In the Pursuit of Impact: Design and Practice of Three Innovative Professional Development Programs for Mathematics Teachers

Arguably, any professional development (PD) program aims to have an impact on the field. Yet there is likely to be significant variation in the nature of the impact that different programs aim to achieve, and in their ways of going about achieving it. We present three PD programs for in-service secondary-school mathematics teachers - one for middle-school heads of mathematics departments, one for experienced mathematics teachers who are interested in engaging in classroom educational research, and one for mathematics teachers who aspire to systematically incorporate high-level problem solving in their teaching. All of these programs are organized as professional learning communities. Through these three examples, we illustrate the impact we aim to have on the practices of teaching mathematics, recognizing that the effect of PD on teachers can be as varied as the kinds of practices in which they engage. We then reflect on the design and enactment of these programs, and discuss some tensions between various facets of the impact that we are striving for. In articulating some of the design principles of these programs, we attempt to make explicit the often implicit - or even tacit - theories of impact that guide our work.