An Online Professional Development Model to Support Teachers’ Abilities to Examine Student Work and Thinking

At the heart of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics’ (NCTM) Principles to Actions: Ensuring Mathematical Success for All (2014) is the development of professional practices such as eliciting and using evidence of student thinking, supporting productive struggle in learning mathematics, and posing purposeful questions. The authors’ emerging work in online professional development for teachers provides potentially cost-effective ways of scaling high-quality, effective professional development for mathematics teachers by employing the collaborative features of the Internet to mediate professional conversations and interactions. Specifically, the authors detail the characteristics of their model for online professional development and present cases to illustrate its potential impact on teachers’ ability to analyze student work and provide productive feedback.