To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser

Back to Graphic Version

Expert Opinion

Platform for Pedagogy: Washington educator Bob McIntosh talks about what works in mathematics professional development

Bob McIntosh is currently the director of instruction for mathematics at North Thurston Public Schools in Washington state. A high school math teacher for 12 years, McIntosh went on to work as an educational researcher at the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory where he was instrumental in developing a math problem-solving model. McIntosh also served as the supervisor of curriculum and instruction at the state Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI), and is a regional leader in mathematics professional development. He spoke with Northwest Education Assistant Editor Bracken Reed, from his office in Lacey, Washington.

Northwest Education: Drawing on your background and experience, what do you see as the biggest professional development need for math teachers?

Bob McIntosh: The thing that math teachers are struggling with is that they’re being asked to teach in a way that’s different from how they learned math. They’re being asked to teach it in a much more constructivist way, so that students understand the process of mathematics better. So, what I see as the biggest need is to have opportunities to learn mathematics—especially the mathematics that they’re teaching—on a deeper level, and also to experience the kind of pedagogy that they’re being expected to deliver.

When you’re designing professional development how do you deliver both of those at once?

Well, first of all, when I design professional development I always have some component of content involved, so that they’re actually doing mathematics. And I also try to model—through my professional development—the type of teaching that we’re hoping to see in our classrooms. So, we have teachers working in groups, solving problems, using manipulatives, sharing solutions, defending their answers—that sort of thing—as a built-in part of the activity.

Do you ever do broad-based, K–12 trainings, or do you find it more effective to separate teachers by grade level?

I think there’s a time for each. It’s often good to do cross-grade and K–12, because I think that the different levels have different things they can teach each other. Generally, the high school teachers know the content better, but not necessarily the pedagogy. A lot of times the elementary teachers are better at presenting things in a way that’s more supportive of student understanding. For example, if they’re all working on a problem together, the high school teacher may have a formula that they use to solve the problem, whereas the elementary teacher may have to draw pictures or use manipulatives, but a lot of times the elementary teacher has a deeper understanding—through that process of solving the problem—than the high school teachers with their fancy formulas.

How do you get teachers—especially in secondary school—to understand the various strategies that students might use?

I try to go into their classrooms and model it. I’ll do a lesson and then ask the students to demonstrate or explain the different ways that they’ve solved a problem. That serves as a model for teachers: that students see things from all different perspectives, and that having them demonstrate it can help every student in the classroom. One thing that’s pretty powerful is that, quite often, the students that the teacher doesn’t expect to be successful end up contributing. A lot of times they come up with some of the more creative and innovative ways of solving things. These are students that they’ve kind of written off as hopeless, and they learn to see those students in a different light—that’s the kind of thing I’m always hoping to do.

That raises the question of equity. As far as delivering math content to English language learners (ELL), for instance, is there a lot of professional development out there for mainstream teachers?

No, there isn’t a lot. When I was at OSPI, I brought in a program called the BEAM program, which was out of the University of California, Berkeley. That was a program specifically aimed at ELL students, and it kind of incorporated the strategies from ELL research into a math context. But I don’t think there are a lot of programs like that. [BEAM] is a fairly unique program, at this point.

If you were putting together more training programs of that kind, where would you look for that research? Specifically, research on delivering content to ELL students in the mainstream classroom.

I would go to the basic ELL or language acquisition research, really. There’s a pretty large body of research around ELL learning in the broad sense. What the BEAM people have done is taken that research and translated it into math lessons, and that’s what’s really helpful. They’ve done that translation into a specific content area for you. A lot of the ELL research is not around a specific content area. Some of it deals with reading, but there isn’t very much that deals specifically with math. There needs to be more work done in translating that research into specific information for math teachers.

With all of the testing being done, there are a lot of assessment data being generated. In the professional development trainings that you design, how do you help teachers use that data more effectively in their classrooms?

We do workshops that address that directly. We have teachers bring data and we have them analyze it, and we help them understand how to do that process. We also score student work collaboratively, so we have them use rubrics and develop rubrics and talk about the standard that they’re going to use. We actually give them direct training in how to interpret data and which data are the most important to focus on.

A lot of professional development seems to focus on the individual, instead of on creating more buildingwide or districtwide organizational capacity. How do you design professional development that tries to build that larger capacity, instead of just a one-teacher, one-time training?

Well, actually I’m involved in a program right now that’s a good example of that larger context. It’s [funded by] a federal Mathematics-Science Partnership grant. The program is called PRISM, and the focus is on developing professional learning communities in schools. What we’re trying to do is develop a learning culture, a culture of inquiry amongst the teachers, supported by the administrators. So, it’s a program that tries to engage teachers and administrators in this process of creating buildingwide learning. I’m actually becoming quite a convert to the whole idea of professional learning communities as a way to really sustain long-term professional growth.

The teachers meet regularly, they’re visiting each other’s classrooms on a fairly regular basis now, and they’re collecting data—for each other—in their classrooms, and then coming back and sharing that data, and they’re talking about very specific areas of focus in which they’re trying to improve. To me, it’s actually some of the most meaningful professional development because it’s coming from the teachers. They’re the ones who are initiating a lot of the work.

What grade level is the PRISM project?

That’s 7–12.

So when you talk about groups of teachers, you’re talking about a group of teachers within one school?

Right. Actually all of our middle and high schools are involved, and it includes both math and science. So we have two groups in each building: a math team and a science team.

That brings up the question of time. You mentioned administrative support, how does the school ensure that teachers have the time to make these kinds of professional learning teams meaningful?

That is the key issue, and that’s where we struggle a lot. We just had a meeting with the leaders of those teams. Depending on the level of buy-in of the administrators involved, there are various levels of success. We do have quite a bit of release time. We have late-starts here every other week, and then we have one professional development day a quarter, so there is some built-in time where teachers meet. But a lot of them have to do it before or after school, an hour here or there. We’re trying to get it more embedded into the day, because that’s when it’s really going to be sustainable.

Otherwise those teachers have to basically volunteer their time?

Well, they’re not volunteering because the grant does pay them for the time. But when the grant goes away, that will go away. That’s the problem.

Getting back to the administrative support—do you have any ideas for a school that doesn’t have that kind of support? What might you recommend for a school like that?

Fortunately we don’t have any of those schools in this district and that’s a really good thing, because it’s almost impossible to pull this off without the support of the principal. They have so much power in terms of how they control your professional development time. I don’t have an answer for that, really.

Let me play Devil’s Advocate. Say, I’m a principal who has seen a lot of bad professional development that wasn’t worth the time or money involved, and so I’m skeptical. How would you convince me of the importance of professional development?

Well, first of all, I think that teaching is a profession like any other, and that the knowledge base is continuing to grow, and that, as in all professions, practitioners have to stay current. I often use the analogy: If your doctor hadn’t opened a medical book since he or she graduated from college, would you want to go to that doctor? It’s really the same issue with teachers. They have to stay current with what’s happening in the research.

The other thing is that through professional learning communities, I think teachers get energized. Their burn-out level goes down. Teaching is a very isolated career, and I think it’s really helpful for teachers to be able to have somebody to collaborate with, to bounce ideas off, to really check their reality with. It’s such a complex job. There are so many levels of decisionmaking that you have to do. There’s always room for improvement. That’s the main thing: We always have to be getting better. We’re either getting better or we’re getting worse.

What measures do you use to evaluate your own professional development programs in order to determine whether they’re really making a difference?

Well, first of all, I think that’s probably one of the weakest areas for most districts—evaluating professional development. I think it’s really critical, and I think that it’s hard to do, and it’s not often done well.

That said, I think our PRISM program is the best-evaluated program I’ve ever been involved in. We use survey data from teachers; we interview teachers; we do random classroom observations using a rubric to score how teachers are improving in their teaching. So we use multiple measures. And then obviously we also use student achievement data.

How do you use that for evaluation purposes, in terms of an individual teacher?

In this program it’s not really about individual teachers because it’s a buildingwide professional learning community focus. So we’re looking at: Are the scores in that building improving?

For an entire grade level?

Exactly.

Does that help individual teachers feel less threatened?

I really don’t think that they’re threatened. They expect to be evaluated. They want kids to be doing better, you know? This program, because they have so much ownership in it, they’re doing research and they’re looking at what are the best techniques for reaching students and keeping them engaged and teaching them how to write and communicate and analyze. So, you know, they’re just engaged in trying to learn and to do a better job. I really don’t think they focus much attention on the evaluation part. At least, that’s not their direct motivation.

That begs the question of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). How has it affected your job, in planning and delivering professional development?

I like to focus on the positive part of it. The most positive thing, for me, is that it’s gotten us to really focus on those kids who aren’t being successful. A lot of the professional development we’re doing now is around how we can reach students who aren’t making it. Before, I think a lot of those kids were just being overlooked and allowed to fall through the cracks. NCLB and the fact that in our state it has become a graduation requirement to pass the WASL [Washington Assessment of Student Learning]—those two things combined have really gotten our attention, because we just can’t have 50 percent of our students not graduating.