Some PD efforts have been recognized as being highly successful (e.g., Bryk, et al. [9]; Stringfield and colleagues [10,11]). Datnow and Stringfield [12] found in a meta-analysis that diverse reform efforts are effective when educators at various levels share goals and work in concert to co-construct highly reliable reforms. Furthermore, they found that a necessary precondition for PD success is envisioning teaching as a profession. This approach to PD is not simply about elevating teacher professionalism, but rather teachers acting as and being treated as professionals.

“The fundamental difference between an amateur and a professional in any field is not one of intelligence or willingness to work hard. Rather, it is that professionals are trained at accessing their own research field, and therefore are much less likely to spend time repeating the others’ prior mistakes. Educational reforms seem to have a less-than-glorious tradition of replicating major aspects of previous failed efforts.”

([12], p. 197)

This approach to PD is less about showing or telling teachers what to do or how to do something better. Rather, it is about engaging them collaboratively with research and providing them with the tools to help them become professional decision makers who manage their own lifelong learning trajectory. Teachers work collaboratively to support and critique their own and their peers’ teaching as a key building block needed to support teaching as a profession.

2.1. A Framework Grounded in Professionalism

Applying a framework to attend to key complex elements is important for ensuring that none fall off the table. But upon what foundation should such a framework be constructed? PD is a process that can be used to develop and support the teaching profession, beginning with early teacher candidacy and continuing throughout a teacher’s career. Because so much scholarship describing teacher professionalism originated with the work of Lee Shulman, we unpack Shulman’s description of “profession” to discern critical attributes, all of which must be addressed.

Shulman’s vision of teaching as a profession is grounded in Flexner’s reformation of the medical profession at the beginning of the twentieth century. Shulman [4] listed commonplaces of professional learning: moral vision, theoretical understanding, practical skills, the centrality of judgment, learning from experience, and the development of responsible professional communities. Furthermore, in the same editorial, he argued, “(p)ractice serves as a major vehicle for testing the validity and efficacy of theory, both for learning a profession and for developing theories more generally” (p. 523). In the following section, we will unpack how the PrimeD framework uses professionalism as a foundation for effective PD by addressing Shulman’s “Commonplaces of Professional Learning”.

How do we make it expected that teachers not only innovate in their practice but also study their innovation as a normal part of their practice? And how do we ensure that those successful innovations are shared across the profession? How do we promote the notion of Servant Leadership (as in Stein [13]) to drive the notion of collaborative initiative (as in Lumpkin [14])? The PrimeD framework (Figure 1) directly addresses these types of questions through four cyclic, interactive phases that draw upon Shulman’s notions of professionalism [3,4] and a broad research base about effective PD (e.g., Loucks-Horsley et al. [15]). PrimeD was originally developed through a systematic review of literature [16]. This synthesis of several PD frameworks (e.g., [9,15]) produced a unique structure that explicitly draws upon leadership, collaboration, and productive beliefs (as in NCTM [7]) to support cyclic processes promoting teacher professionalism in a way not clearly addressed by any extant PD framework. Our review of the research indicates that PD can be considered a process that begins with creating a vision that is commonly embraced by all participants with the eventual goal of increasing the corpus of knowledge of effective practice (Bryk et al. [9]). Leadership is a key characteristic for teacher professionalism ([13,14,17,18]) and is a focus in the PrimeD framework.

The PrimeD framework can function at the class, school, or district levels to guide a process of collaborative, systematic, robust, and meaningful reflection about teaching. This process connects professionalism with practice, including tools to both reflect on that practice and explore new ways to engage in that practice. This form of leadership is a collective experience dedicated to the growth of others (Stein [13]). Although the framework does not specify particular methods to organize the collective experience of participants, we have found connecting to improvement science [9] to be an effective strategy.

The inclusion of Networked Improvement Communities (NICs) as a key driver of PD implementation connects PrimeD to improvement science (as in Bryk et al. [9]). Through Plan–Do–Study–Act (PDSA) cycles, teachers try out a change idea and bring their results to the NIC. PrimeD takes these cycles a step further by including evaluation and research cycles in addition to PDSA cycles. These multiple cyclesmove PD from transforming a teacher’s practice to transforming the teaching profession by sharing and generalizing results across contexts. PDSA cycles were not initially perceived as research because they are often implemented informally, and/or the data being collected are informal. With a little additional structure, however, PDSA cycles can become a very useful tool to bring research into the classroom and become a normal part of the teaching profession. Research is an activity that involves carrying out a series of small logical steps: (1) ask a question, (2) collect data to answer the question, (3) present an answer to the question [19]. This type of research is practical, builds knowledge, and encourages leadership. Furthermore, PDSA cycles carry an evaluation aspect into the classroom. For example, throughout a cycle, teachers collect data and make judgments about the effectiveness of teaching strategies. Moreover, the relationship between research and evaluation may take multiple forms: independent, interactive, or one a subset of the other [20]. At this project level, research and evaluation are independent but work together. Research and evaluation integrated into teacher PD elevate learning to the level needed for teaching to operate as a profession.

By conceptualizing PD as functioning within a NIC, PrimeD also takes advantage of research on high-reliability organizations (HROs, as in Stringfield and colleagues [10,11,21]). This perspective engages teachers as partners rather than recipients, fulfilling another component of professionalism, that is, leadership. For example, within HROs, high reliability takes precedence over short-term efficiency—that is, long-term, deep learning takes precedence over quick pedagogical fixes. For PD to function as an HRO, teachers must begin thinking about the success of the school, district, and profession as a whole--not just their own classrooms. Furthermore, participants engage in rigorous self and peer evaluation for the purpose of engaging in continuous improvement [21].

2.1.1. Phase I Design and Development: Getting Everybody on the Same Page

Members of a profession recognize that they are part of a professional community and hold themselves responsible for participating in that community. In professional learning communities, people come to any shared experience with differing expectations, prior experiences, and needs. In a PrimeD PD, all stakeholder groups participate in the creation and evolution of the vision (including Shulman’s moral vision), a departure from traditional PD, in which the vision is typically static and originates outside the group. The creation of shared goals and vision (a challenge space as in Bryk et al. [9]) helps translate a PD design into something that can help all participants learn from the experience (setting the stage for Shulman’s Learning from Experience). Even with shared goals, a PD design must recognize that participants will apply their learning in different contexts [21]. The community will therefore need to revisit the challenge space regularly in order to update the vision and goals as they gain better understanding of their individual and shared domains. The importance of a clear purpose or vision and an understanding of context for meaningful classroom change has been highlighted by many researchers (e.g., [5,6,7,15,22,23,24]). The inclusion of participants in the PD design begins the process of building Shulman’s Responsible Professional Communities and allowing teachers to exercise and refine their professional judgment (Shulman’s Centrality of Judgment). Furthermore, strategies for implementing the challenge space must be explicitly included in the common vision (setting the stage for Shulman’s Practical Skills). Fully implemented, PrimeD Phase I engages participants or sets the stage for all six of Shulman’s Commonplaces of Professional Learning through the creation of a challenge space. PrimeD Phase II puts the challenge space into action.

2.1.2. Phase II Implementation: Connecting Classroom Practice to Whole-Group Activities

Within whole-group engagement, the PrimeD framework synthesizes elements of effective PD from a wide array of research and theories. These elements of effective PD are essential for engaging participants as professionals. Many scholars recognize the improvement of student learning as the foundation of effective PD [5,15,25,26]. Focusing on student learning while connecting to classroom instruction helps participants enhance their professional judgment (Shulman’s Centrality of Judgment; [5,23,24]). Moreover, connections between PD experiences and classroom instruction are not formed during disconnected or isolated events. Effective PD creates an environment in which teachers’ sense of agency is promoted when processes such as reviewing and discussing classroom instruction and student work are integral components of whole-group events. Such environments exist when teachers serve as co-constructors of their experience. That is, teachers should have leadership roles in the design and implementation of the PD rather than function merely as participants [5,27,28].

The PrimeD framework integrates lessons about effective PD into an implementation model that includes both whole-group engagement (the traditional locus of PD) and classroom practice. Phase II engages teachers as professional partners by creating a space for teachers to have a leading voice in choosing and refining a teaching innovation. NICs guide whole-group engagement and Plan–Do–Study–Act (PDSA) cycles to align the PD activities with a problem of practice. In PrimeD, PDSA cycle data gathered by participants in their classrooms are shared at subsequent NIC meetings to jointly develop refinements to the innovation.

Members of a profession focus on both theoretical knowledge and practical skills [4]. Professionals who participate in a PD therefore need to interpret the theoretical foundations within their unique professional contexts for it to have an impact on their practice. Because teacher practice is situated [22], a single innovation will be rolled out differently in different schools/classrooms. As the NICs begin to synthesize these situated practices into a generalized innovation, classroom investigations can be aligned so that they begin to contribute to the theoretical knowledge of the profession.

2.1.3. Phase III Evaluation: Members of a Profession Establish What Is Best Practice

The role of PrimeD evaluation is to engage teachers in a process of continuous, multi-level feedback about both PD and subsequent classroom activity to provide evidence supporting the establishment of best practice. Shulman [4] observed that members of a profession participate in determining what is best practice and what is not; however, the profession of teaching has not typically emphasized systematic, wide-spread, collective sharing as an expectation. To incorporate that principle, evaluation must become an integral component of teacher practice. Because teaching practice is situated in contexts, evaluation of the PD and of the innovation being studied must be implemented in partnership with participants.

PrimeD evaluation helps focus practice on the common vision with questions such as: Are we following our plan? Is the implementation aligned with the challenge space? Are we achieving the designated outcomes? The five PrimeD evaluation categories shown in Figure 1 (Design, Context, Cycles and Activities, Measures and Assessments, and Outcomes) provide both broad and deep lenses for formative and summative evaluation. The individual categories of the PrimeD evaluation in Phase III align with the five Joint Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation (JCSEE) program evaluation standards categories: Utility, Feasibility, Propriety, Accuracy, and Evaluation Accountability [29].

2.1.4. Phase IV Research: Members of a Profession Generate Knowledge Associated with Practice

While evaluation focuses on determining the effectiveness of an innovation and generating local results for use by the innovators, research focuses on why or how an innovation did or did not work, producing generalizable results to report back to the professional community. Because teaching is an intensely situated practice, education research should be carried out in partnership between researchers and teachers [30,31]. Indeed, without close collaboration, the education profession will continue to replicate previous failed efforts [12]. Teacher–researcher partnerships provide important design perspectives to researchers that would be difficult to gain as an external agent. Teachers therefore need to be prepared with systems-thinking and research methodology [32]. Furthermore, for educational research to be valuable to teachers, it needs to attack problems of practice at a “grain size” that is useful for teachers. This connection is enhanced when the classroom implementation is part of the research process [33].

Berger and Baker [34] described two kinds of teacher–researcher partnerships with separate affordances and challenges—“teacher as research assistant” and “teacher and researcher as collaborators”. The “teacher as research assistant” model is the typical role enabling the researcher to create well-designed studies that have the potential to contribute to the corpus of research literature. Unfortunately, because this is a top-down model, it has less likelihood of impacting teacher practice in the long term. Teachers consider research most useful when it is relevant and applicable to their own classroom context [35]. The “teacher and researcher as collaborators” model engages teachers directly in studying their practice, creating immediate opportunities to transform their practice and profession.

Research collaborations should begin with knowledge of the local context and be designed to improve local practice [30,36]. Teaching practice and teacher knowledge are profoundly complex [3] and situated in context [37]. This complexity creates challenges that have no consistent description or solution space [34]. Because little research has centered on teacher voices, the questions they ask, or their interpretive frames [38,39], the gap between researchers and practitioners is often wide and needs to be closed.

To better connect teachers and research, structural changes to educational research, teacher preparation and development, and educational systems are needed [34,40]. Teachers and researchers therefore need to design hypothetical learning trajectories addressing teachers’ instructional problems [33]. Additionally, as professionals, teachers must accept responsibility for contributing to the professional knowledge base extending beyond their classrooms [41]. The significant variability in institutional systems, norms, and expectations [42] requires researchers and teachers to adapt their projects to local contexts and to connect those contexts to provide a more general understanding of the teaching and learning process.

PrimeD provides a scaffold for that process. Effective PD creates an environment in which teachers’ sense of agency is promoted when processes such as reviewing and discussing classroom instruction and student work are integral components of whole-group events. Such environments exist when teachers serve as co-constructors of their experience. That is, teachers should have leadership roles in the design and implementation of the PD rather than function merely as participants [5,27,28]. During PDSA cycles in Phase II, teachers generate research questions from their classroom experiences and provide insight into questions about the PD itself. Results are generalized in Phase IV when they are shared with the larger group to be tested under a wider set of conditions to determine why an innovation worked and under what conditions. By including research as an intentional component of PD, PrimeD supports the development of strong, meaningful partnerships between teachers and PD providers by framing them as a collaborative research team.

Studies on the efficacy of researcher–practitioner partnerships (RPPs) highlight several challenges, including differences in communication, norms, and expectations that need to be bridged for those RPPs to yield useful results [40]. Coburn, Bae, and Turner [43] describe several barriers to successful RPPs. Negotiations between researchers and administrations are complicated by insider–outsider and authority relationships. Multi-level district administrations with turn-over at upper levels and loose connections between levels creates a need for a framework to facilitate communication across administrative structures and over time [43].

To develop teachers as professionals, they must be treated as professionals who approach teaching as a structured, research-based learning opportunity. Building leadership and collaboration will require partnership opportunities from the beginning, even as early as a preservice teacher preparation program. Providing pre-service teachers leadership roles in their programs helps set the stage for their growing professionalism as teachers. Engaging them in research roles even at such an early stage provides a continuous learning structure, further enhancing the potential for developing a professional demeanor. Building teaching as a profession will require that all teachers are engaged in efforts to improve their practice collaboratively and to embrace responsibility for one another’s growth from the earliest stages of their careers.

3. NICs as a Research and Evaluation Driver

The relationship of research, evaluation, and PD has been framed as Research ON PD [44], Research AS PD [45], and [Research ON PD] as PD [46]. Examination of the NIC as a component of the PD requires another layer of evaluation and research (Phases III and IV), which is akin to Kirkwood and Christie’s [44] notion of Research ON PD. PrimeD seeks to focus the normal, everyday research activities of teachers into a professional, collaborative improvement driver through PDSA cycles. By integrating classroom research into PD, PrimeD also supports the notion of Research AS PD [45]. The interactions of Phase II, Phase III, and Phase IV offer the opportunity to also conduct [Research ON PD] AS PD [46].

3.1. Research AS PD

Elliot [45] posited that from the view of the practitioner, teaching and research can be seen as two aspects of a single process of reflection and practice. Teacher research as a form of PD has been shown to boost teachers’ self-esteem and confidence, help them become more flexible and proactive, and ground them with realistic expectations [45,46,47,48]. The implementation of teacher research may begin with unstructured anecdotal reports and open-ended inquiry as teachers become accustomed to the use of PDSA cycles but eventually moves to more highly structured action research (as in Zeichner [49]) as data and evidence collection becomes more formalized and consistent across the NIC.

PDSA cycles are intended to be rapid trials, the results of which are initially shared in whole-group meetings of the NIC. An additional layer of research cycles through Phase IV. This cycle seeks to determine which activities lead to which outcomes and why (arrow from Phase II to IV and arrow between Phases III and IV in Figure 1).

3.2. Research ON PD

Action research was the approach of choice in early Research AS PD models [45,50,51]; however, more recently Design-Based Implementation Research (DBIR) and Improvement Science approaches have been used in efforts to include practitioners as partners in the research of their classroom practice [52]. Research ON PD may therefore be interpreted as a focus on generalization, that is, to the extent possible, addressing what factors contribute to the effectiveness of PD to elicit targeted outcomes [44].

PrimeD cycles all components of the PD through Phase IV so that plans, activities, and results are in a constant state of study, in which ownership is shared with all participants and stakeholders. For example, the overall plan for the PD is part of a cycle for review and subject modification if such a change is warranted by the results.

3.3. [Research ON PD] AS PD

The inclusion of participants in Research ON PD opens the door for that process to become part of the PD experience for participants. [Research ON PD] AS PD includes research on the effectiveness and efficiency of the PD as a supporting element of the PD outcomes. The focus is not merely on improving teaching practice, but also on understanding how studying the PD process improves the system within which it operates. Research is not an add-on to the PD, but a critical component of a PD process that encourages and guides the professionalization of teaching. We may ask “How do we study our learning processes so they can be designed in a way that they work for the most participants?” Asking this question improves the practice of teaching itself.

[Research ON PD] AS PD may often blend with other levels (Research AS PD and Research ON PD), the distinction being that research on teacher improvement is viewed as a normal part of the PD and professionalism. By conceptualizing PD in this way, PrimeD creates a vision of a complex and interconnected process that requires a great deal of organization and cooperation efforts that expand across levels of influence in the targeted system. PrimeD changes the relational dynamic of the participants of the process by integrating research as an integral part of the PD, especially the teachers’ role in their own professional growth. Teachers assume leadership roles on the outcomes in their classroom as well as why those outcomes were generated by their actions and what modifications should follow. Approaching classrooms as laboratories can be an important step in conceiving teaching as a profession. Finally, sharing classroom results with colleagues contributes to the growth of the profession itself.

4. Illustrations of Professionalism Supported by PrimeD

The narrative below describes efforts by four institutions to collaboratively design and implement NICs to engage preservice, early-career, and classroom mentor teachers in assuming leadership in professional PD efforts. We argue that professionalism was enhanced to the degree that participants took ownership of their own learning and that of their peers. The four institutions were different in size and mission, ranging from a small rural liberal arts college to an urban university and flagship state universities, which became an important asset to better understand the common processes involved in fostering change while preserving their individual program missions and honoring their diverse contexts.

This qualitative descriptive study triangulates multiple sources of data (NIC meeting observations, program documents, interviews). Data were analyzed using an inductive content analysis approach, allowing the researchers to identify common themes as well as divergent cases, comparing categories to see if there were any underlying patterns [53,54,55]. At least two researchers used open coding on the responses and independently wrote memos [54] that included any patterns evident throughout the data to maximize trustworthiness. The researchers came to a consensus on the themes. Once a consensus was reached, the emergent patterns and themes were identified.

Data analysis across these four institutions implementing PrimeD in their preservice and early-career programs exposed five overarching themes. These themes consisted of (1) connections between coursework and NICs for preservice teachers; (2) strategies for building effective PDSA cycles; (3) importance and effectiveness of collaborative discussions for building professional communities; (4) challenges for participants in revising their classroom structures to integrate PDSA cycles; and (5) time constraints for attending meetings, especially for early-career teachers and even more so for first-year teachers.

4.1. Theme 1: Connecting NICs to Coursework

Institutions commonly recognized the importance of making explicit connections between coursework and the NICs. For example, apprentices (that is, preservice teachers engaged in a field experience) who discussed their PDSA cycles in their methods classes developed their classroom implementation strategies more quickly, as evidenced by earlier presentations of PDSA results and next steps at subsequent NIC meetings. This strategy developed over the life of the project as institutions shared ideas and collaborated to make the implementation of PrimeD consistent across programs. Beyond explicit discussions during class time, other solutions included researchers sending weekly reminders to apprentices and mentors and arranging virtual meetings outside the standard NIC schedule to support early-career teacher alumni.

4.2. Theme 2: Building Effective PDSA Cycles

Institutions were commonly challenged at first to understand the attributes of an effective PDSA cycle but grew in their capacity over time. When participants attempted to innovate at the whole-lesson level, they faced challenges in initiating the process. Discussions during NIC meetings guided participants to understanding that effective PDSA cycles require small problem grain size and fast iteration. The institutions also saw their apprentices develop significantly in their understanding of the nature of evidence of change, broadening beyond typical assessment sources like homework and quizzes to more systematic classroom observations, orientation measures, and student feedback. The NICs initiated a more systematic emphasis on data collection and evaluation. These assessments started informally but became more intentional and formal as the school year progressed.

4.3. Theme 3: Collaborative Discussions in Professional Communities

Mentors and apprentices alike found engaging other professionals in discussions about problems of practice to be energizing and rejuvenating. For example, one mentor compared NICs against typical PD, noting “this actually works”. She noted that she would be wiped out on Thursday before the NIC but then be rejuvenated afterwards. One recent alumnus observed that participating in the NICs was a critical resource for him during his first years of practice.

The team leaders at all four institutions characterized the application of the PrimeD framework to their teacher preparation programs as dynamic and useful. One important dynamic common to all four institutions was the complex relationships within a NIC. The NICs were composed of teacher educators, classroom mentors, field experience supervisors, early-career alumni, and preservice teachers. The breadth of perspectives, experience levels, and professional responsibilities added a level of complexity to managing discussions during a NIC meeting. This complexity was often managed through careful crafting of whole-group discussion prompts and ensuring multiple perspectives were represented. Careful construction of breakout groups provided another avenue for engaging multiple perspectives in the discussions.

4.4. Theme 4: PDSA Cycle Challenges

Another important dynamic in the NIC was the connection of change ideas to classroom practice. Teachers sometimes had a hard time taking up class time to experiment. Discussions revealed that participants often viewed PDSA research cycles as large-scale change ideas requiring multiple lessons to enact, sparking further discussion about the scale and iteration speed of PDSA cycles. Developing a robust change idea was also challenging in the early years of the project. For example, most participants were worried about “engagement” as the primary challenge to their practice and created innovations such as games without a mathematical focus. Consistent prompting was needed to cause them to think of mathematics as innately engaging. Frequently, when an apprentice at one school asked a question or raised an issue, mentors from different schools responded and provided multiple perspectives. These dynamic interactions helped build tighter relationships between teachers to promote systematic, sustainable change across schools within the NIC.

4.5. Theme 5: Time Constraints

Although teachers found the NIC meetings to be valuable, they often struggled to find the time to attend. Team leaders worked with participants to develop schedules that were flexible for their contexts. One site built their NICs within teacher preparation classes. Another site held NICs on Saturdays. Given the overloaded schedules of teachers, the team leaders were challenged to find ways that the model could be sustained beyond the end of the grant funding. The online venue of the meetings made the time commitment more tenable. Alternatively, some mentors continued in the program even after their apprentices graduated, simply to continue with the professional dialogue.

5. Discussion

The first research question investigated ways that the application of PrimeD to secondary mathematics teacher preparation can serve as an action framework to guide program transformation. Each of the five themes revealed through the analysis addressed some aspect of program transformation. For example, Theme 1 focused on connections between coursework and NIC meetings. Each program focused on methods coursework as a lynchpin for making such connections. In Theme 2, fieldwork was revised to include PDSA cycles, positioning teacher candidates as researchers in their classrooms from the outset of their careers. In Theme 3, programs recognized the importance of bringing PDSA cycle reports back to NIC meetings to build community consensus. The programs saw stronger bonds formed between mentors, student teachers, and faculty. The engagement of mentors as partners in the program rather than an external support to the program was seen as a major improvement to the programs. Theme 4 identified a major challenge to PDSA cycles, that participants often viewed PDSA as requiring global changes to an entire lesson rather than small, incremental, rapid, and highly structured change cycles. Programs needed to adjust the way PDSA cycles were introduced, discussed, and supported to help participants be successful. Theme 5 identified another challenge for participants, i.e., that the many responsibilities carried out by teachers placed constraints on the time they had available for NIC meetings and program activities. Flexible scheduling was needed to maximize participation. The programs frequently found that online meetings allowed for broader participation, especially for participants located in distant geographic areas (e.g., alumni in different states). The programs also found that the online meetings were often easier for local participants to attend than face-to-face meetings. Systematic outreach efforts were made to help participants with time conflicts to stay connected to the program.

The second question investigated how the application of PrimeD to the teacher preparation programs influenced teacher outcomes. In Theme 1, the connections between coursework and NICs influenced the way teachers approached pedagogy in their classrooms. By connecting preservice teachers to a broader community of practice, their pedagogy became more grounded in research and theory. In Theme 2, the PDSA cycles stretched preservice teachers to engage with research-based pedagogy earlier and more consistently throughout their student-teaching experiences. Alumni and mentors frequently commented that the PDSA cycles pushed them to maintain and expand their repertoire of pedagogical tools and strategies. All participants grew in their understanding of the types of data that provided meaningful evidence. In Theme 3, participants found the NICs to be a professional community that inspired them to improve their professional practice. In Theme 4, the challenges around PDSA cycles led to slower progress throughout an academic year in terms of deepening the quality of pedagogy and broadening the types of strategies that could be tested in the classroom. By addressing these challenges through program adjustments, participants learned how to narrow the focus of their PDSA cycles to a testable hypothesis and strengthened the partnership between mentors and student teachers. This process resulted in participants taking ownership of their professional growth. In Theme 5, time constraints presented another challenge. In some programs, limited time for NIC meetings led to difficulties accomplishing the teacher outcome goals of the NICs. All programs navigated issues with intermittent or inconsistent participation from alumni, with time constraints and conflicts being the most cited reason. These time issues also led to inconsistent implementation of PDSA cycles, which limited the benefit to participants’ professional practice.

Ultimately, teachers typically did not fully embrace experimentation as part of their job. Teacher preparation programs often treat research as separate from teaching responsibilities, so mentor teachers in the NIC had little experience with research in the classroom. Institutional pressures at the school level (e.g., required curricula and timelines, test preparation) also often interfered with efforts to conduct PDSA cycles. As a result, teachers were willing to try new things, but not regularly or systematically. That is, goals were often not well developed, data were not systematically collected, and results were not shared consistently or compared across classrooms.

When engaged in the NIC, teachers embraced the challenge space, often enthusiastically. This process of experimentation was enabled because these teachers had apprentices in their classroom who were trying to learn about how to teach. In this situation, the pre-service teachers were situated as leaders through their need and desire to innovate.

The PD was driven by the dynamic PrimeD cycles and phases (Design, Implementation, Evaluation, and Research), which are continuously informing the PD implementation. For example, one cycle of whole-group engagement and classroom implementation is evaluated, and the results are fed back into the design to inform subsequent PD implementations. Because of the nature and complexity of this project, the evaluation needed to be agile and multifaceted. The PrimeD evaluation design was able to capture the complexity of the implementation and was also able to provide feedback that was useful to guide the process.

In order for PD in this setting to be effective, a structural change was required, that is, in how PD is constructed, delivered, evaluated and researched. The PrimeD framework has many components and, in many ways, matches the complexity of the teaching profession. The framework can serve as a guide for PD providers and teachers to select the key components that they wish to emphasize: establish a common vision in Phase I, create and test a plan in Phase II, and study and share the results in Phases III and IV. The framework does not require that everything in it be addressed at all times; in fact, such an approach is not advisable. Instead, a path should be designed to fit a current situation based on a needs assessment.

Through a collaborative project between four institutions, mathematics education teacher preparation programs were restructured to emphasize the concept of professionalism and strengthen their collaboration with practicing teachers. The preliminary results have been encouraging. At each institution, teams have examined their programs to find ways to emphasize the professional characteristics of teaching through the enhancement of collaboration and leadership opportunities for their students and the students’ classroom mentors. Frequent sharing across institutions provided additional perspectives that continued to feed program evolution at the local levels. The differences in scale and mission of the four institutions may suggest on the surface that those local experiences would not be generalizable; however, experiences at one site often led to the evolution of change ideas across all sites, which in turn supported the generalization of strategies across contexts. PrimeD provided a common language for programs and support for evaluation and research that, at the same time, served both local and global needs.

This vision of PD is different from that of bringing in experts to create new understandings and connections for teachers in large group sessions. But it does not suggest that experts are not important for PD for teachers; the role of the expert has changed to facilitation and guidance. The challenge, then, is how to take the stereotypical PD disconnected from classroom practice and turn it into a dynamic learning system. There is value and room for school administrators and university faculty to engage experts in sharing strategies and information with teachers in planned whole-group sessions. Such “drop-in” sources, however, are unlikely to have the time or ability to dynamically connect the experience in a vigorous, repeated set of classroom trials and whole-group follow-up analyses and reflections. On the other hand, with the support of local administrators to promote sustainable change, the teachers themselves can continue to meet to carry out and share the results of those classroom trials. As teachers become the arbiters of best practices in their classrooms through collaboration and leadership, they begin to embody the hallmarks of a profession as defined by Shulman.