Leading School-Based Math Labs: How Principal-Coach Teams Make a Difference for Teacher Learning

By Elham Kazemi, Ruth Balf, and Becca Lewis
December 22, 2016

Between the three of us, we have many decades of experience supporting teachers to learn about children’s mathematical thinking and create strong and joyful learning environments for children. Over the years we have led many after school workshops, weekend professional development sessions, and intense summer institutes. These experiences have always been satisfying in some respects and unsatisfying in others. Certainly, learning about children’s thinking is engaging, surprising and invigorating. Most often, professional development, by its nature, pulls teachers out of classrooms and expects teachers to put new ideas into practice on their own. Inspired by lesson study and various kinds of teacher inquiry groups, we started to think about how to structure professional development so that teachers not only learned about children’s thinking together but also had collaborative opportunities to put those ideas into practice with children in informal and ongoing ways.  

The idea of “math labs” came from the premise that if we embedded professional learning during the school day (or in the summer by partnering with summer camps fro children) we could not only learn about children’s thinking but also leverage those new insights in experimenting with lesson ideas together. That way, teachers would develop a stronger, clearer shared understanding of how to create classroom learning environments where children were invested in their own learning, identified positively with mathematics and were able to engage in meaningful learning.

Our goal is to change the workplace so that schools are organized to support teacher learning as well as student learning. This idea has been captured in video by the Teaching Channel in a series on learning labs:  https://www.teachingchannel.org/videos/build-collaborate-learning-culture. A hallmark of math labs are the classroom visits that groups of teachers make after they have explored children’s mathematics around a focused topic and designed a lesson together. The classroom visit enables the group of teachers to wonder aloud about instructional decision making as they lesson unfolds with a real group of students. We call these quick conversations as the lesson plays out, teacher time outs: https://www.teachingchannel.org/videos/mid-lesson-teacher-collaboration-nsf.

Organizing a school for teacher learning takes a special kind of leadership by mathematics coaches and principals. We have been learning about this important work by documenting how coach-principal teams play distinct but complementary roles in math labs, in leading grade level team meetings and in visiting classrooms to support teacher learning. Their work makes all the difference in the willingness teachers have to take risks with one another, to be focused in what they are learning, and to make commitments that create more coherent and productive learning experiences for our students. We think how principals and coaches work together are consequential for equity because instructional leadership impacts the culture of a school, how teachers are supported to learn, how children are recognized and supported to be known, to feel a sense of belonging to their school community and to thrive.

Be sure not to miss this session at the 2017 NCTM Annual Meeting in San Antonio:

Leading School-Based Math Labs: How Principal-Coach Teams Make a Difference for Teacher Learning
Creating strong and equitable learning communities for students necessitates having strong learning communities for teachers. We show how different schools have used math labs to launch and sustain job-embedded professional learning opportunities with a special focus on the work of principal-coach teams.